Last year I became a student writer again-and a novice at that. For although I'd been teaching and writing nonfiction for years-both academic articles and feature stories-I never wrote much fiction. And although I dabbled in poetry, even had a few poems published once, I never before took a course in poetry writing. Frankly, I didn't have the guts in college, never thought of myself as creative enough to risk such public exposure. The budding confidence I felt in fourth grade when my suspense thriller, Thunderstorm, was published in a class booklet had been buried under too many years of exposition, both for school and work. I didn't really recover it until long after graduation, when I received a fellowship that gave me released time from full-time teaching in order to take two creative writing courses at Princeton University: one in fiction writing with Russell Banks, author of the much-acclaimed Continental Drift; the other in poetry writing, with Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Carolyn Kizer. These were undergraduate courses incidently, because that's all Princeton offers, so except for three other older women (i.e., over 40) in the poetry class, the rest of my peers were under 22. It was a remarkable experience-to wear the shoe on the other foot and be a student again. For one thing, I realized how much more I enjoy learning now than I did at 20 when my future loomed before me like a huge, unmarked field. And how much more focused I am in energy once scattered on a million other concerns. For another thing, I've toughened up over the years. Twenty-five additional years of living and writing have helped me know and risk more, personally and intellectually, than I would ever have dared, even ten years ago. I have more of life to draw upon and more laurels to rest upon, as needed. These assets, I've found, are shared by other over-30 adults--even if, like many of my returning students, their extra writing experiences are mainly in letter or report writing. Life experience and writing success notwithstanding, I was surprised at my own vulnerabilities as a writer. Many of my fears, confusions, and needs were not as different from my younger counterparts' as I would have predicted. Remembering what it

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As those of us who are over twenty-five and teach writing know, revision pedagogy has changed since the days when we were in school. Thanks to the research of Donald Murray, Nancy Sommers, Lester Faigley and Stephen Witte, to name just a few, teachers no longer present revision simply as the mop-up operation that students must endure for not getting it right the first time. It is now rather conceived as a complex creative act that everyone must master, if, like the professionals, one wants to write really well. Yet in our newly-found enthusiasm for revision, we must deal with a few anomalies. First, although research shows that most good writers revise more extensively than poor writers, some revise little and still produce fine texts. Journalists, for example, frequently produce lucid first-draft articles, and even novelists occasionally write whole books with only minor revision. James Dickey may assume that the first fifty ways I try it are going to be wrong, but Zora Neale Hurston says she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, a 286-page novel, in seven weeks with few changes.' Second, there are no uniform patterns that constitute expert revision. As Faigley and Witte pointed out in their recent study (Analyzing Revision), professional writers, dealing with the same topic under similar conditions, all revised in their own way:

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