The temperature is twenty degrees below zero this morning, but the sun is bravely shining. The snow on my garden is striped with tree shadows. The windowpanes of my bedroom are patched with ice flowers. Fire clicks in the woodstove, and bread dough rises in a red bowl.

My desk is stacked with editing projects: poetry collections, fiction, academic histories. Some require simple line corrections; some require mentorship. It is interesting to switch among these responsibilities, interesting also to think about how these tasks transfer to the teaching I do at the Frost Place and elsewhere. What I am thinking about now is how important it is to structure conversation around the layers of creation and revision. Schools call this task "the writing process," but that is too linear a phrase. Writers don't just begin with nothing and travel toward a final something. They create a something, that becomes a something else, that becomes a something else. As they add layers of language, meaning, structure, they also carve away at those layers. In actuality, an editor often has to do that work herself, especially when an author is not primarily a writer but a specialist who is struggling to transmit information through writing. But ideally, the task of a teacher-editor-mentor is to guide writers into a deepening awareness of what is there and not there, to perceive the existing relationships within and between layers, to learn to make productive decisions about those relationships.

Last week my father-in-law was talking about the problem of what he called "gate keeping" in academia, by which he meant the urge among some schools to force students to prove their aptitude in a trial-by-fire, cross-the-Rubicon kind of way: i.e., "you can't major in such-and-such field of study unless you successfully write a ten-page paper in twelve hours about a subject we've just assigned you." (I actually heard this requirement at a recent college information session.) He is an emeritus professor at a renowned small college, where he was responsible for transforming his department into a creatively driven rather than primarily academic program. In his view, the best teachers look at where a particular student is now, talk with that student about what she hopes to do, and support her to grow in individual, idiosyncratic ways.  One student's success is not the same as another student's success. Each thrives on different food, different stimulations, different expectations--and I try to remember this truth whenever I open a new manuscript.