Dear students:

I hope you experienced productive summers and are enjoying your second year of law school. As you begin submitting law clerk applications for next summer, I encourage you to revisit the memoranda and briefs that you completed in my legal writing class last year. With revision, they would make appropriate writing samples to accompany your applications. I’m sorry that I’m not on campus to help you polish your written work product. I’ve decided to use my sabbatical year to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing.

On the day of my first graduate creative-writing workshop, my professor walked into class with a stack of papers in hand. All twelve of us grew quiet; the week before, he’d brought a similarly sized stack that had turned out to contain copies of the original first page of a story my classmate had turned in as a revision. My professor had brought the original to show how it was possible to revise the life out of a story, and he methodically worked through the original first page as compared to the new one to make his point.