LESLEY WHEELER

Author: Lesley Wheeler

  • Poetry and suspense: more twists

    I’m almost always suffering some dire form of suspense and trying to ignore it. Long publishing cycles are a large part of that–I have many mss out there and the odds of success don’t favor me. Often I can receive a rejection with a philosophical shrug, or go for weeks without thinking about a particular…

  • Poetry, politics, and friendship

    In the early nineties, I was lucky enough to hear Toni Morrison introduce a reading by Maxine Hong Kingston. Both of them had recently lost manuscripts and many other precious belongings in house fires, and Kingston read a riveting piece about driving toward her neighborhood that day and realizing her home was ablaze. It became…

  • Prove or disprove and salvage if possible

    Both your children will be away, people said, thus you will have a productive summer. In honor of my younger child, who is studying number theory for six weeks straight, let’s do the math. On the plus side: Cooking, cleaning, shopping, and laundry are far easier and cheaper. (I cannot BELIEVE how much less money…

  • Not fleeing

    When I was eleven, I started to plot my escape. Financial independence seemed like the prerequisite, but the 50 cents an hour I earned babysitting weren’t going to take me far. So, baby steps. I started by purchasing my own shampoo and toothpaste, keeping them separate from the family stuff. I figured I’d gradually work…

  • #RedHen

    You’d Better Believe These Rhymes Are Slant Inspired by the co-owners and staff of the Red Hen Restaurant This sonnet politely requests the entire Trump administration to leave the establishment. It’s the seizing of children from migrant parents, the cages and proposed internment camps, that curdle the cream and knock the meter wobbly. I lack…

  • Paternity suit

    Father’s Day used to be a hard one. When my father was alive, I knew he wanted to be fussed over, but he was an unpredictably mean-spirited person who’d praise my intelligence one minute and mock me the next for my unattractiveness, my career choices, or my politics–and he was doing the same to my…

  • Hundred-year nap

    For the last week, I’ve lived in the land of the long blink. We arrived home eight days ago from the aforementioned intense trip to Europe, and I dutifully took sunlit walks to reset my body clock, swallowed melatonin at the appointed hours, and vigorously swept out my email inbox–begone, reference letters and peer review!–while…

  • Venus/ dodo

    I didn’t even know the Venus of Willendorf inhabited Vienna’s Natural History Museum when deciding to spend our last afternoon in the city there. My son was weary of paintings, so while Madeleine and Chris headed to the Leopold Museum, Cam and I staggered through flocks of taxidermied rare and extinct animals. The museum was…

  • Current weather and forecast for the Confederacy

    I’m often proud of my brainy, big-hearted students and colleagues, and I’m occasionally even proud of an administrator–when I hear, for instance, that someone deployed funds to help my advisee get through a crisis. Wealthy small liberal arts colleges can be very good places to work and study. And in ways I did not expect…

  • My mother as live-in nurse, 1962

      Numismatics, 1962 Strange to feel inferior, but that was the job of live-in European servants: to confer shine for a pittance. English nurses, Scottish maids, Estonian women doing laundry, German POWs pruning roses. Out through glitter, back to the dock. Mrs. Anthony motored around town in a humble Ford wagon, but in her garage,…