LESLEY WHEELER

Author: Lesley Wheeler

  • Don’t get ambitious

    I’m trying to imagine myself as a pasty-faced superheroine–Anemic Woman!–battling vampires with cast-iron skillet and chimichurri (having learned fresh parsley is highly ferrous, I’m putting chimichurri on everything and calling it “Iron Sauce”). All this mythologizing, however, takes a lot of vim, and I’m tuckered out. I really enjoyed visiting Kenyon last week, and I’m…

  • Noisy heart

    “Has anyone ever told you you have a heart murmur?” asked the cardiologist, extracting a stethoscope plug from his ear. “Could be a leaky valve.” I was in his office to talk about palpitations, long runs of crazy rhythm ten times a day, bad enough that I’d cough insanely and have a hard time focusing…

  • Post-poetry-reading rituals (AWP Prep Pt. 2)

    When people talk about writing rituals, they usually mean the behaviors that get them primed for focused composition. For me, that’s a pot of tea and a laptop in a quiet corner, with email notifications turned off. If I still can’t get my head together, reading helps. Or I write informally or in another genre…

  • Diversity in Creative Writing Programs (AWP Prep, Pt. 1, Updated)

    A Creative Writing Program Head in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S.–of which I am now Council Chair–recently asked me if the AWP could provide a list of published resources on supporting diversity at the programming/ curricular level. It seems to me we need both a set of sources (research, testimonies, provocations) and a list…

  • Extinction burst?

    Extinction burst?

    Last Monday, I found a KKK recruitment flier on my front lawn. Just a week or so earlier and a few blocks away, the first physical memorial to enslaved African-Americans was installed at Washington and Lee University, an institution that benefited financially from slavery but, until recently, bruited that terrible fact much less than, say,…

  • Watch me listen

    On Saturday I met my daughter at Union Station in D.C. and we ended up at the National Portrait Gallery, standing in front of paintings until our feet ached. I’ve done the rounds there a few times but don’t remember seeing “The Hermit Thrush” (1890), above, by Thomas Dewing. I love those postures of keen,…

  • As if suspense were a permanent state

    Poetry isn’t generally associated with suspense. It seems like an art of uncertainty–and a consolation for that uncertainty. Yet I find myself more and more convinced that poetry’s fragmentariness needs to be anchored by story (earlier post related to this idea here). I’m also wishing I could see the shape of my own story more…

  • Marginalia and interleavings

    When you read, you think someone else’s thoughts–which is why it’s interesting and good to read books by people whose experiences are different than yours. Sometimes, however, there’s an intermediary spirit in the mix. Pick up a heavily marked used book and you end up glimpsing another reader’s mental processes, too. Students experience this all…

  • Poetry & change & cocktail recipes

    When someone says, “Poetry changed my life,” you expect to hear of a high-stakes transformation. Former students have told me, for example, how poetry gave them permission to embrace and admit their sexuality. Reading and writing poetry sustains people through all kinds of crises, and hearing it helps people feel moved and connected at weddings,…

  • How and why

    I’m not the only writer who’s fascinated by the processes of inspiration, composition, and revision, but horrified by the processes of self-promotion. And  I do mean full-on gothic trauma complete with repressed guilt rising monstrously from a shallow grave and chasing me through the Cemetery of Dead Projects. Brave heroine that I try to be,…