LESLEY WHEELER

Category: Radioland outtakes

  • 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…

  • Writing the motherland

    “How many of you,” Betsy asked the audience, “think you know your mother’s mind, maybe better than she knows herself?” Whoops, I thought, raising my hand. That’s arrogant of me. But trying to read my mother’s mind was one of the most urgent and constant occupations of my childhood and teenage years, and I’ve kept…

  • Red wolf howl

    Okay, so the red wolf is not a separate species but a hybrid of gray wolf and coyote. That kind of makes me like them more. What’s celebrated as local is mixed, impure. Making a fetish of purity–racial, ideological, national–is not just hateful. It’s dumb. No person is unmixed, no policy, no poem. That was…

  • Mathy Radioland

    I was tickled that JoAnne Growney wanted to put “Concentric Grooves” from Radioland on her blog “Intersections–Poetry with Mathematics,” but her request also jogged a memory of an unpublished poem from the same era that was even MORE mathy. I finally found “Disaster Math,” a poem I sent out a couple of times then gave up on,…

  • Radioland, an outtake

    The world’s going to hell, but my writing is going well…Mostly revising and submitting, these days. I now have THREE projects under submission: 1. Taking Poetry Personally: Twenty-First Century Verse and the Multiverse; 2. a chapbook-length long poem, Propagation; 3. and a first novel, The Changeling Professor, although that one is just at the beginning-to-query-agents phase. Meanwhile…