LESLEY WHEELER

Category: The State She’s In

  • Publishing in the apocalypse (please vote!)

    Publishing in the apocalypse (please vote!)

    My last poetry book, The State She’s In, launched on March 17th, 2020. I’m far from the only author whose disappointed feeling was swamped by the dimensions of pandemic disaster. Millions died; literary cancelations were vanishingly small potatoes by comparison. Other authors shared stories of their 9/11/21 launch dates or the collapse of the book-buying…

  • Small college English, ’90s style

    Small college English, ’90s style

    I just began a new term with thirty years at W&L in the rearview mirror. I looked up 1994: aside from the leaders and wars I remembered, Wikipedia reminded me that was the year Munch’s The Scream was stolen, Kurt Cobain died, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president, the Chunnel opened, and Pulp Fiction…

  • Some indie books for your list

    Some indie books for your list

    This week in the U.S. academic calendar involves a lot of reflection on and (less rewardingly) grading of student writing. I always sift and contemplate of my own year’s work, too, looking over what I’ve read and written, considering what I want to do next, or do better. I wasn’t surprised to see poet-blogger Ann…

  • Incantations from the snow globe

    Incantations from the snow globe

    I’m not living in a snow globe exactly–the precipitation in Virginia this April is rain and petals–but I came down with Covid a week ago so I have definitely been living behind glass. It wasn’t a severe case, and in fact I first mistook it for a sinus infection because the most unpleasant symptom was…

  • Mycocosmic and plutonic

    Mycocosmic and plutonic

    Big news arrived this week: Wednesday morning, I talked by phone with Jeffrey Levine, who told me that Diane Seuss had named my next poetry book, Mycocosmic, runner-up for the Dorset Prize, and they want to publish it with a $1000 honorarium, likely in winter 2025. I said yes. I’m still stunned. My adoration for…

  • Differently to #AWP22

    It’s been a packed week, but also kind of a splendid one. I feel more connected to literary people again–and more conscious of how much the first pandemic year, especially, disconnected us. I returned from a good conference last Sunday to visit with the wonderful poet January Gill O’Neil, who talked to my class the…

  • Mind of winter (not)

    For me, midwinter is a time of introversion. I’m three weeks into my university’s winter term, so I’m planning and leading discussions and meetings constantly, but they’re usually based on study and solitary thinking–not extroverted stuff, even though there’s a social, performative aspect to the work. The class based on NEW reading and thinking is…

  • Writing/ being a “strong female character”

    One of the students in my senior seminar is exploring representation of female characters in contemporary fiction. On the one hand, there’s pressure to write “likeable” women protagonists. Koa Beck wrote about this for The Atlantic in 2015, quoting an amazing retort from Claire Messud, in response to a journalist’s question about whether anyone would…

  • Rereading Sedgwick, or, Oh Yeah, I Like Teaching

    The first paragraph from this famous essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick just stopped me cold: “Sometime back in the middle of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, I was picking the brains of a friend of mine, the activist scholar Cindy Patton, about the probable natural history of HIV. This was at a time…

  • Pandemic books, like pandemics, keep coming

    September 2021 in the U.S.: vaccines are widely available for those over 12, yet people are still suffering and dying from Covid-19 at a higher rate than last September, newspaper articles keep telling me. This is a comparatively trivial point, but for related reasons, it continues to be a tough time to launch a book.…