LESLEY WHEELER

Category: Uncategorized

  • #TheSealeyChallenge & #TinyBookFair

    I love so much about #TheSealeyChallenge, a project created by poet Nicole Sealey asking people to read a book of poetry a day for the thirty-one days of August. I’ve read some guilty-sounding social media posts, though, by people saying they just can’t read poetry that fast, and I get it. The event has been…

  • The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Lesley Perkins Wheeler Gilman

    It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. I would say a haunted house–there is something infected about it. Else, why should it be let so cheaply, and why have stood so long untenanted, during a global pandemic? John laughs at me, but one expects…

  • Why You Should Be Reading About Menopause

    Why You Should Be Reading About Menopause

    You know how obsessions grow on you and into you, like fungal hyphae bursting through carpenter ants’ heads and disseminating spore? I’m currently fixated on fungi, but a few years ago I developed a more explicable obsession with perimenopause and its sequel. Like puberty, this process has major effects on mind and body. I know…

  • Practicing Hope

    I’ve never had much talent for hope, and what hope I’ve managed to summon tends to get squashed. It’s a feeling I’ve learned to distrust. Yet widespread public outrage at police assaults to Black lives and dignity: it springs from that four-letter-word. Protests and anger, imply at least some tiny spark of faith that the…

  • Virtual Salon #12 with Ned Balbo

    …the landline’s cut & no one’s listening -Ned Balbo, from “Vortex” The imaginary book party below is the twelfth in a spontaneously invented series–how did this milestone come so fast? In March, events I’d planned to launch The State She’s In fell apart, which in some ways felt like the very smallest loss in an…

  • Virtual Salon #11 with Martha Silano

    Dear Mr. Wordsworth, It turns out there is no tranquility. When you read any of Martha Silano’s books, all of them fizzing with brio and invention and awe, you want to start a salon just so you can invite her. As Diane Seuss says about Gravity Assist, Silano’s fifth poetry collection is “popping with kinetic…

  • Rainbows, snakes, and book launches

    Among my latest thrills: nearly stepping on a hissing snake; a double rainbow over an empty Main Street; a frisbee arriving by mail; and, oh yeah, publishing my first novel. On launch day for Unbecoming, I was shut in my house responding to student project proposals; my March launch for The State She’s In came…

  • Becoming Unbecoming

    My debut novel launches this Friday, May 15th, 2020. Here’s the story of how the book came to be. I was in my late forties in 2015, sending my oldest child off to college and feeling glum about the next phase of my life. Hormonal shifts were not helping. On a walk with my spouse,…

  • Virtual Salon #3 with Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

    There’s one scar a river carved, but this ground isn’t a bible you know. True, there are chapters of basalt and clay, but no leaves get saved between them. -from “Amazonis, Mars” The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers documents a different crisis than the one we’re currently, ineffectively navigating: people…

  • the salonnière introduces …the state she’s in!

    My book is now available from Tinderbox Editions! And, once we get through this, it will also be available in independent bookstores near you. In the meantime, I hereby introduce a virtual salon for authors launching poetry books plus anyone who enjoys a pretend party. Imagine this space as a high-ceilinged room, art-fans lounging on…