LESLEY WHEELER

Category: Uncategorized

  • 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…

  • In favor of impurity, or, I’m sick at heart and I want to lie down

    My daughter told me about the mass killing in Orlando in the car Sunday, as we drove up Route 81 on an errand. We bought summer shorts and solar lights for the back walkway, ate pho and spring rolls, stopped at a bookstore, drove home, and she kept updating me all evening. Mostly Latino and…

  • Poetry by the Sea, Pt. 2: Seams showing

    “I’ve quit hoarding,” Kimiko Hahn said at her reading, “and now collect myself.” I, on the other hand, was hoarding good lines–hers was one of many I collected last week in a little notebook bound with blue thread. My tattered Moleskin is beginning to fill with quotes and drafts and lists and spiral doodles–and I…

  • Poetry by the Sea, Pt. 1: Edna Rules

    “Edna rules!” a woman declared to me in the hotel hallway, waving a vigorous fist. “I mean, Vincent!” I organized a panel  on Edna St. Vincent Millay for Poetry by the Sea, an annual writing conference in Madison, Connecticut. The other speakers were Anna Lena Phillips Bell speaking about Millay as an ecopoet; January Gill…

  • Toasting successes, fleeing gnats

    Even though I’m not teaching this year, I can SMELL that it’s the last week of classes. The campus, lush from an unusually rainy May, is full of giddy, jittery, sneezing students. My colleagues are staggering around exhausted, arms full of ungraded papers. Processing my heavy email load is like trying to get free of…

  • Oh, mother

    Writing is a confidence game, and while generally I can play it with the necessary brio, occasionally I drop all the cards. In many ways, I’m having a great spring. I love this new essay on Radioland by Athena Kildegaard in Bloom. I’m happily tinkering with fall syllabi, but I still have a few months before…

  • Collaboration

    Lone wolf humanist here to tell you that while reading and writing in solitude are some of my favorite things, experiences with intellectual and artistic collaboration have astonished me, shaking loose all kinds of work and thinking I might never have otherwise produced. As poets Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton say in this great piece–which…

  • 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…