LESLEY WHEELER

Category: Uncategorized

  • Incarnation: WisCon

    I’ve been a virtual sf author since Aqueduct published The Receptionist and Other Tales last summer: you can conjure me by textual transportation device. At WisCon this weekend, though, avatar and body will undergo fusion. I’ve given readings from the book all year, but on all those occasions my primary identity seemed to be poet.…

  • Professor Aragorn swears a vow

    Manifestos are for angry young men, right? I’m more like “cranky” and “middle-aged,” and as far gender stereotyping goes, I actually had a student write on a course evaluation once, “Just as kind as you’d expect from a mother.” Whippersnapper, if you’re out there, be glad that was anonymous. I am weary of hearing that…

  • And the winner of the Big Poetry Giveaway is…

    Poet and blogger Joseph Harker! I’ve never met him but just looked him up and his last post for NaPoWriMo, “Adam and Steve,” is pretty great. Nice list of favorite poets, too. I’ll be sending him my latest, The Receptionist and Other Tales, and Feral by Janet McAdams. Thanks to Susan Rich for organizing this and to everyone who…

  • The exquisite hush I require, being a sensitive artist

    “So how’s it going at your writer’s resort?” my son keeps asking, and you should definitely hear pre-teen sarcasm in those italics. I packed skepticism in my suitcase, actually, nested in there with books I didn’t use and tea I would brew in enormous quantities. What’s so special about writing over there instead of at…

  • I’m sorry I’m abandoning you all

    All it takes is a wobble of ankle or attention— the other racers fly ahead and I’ll never catch up. This is a stupid way to approach a cherry blossom. With fear, I mean. What if, I ask my spouse, I waste this gift of two weeks? I will have betrayed my family. Counting games…

  • Pretty books, messy drafts

    “No,” she said (I’m paraphrasing), “you have to post your daily poem. That’s how you learn to stop worrying about what other people think. It frees you.” Luisa Igloria, who gave a great reading here a few days ago, has published a poem a day at Dave Bonta’s Via Negativa since November 20th, 2010, so…

  • Poets do it for free

      You thought I meant poetry readings, I’m sure, and yes, we will talk dirty to you in bookstores, classrooms, cafés, and other marginal spaces, for little or no compensation. But at the moment I’m referring to another kind of freebie. The wheel of the year has turned and it’s time to get Feral for National Poetry…

  • Career Suicide

    I’m risk-averse, at least financially. My mother felt trapped in a bad marriage by her lack of education and her sense that she couldn’t earn a decent living. I remember thinking as a child: come hell or high water, I WILL have my own salary, health insurance, retirement fund. I will never have to sit…

  • “Next Big Thing” weird self-interview blog meme thing

    Sally Rosen Kindred tapped me for this game of blog-tag in which I contemplate my ms-in-progress as a high-concept Hollywood thriller starring James Franco minus apes. Let the bidding war begin. What is your working title of your book (or story, or project)? Radioland or some variation involving additional nouns, verbs, and/or prepositions. For a…

  • The loveliest, the smartest, the most full of dinosaur droppings

    For Wednesday, my “Poetry and Community” students are required to judge the U.S. inaugural poems from Frost to Blanco: which is best and why. “Define best however you like,” I told them: most beautiful? politically galvanizing? original? traditional? appropriate to a formal ceremony with a gigantic audience? inappropriate yet for that reason surprising and memorable?…