LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: Chris Gavaler

  • W&L Writers Resist

    The work ahead of us is overwhelming, so how to prioritize? I’m watching my friends make various choices, and I respect all of them. Some have stepped up their political activism and local volunteerism. Others have turned off social media and are writing their hearts out. Still others, feeling their words stolen away, unable even…

  • 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…

  • Union of future literary titans

      Twenty-four years ago this June, Chris and I set up our first shared apartment. Possessions: a double bed my mother purchased (“don’t tell your father”); one brown vinyl couch with no rear legs picked up off the street, so if you sat down on a humid August night in shorts you wouldn’t be able…

  • 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…

  • Living with a writer

    “Page two is a verb tense tour de force,” he says, and I puff right up. I’m pretty new at creative nonfiction as a genre, but prose storytelling is his mastery zone. Who knew the personal essay was all about verb tenses? Transitions, yeah, understood they were trouble. And bending accuracy for elegance (we sometimes…