Tag: Ecotone
Posted on June 19, 2020
by Lesley Wheeler
3 Comments
Deferred Action Look at the mountain, find my boots, abandon walls, look at the mountain. It’s all I do. The president tweets DACA is dead while the magnolia publishes other news: the future will be pink. Whom should I listen to? Beets for…
Category: teaching, The State She's InTags: 32 Poems, About Place, Breonna Taylor, Confederacy, DACA, Ecotone, gigan, Literary Matters, Marilyn Nelson, Practices of Hope, sweet, Terrance Hayes, verse daily, Waxwing
Posted on April 7, 2020
by Lesley Wheeler
1 Comment
I’m not processing very well, here at the quiet edge of apocalypse. Sometimes I’m fine, scared, down, or stir-crazy; often I’m busy teaching remotely, being fortunate enough to still have a job; generally I can’t concentrate. New York City has always been the center…
Category: Shenandoah, The State She's In, UnbecomingTags: Choice Words, Dear America, Ecotone, editing, Massachusetts Review, Publishers Weekly, publishing, quarantine, Rocked by the Waters, social isolation, uncertainty
Posted on July 17, 2019
by Lesley Wheeler
6 Comments
Sometimes the news just silences me: children suffering in camps, the Justice Department refusing to seek justice after the killing of Eric Garner, racist tweets from the white-nationalist-in-chief. I make donations and sometimes participate in political action, but mostly I’m sitting around like Ursula,…
Category: UncategorizedTags: Cimarron Review, creative criticism, Ecotone, international mla symposium, Leslie Jenike, poetry, Poetry's Possible Worlds, politics, revision, Shenandoah, verse daily
Posted on July 2, 2019
by Lesley Wheeler
3 Comments
I was advising a writer-friend lately to celebrate small wins. Then I thought, hey, I should do that, too. Since my last couple of posts explored self-doubt, and a lot of people in my orbit are having rough summers (for example, catch up with…
Category: UncategorizedTags: Amy Lemmon, borders, CD Wright Women Writers Conference, Choice Words, Cider Press Review, Deep Beauty, Ecotone, Fourth of July, Jeannine Hall Gailey, patriotism, poems as spells
Posted on June 11, 2018
by Lesley Wheeler
2 Comments
For the last week, I’ve lived in the land of the long blink. We arrived home eight days ago from the aforementioned intense trip to Europe, and I dutifully took sunlit walks to reset my body clock, swallowed melatonin at the appointed hours, and…
Posted on March 6, 2017
by Lesley Wheeler
4 Comments
I’m returning to a beloved book this week, Paula Meehan’s Painting Rain (2009), for a class on place, borders, and migration in contemporary poetry. Meehan’s collection inspired a lot of my thinking about place in verse. I suddenly remembered, as I wandered among the poems again,…
Posted on March 10, 2016
by Lesley Wheeler
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On Saturday I met my daughter at Union Station in D.C. and we ended up at the National Portrait Gallery, standing in front of paintings until our feet ached. I’ve done the rounds there a few times but don’t remember seeing “The Hermit Thrush”…
Category: UncategorizedTags: birdsong, Ecotone, National Portrait Gallery, poetry, sound, The Hermit Thrush, Thomas Dewing, virginia festival of the book, vision, Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Posted on October 16, 2015
by Lesley Wheeler
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The main piece of housekeeping wisdom my mother passed down to me was just make it LOOK clean. If the counter is wiped down, people will admire your kitchen. They’ll never know about the dust under the fridge or even see the crumbs on the…
Category: UncategorizedTags: AWP, Barrow Street Press, cleaning, Ecotone, editing, Eleven Eleven, gendered divisions of labor, Mid-Atlantic Council, New Orleans Review, poetry, post-publication prizes, Radioland, scholarship
In theory, in two days, all this year’s schoolwork will be in recycling bins on the curb, I’ll be the parent of a rising high schooler and a rising first-year college student, and we’ll all be flying towards an English city full of ancient…
