LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: election

  • Shaky & a still life

    Shaky & a still life

    On election day, I taught a Zoom workshop to a small creative writing workshop at Western Washington State, with a focus on spell- and prayer-poems. The teacher and I thought hard about the timing and decided it would be a good distraction for us and them–and it sure was. I read some poems and answered…

  • Publishing in the apocalypse (please vote!)

    Publishing in the apocalypse (please vote!)

    My last poetry book, The State She’s In, launched on March 17th, 2020. I’m far from the only author whose disappointed feeling was swamped by the dimensions of pandemic disaster. Millions died; literary cancelations were vanishingly small potatoes by comparison. Other authors shared stories of their 9/11/21 launch dates or the collapse of the book-buying…

  • Future schmuture

    No NEH grant again, a magazine acceptance, a solicitation of poems from a magazine I’d never cracked (!), several poem rejections, some drafting and revising, lots of Shenandoah work, a vague but persistent headache, short days and blustery cold–hello from a mixed-blessing November in Sabbatical Land. I hereby mark the sixth-month birthday of my novel…

  • Imagining poetry after the election

    Inside Out September, 2016     Shouldn’t talk with a mouthful of half-chewed flags, but he smirks and suggests her Secret Service guys disarm and see what happens. The crowd turns wild and you can spot a star wedged in his molar. Scraps of stripe dangle from a lip. Maybe, he cracks, the Second Amendment…

  • Keeping the minutes on violence, with Lucille Clifton

    For a workshop on Tuesday, Election Day, one of my undergraduates submitted a poem based on the day he hid in a closet during a middle school shooting. A different student said there had been a shooting in her school, too; another described an active shooter just last week in the high school her sister…

  • Don’t read this if you’re focusing on gratitude

    As I slice sweet potatoes and cube challah bread for stuffing, I’m feeling not grateful or festive but sick at heart about two things: the injustice at Standing Rock, and what this election is going to mean for my children’s generation. I am fortunate to have my daughter home from college and a visiting cousin…

  • Battles lost

    I’ve always had the sense that people looked at me skeptically when I characterize my life as damaged by sexism. I’m a US-born person of European descent who never had to go hungry. I obtained a good education, was legally able to marry the person I love, and now earn a respectable living. How bad…