LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: mushrooms

  • Professor Mushroom listens to strangers

    Professor Mushroom listens to strangers

    As I filtered out of a particularly fun workshop-reading-open mic at BookTree in Kirkland, Washington, one of the participants called back to me as he ambled down the dark street, “Thanks, Professor Mushroom!” The featured image above with its weird reflections, taken at a booth at the Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival, conjures, for me, that…

  • Nuts raining down

    Nuts raining down

    I needed to get out into the woods, but between sciatica and recovering from the sprained ankle, it’s been hard to plan, or for that matter to pick a trail that hits my sweet spot between genuinely peaceful and not-too-rugged. Yesterday my spouse remembered Reservoir Hollow. It’s an obscure out-and-back trail a 15-minute drive away,…

  • Role model, mycelium

    Role model, mycelium

    Spring’s little revolutions are flaring in small-town Virginia. It’s been unseasonably warm, so on the streets around my house, the daffodils’ signage was rapidly outshouted by tulips, azaleas, and lilacs. We took a couple of walks in the woods, one at Brushy Hill where redbuds headlined, the other on back campus, where the news included…

  • Myco-local

    Myco-local

    Two weeks till Mycocosmic launches! In the meantime, I snuck in a four-hour Sunday workshop run by two mycocologists and foragers about an hour away in Churchville, Virginia. They stuffed my head full of information and my body full of mushroom soup, mushroom hand pies, and pieces of shiitake, maitake, and lion’s mane sauteed in…

  • Magic reciprocity

    Magic reciprocity

    My two fall classes are a first-year writing seminar called “Other Worlds” and an advanced poetry class called “Haunted & Strange,” so as autumn starts, I’m feeling weird in a good way. I’m also reading Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, full of meditations on poetry’s magic and modernism’s intersections with the occult, and wow, I…

  • Cosmic, dystopic, poetic

    Cosmic, dystopic, poetic

    Spring proceeds peony by heavy-headed peony. With satisfaction and struggle, I’ve mostly finished the editorial part of the season, although we’re now proofing Shenandoah‘s Spring issue. I’ll be off the hook for a while, except for the relatively moderate workload of running the annual Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Writers, because I’ve now set the poetry…