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Dickinson’s fungal weirdness
This Thursday, 7/17, at 6 pm Eastern, I’m reading with Nadia Alexis in a virtual series, Phosphorescence, hosted by the Emily Dickinson Museum. (Nadia’s great book Beyond the Watershed launched on the very same March day as my Mycocosmic so it’s been a pleasure to pair up a couple of times.) The reading is free…
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Instead of patriotism, fungus
I’m not feeling the red-white-and-blue this year, so I hereby give you an image of the very pink Barbie pagoda mushroom–Podoserpula miranda–from New Caledonia, image drawn from The Global Fungal Red List. You’re welcome. I found stories about its discovery when I was reminding myself of the names of mushroom morphologies for a novel I’ve…
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Shimmer, steam, somatic, sciatica
A happy thing that happened a week ago Monday, the day before my Personal Pinched-Nerve Apocalypse (more on that soon). Adroit published my short essay “Mycelial Mind.” As far as maintaining the mental habits the essay describes: well, I’m still a seeker, and I guess that’s the point. The past week and a half brought…
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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…
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Mycocosmic is in the field
My book-spore have been released! Like all wild things, they’re not as calendar-driven in their dispersal as an author might pretend. Tupelo people and I agreed that the official launch date would be March 4th because Tuesdays are traditional in the industry and “march forth” sounds cute–that’s when the local party happens (Downtown Books, Lexington…
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Mycocosmic cover & pre-order link!!!
I am SO EXCITED to reveal the cover to my sixth poetry book, MYCOCOSMIC! It’s also available for preorder from Tupelo Press at this link, and it officially marches forth on March 4th, 2025. The cover art is from a series entitled “Radiant Void” by Pearl Cowan, whose other works you can also see on…
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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…
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Mycocosmic and plutonic
Big news arrived this week: Wednesday morning, I talked by phone with Jeffrey Levine, who told me that Diane Seuss had named my next poetry book, Mycocosmic, runner-up for the Dorset Prize, and they want to publish it with a $1000 honorarium, likely in winter 2025. I said yes. I’m still stunned. My adoration for…
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Mycelial poetry devouring the ruins
For the last couple of years, my muse has been mycelial. I mean both that fungus infests my current mss–I’m revising a poetry collection and a novel–and, in a related way, that a mycelial life seems like what I ought to be aiming for. Spreading tendrils underground, sprouting mushrooms after a storm, metabolizing trouble: these…
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LESLEY WHEELER 