LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: pandemic

  • 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…

  • Rereading Sedgwick, or, Oh Yeah, I Like Teaching

    The first paragraph from this famous essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick just stopped me cold: “Sometime back in the middle of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, I was picking the brains of a friend of mine, the activist scholar Cindy Patton, about the probable natural history of HIV. This was at a time…

  • Pandemic books, like pandemics, keep coming

    September 2021 in the U.S.: vaccines are widely available for those over 12, yet people are still suffering and dying from Covid-19 at a higher rate than last September, newspaper articles keep telling me. This is a comparatively trivial point, but for related reasons, it continues to be a tough time to launch a book.…

  • Learning, unlearning, and #AWP21

    You know the way somebody makes a remark and it clangs in you, your body vibrating with recognition? A friend recently told me that she’s learned a lot over the past year about what she needs to be happy. Yes. I’ve had other lesson years: for instance, I learned during my long-ago stint as department…

  • Hope, in spite of and because of

    I felt really blue about dropping my youngest off for his second year of college, so I self-medicated by putting my head down and writing for long hours each day. The west coast on fire, more anti-Black violence, high infection rates–it’s not easy to pay attention and help in little ways without becoming self-destructively obsessed.…

  • The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Lesley Perkins Wheeler Gilman

    It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. I would say a haunted house–there is something infected about it. Else, why should it be let so cheaply, and why have stood so long untenanted, during a global pandemic? John laughs at me, but one expects…