LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: revision

  • Change of (literary) life

    It’s fall, 2015. I’m on sabbatical. My mother is direly ill with what turns out to be lymphoma. I’m mourning my daughter’s departure for college and worrying about her experience there; my son, new to high school, faints in a clinic and is diagnosed with pneumonia. My own body is going haywire, perimenopausally. Amid doctor…

  • Prove or disprove and salvage if possible

    Both your children will be away, people said, thus you will have a productive summer. In honor of my younger child, who is studying number theory for six weeks straight, let’s do the math. On the plus side: Cooking, cleaning, shopping, and laundry are far easier and cheaper. (I cannot BELIEVE how much less money…

  • Excerpt from a mess in progress

    1. Once, when she was a toddler-sized blizzard of pure will, I called her “little missy.” Some current of Victorian chastisement must have welled up through me, springing from all the British books I’d read or maybe from some fifties sitcom re-aired in periodic waves. My daughter had created yet another hodgepodge installation of stuffed…

  • Killing your 18th c specialist darlings

    My imaginary English Department was overstaffed, according to fictional administrators. Unfortunately, the first readers of my novel ms said the same thing. One of those professors, everyone said, has got to go. And it was pretty clear who had the least seniority. I hated firing the poor guy. Jay’s specialty is not, in real life,…

  • Waving and also drowning

    When, while bobbing in the ocean, you spot a larger-than-usual wave steaming your way, what do you do? A. Jump into it with joy, trying to hit the breaker where it crashes, for the wildest ride possible. (This is my husband and son.) B. Shout “no!” in a stern voice, demanding the ocean behave itself.…

  • On submitting a poem 50 times

    I’ve had my head under a giant seeing-my-daughter-off-to-college-shaped rock, so when I read Jeannine Hall Gailey’s blog yesterday, its references to scandal in the poetry world inspired me to lift my busy skull and ask, “Wha-at?” I’m not going to name the white guy who published in Best American Poetry under a Chinese-American pseudonym, because he’s…

  • Mess, noise, static

    “The derecho felled my father, I mean my maple tree”: that’s a line from my forthcoming book, Radioland. My desk at home faces a large old maple, and beyond that Myers St., and beyond that House Mountain. A storm cleaved the tree, however, during the summer of 2012, about a month after my father died. Half the…

  • Ruthlessly pruning the overstuffed closet of a poetry book manuscript

    After a shopping trip for school clothes on Saturday, my daughter, a rising high school senior, spontaneously cleaned out her drawers and closet to make room for the new. I cannot emphasize enough how out of character this was, but then again, she’s on the verge of so many changes. All summer she’s been doing…

  • “Douchebag” and other rude, not-seasonally-festive epithets

    The one time I tried to smoke a cigarette, my friends mocked me: “Cut that out. You look totally ridiculous.” By common consensus, I couldn’t pull off foul language either. I thought the problem might have been some crisp Englishness lingering in my elocution—my mother’s British and allegedly I started kindergarten with an accent. I…