Lesley Wheeler, Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, is the author of
Mycocosmic, runner-up for the Dorset Prize and her sixth poetry collection.
Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds and
the novel Unbecoming; previous poetry books include The State She’s In and Heterotopia, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize.
Wheeler’s work has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Workshop, and
the Sewanee Writers Workshop. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry,
Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review Online, Ecotone, Guernica,
Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Virginia and teaches
at W&L University.
1 - How did your first
book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous?
How does it feel different?
This is weird to say
because poetry books earn virtually nothing, but the biggest way publication
changed my life was economic. Publication is artistically validating and joyous,
and those first books in each genre transformed my sense of identity, but in
the academic reward system, books enable tenure and promotion.
My
debut full-length poetry collection, Heathen, was, like many first
books, a best-of album honed at live readings. Mycocosmic is a concept album about
the underworlds that support above-ground transformation.
2 - How did you come to
poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poetry suits me because
I love sound patterns and my brain prefers associative to logical moves. I
wrote fiction constantly as a child, though, and I’ve circled back to bring that
genre into my writing life again.
3 - How long does it
take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come
quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their
final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Initial drafts tend to flow
rapidly: the bad first draft of my novel Unbecoming, for example, emerged in a seven-week writing binge. It’s very
rare, though, for me to draft a poem or anything else that doesn’t then require
massive revision. I tend to put a draft away for months, pull it out for a radical
overhaul, and repeat the process a few times. It takes me a long time to see
the work from a critical distance.
4 - Where does a poem
usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining
into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very
beginning?
I’ve worked both ways,
but most commonly: I write by impulse until I accumulate a pile of poems. Then
I sift through them, thinking about throughlines. Finally, I start writing and
revising toward that throughline, and the book comes together. “Underpoem [Fire
Fungus]” in Mycocosmic, a verse essay that unites the book by threading
across the bottom of every page, was probably the last poem I wrote for the
collection.
5 - Are public readings
part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who
enjoys doing readings?
I always feel lucky to give
a reading to a live audience—to connect with people through poetry in real time.
I enjoy conversations about poetry even more, whether in interviews or
classrooms. Like a lot of professors, though, I’m an introvert-extrovert: it’s
fun to ham it up, but then I have to pay myself back with solitude.
6 - Do you have any
theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you
trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions
are?
I tell students when I
teach speculative fiction that its operative questions are “what’s real, what
matters.” That’s true for poetry as well, whether it arises from a documentary
impulse, relies on autobiography, imitates prayer, or springs from some other
field. For the past ten years I’ve also been probing the question “who am I
now?” Midlife transforms a person in many ways, but it’s electrifying to read
about microbiota, too. If 80% of the DNA in my body is not human, is it in any
way meaningful to use first-person singular pronouns? Obviously I’m doing so
right now, but I’m interrogating the habit.
7 – What do you see the
current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What
do you think the role of the writer should be?
It’s incredibly various,
thank god. I’m so glad there are activist poets, linguistic experimenters,
spiritual poets, entertainers, and more.
8 - Do you find the
process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
To engage deeply with
someone else’s work in progress is an act of incredible generosity. I find that
push-and-pull rewarding. Yes, occasionally I’ve thought an editor got something
wrong or, ouch, could have managed their tone a bit better, but in poetry, for
me, that’s never, never seemed motivated by ego. Literary editing is a labor of
love.
9 - What is the best
piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I always give a
different answer to this question, but what’s on my mind today is something
Asali Solomon tells her fiction students: the first obligation of any writer is
to be interesting.
10 - How easy has it
been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction to critical prose)?
What do you see as the appeal?
I never stopped writing
critical prose or had trouble toggling between criticism and poetry. Writing literary
prose, though, is not, as I once foolishly thought, a natural meeting point
between the two. Managing verb tenses alone—wow! As in poetry, the writer of
prose narrative is always juggling the question of what to explain and what to
elide, but the math is fundamentally different.
11 - What kind of
writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a
typical day (for you) begin?
I wake up slowly, drink
a pot of tea, do puzzles. When I’m alert, I reluctantly drag myself to the
desk, but I’m happy once I get going, even if I’m mainly prepping for class. Actual
writing and revision happen only sporadically during the academic terms but
daily during summers and sabbaticals—I’m pretty disciplined then.
12 - When your writing
gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?
I read or take a walk,
trying not to worry about it, because the writing always comes back. If moving
my body or immersion in someone else’s book doesn’t work, I just switch gears.
It’s good to have multiple projects going so there’s always a productive way to
procrastinate.
13 - What fragrance
reminds you of home?
Bus exhaust in the rain
reminds me of my mother, which isn’t very flattering, but when I was six we
visited her home in Liverpool for the first time. Everything amazed me, that
first time on a plane, even the smelly rank of buses that greeted us at the
airport.
14 - David W. McFadden
once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that
influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Walking around a museum
often jolts me into poetry. Mycocosmic came largely from scientific
reading about mycelium and biochemical transformations. The
State She’s In draws
at least as much from history and politics. Poetry’s
Possible Worlds
was inspired by narrative theory and cognitive science almost as much as
twenty-first-century poetry. Sources are always myriad—the whole world can
excite the writing impulse, if you’re paying attention—but some projects lean
on one discipline more than another.
15 - What other writers
or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your
work?
Emily Dickinson, H.D.,
Gwendolyn Brooks, and Langston Hughes are poets I steer through the world by. I
read fiction daily, and when the news is this terrible, I lean toward mysteries
and fantasy. This year there’s been a lot of Martha Wells, T. Kingfisher, and
John Dickson Carr.
16 - What would you like
to do that you haven't yet done?
I aspire to write a
book-length poem, but everything keeps splintering on me. I came closest in a
terza rima novella called “The Receptionist” in The
Receptionist and Other Tales. That was crazy fun to write, but could I sustain
the energy in a less narrative mode? We shall see!
17 - If you could pick
any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you
think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Making some kind of art
would always have been an avocation. Teaching undergraduates is a good fit for
me as a day job, to the point that I wonder if any other paying employment
could have satisfied me as much. Honestly, I have no idea.
18 - What made you
write, as opposed to doing something else?
I loved painting and
drawing when I was young, but AP Physics clashed with Art in my high school
schedule and my father insisted on the former. I envy singers, but I can’t
carry a tune.
19 - What was the last
great book you read? What was the last great film?
I have trouble with the
word “great.” It’s not that I don’t make judgments constantly, I’m very
opinionated, but it suggests stable hierarchies of value I don’t believe in.
Context matters so much: great for what, for whom, where, when? I still feel
awe when I reread “The Book of Ephraim,” Life on Mars, Montage of a Dream Deferred, or just about anything by Ursula K. Le Guin, but last year I
reread Anne Carson’s Autobiography of
Red, which has always inspired the
same feeling, and it wobbled for reasons I can’t articulate yet. Was I just in
a bad space that week? I don’t think A Complete Unknown was a perfect
movie by a long shot, but it was utterly absorbing and great to talk about
later.
20 - What are you
currently working on?
I’ve
been writing poems that in various ways invoke the spiral as subject matter or
formal principle. I also have a novel ms, Grievous,
under consideration, and I’m
drafting a nonfiction collection with the working title Community with the Dead: Reading Modernism
Strangely.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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