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.
