The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt.4: Lesley Wheeler

 

 

Pleasures of 2024

by Lesley Wheeler

 

 

During the summer, I spent two weeks in Scotland. I read many memorable books to set the mood. Some were new, some old, but all have some weird or magical elements. What stayed with me most powerfully were George Mackay Brown’s An Orkney Tapestry; Robin Robertson’s Grimoire; Margot Livesey’s The Road to Belhaven; James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mac; and Emma Seckel’s The Wild Hunt. After years of procrastination—despite my academic specialty in modernism—I finally faced up to Hugh MacDiarmid’s long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. It has a well-earned reputation for difficulty, but I was surprised to find that it’s also very funny.

 

I tend to oscillate between reading for immersive pleasure and reading by assignment. Some of the homework is work-driven—for my classes, tenure reviews I’m asked to undertake, and more—but the rest I assign to myself, as in my unofficial Scottish authors syllabus. I was commissioned to write a short scholarly piece about a Bob Dylan song this summer and wow, there’s a lot of Dylanology out there, so that assignment was bigger than I expected. I absorbed as much as I could, but Suze Rotolo’s memoir A Freewheelin’ Time was a favorite. I also tried to keep up, not entirely successfully, with the publications of my prolific spouse, Chris Gavaler.  His 2023 co-authored book (with Nat Goldberg) happened to be politically on point: Revising Reality: How Sequels, Remakes, Retcons, and Rejects Explain the World asks, for example, “When overturning Roe v. Wade, did the Supreme Court end the right to abortion, or did the Court claim that the right of the previous half century never existed?” Research-wise I’m on a fungal kick with a mycelium-themed poetry collection, Mycocosmic, due in March 2025, and was fascinated by Chesak’s thoroughly researched The Psilocybin Handbook for Women.

 

Evenings are immersive-novel-time. It was a revelation to reread all of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea books, each more powerful than the last. I was riveted by Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. I’m currently rereading Agatha Christie and while I can’t seem to stop, her early books especially are so spiked with racism and misogyny that they’re not exactly consoling. I felt ambivalent about most of the so-called literary fiction I read, but the long novel Trust by Hernan Diaz is wholly worth anyone’s investment, ahem. I caught some mixed reviews of Kelly Link’s first novel, The Book of Love, but it delighted me.

 

On the poetry side, I expected to love Diane Seuss’s new collection Modern Poetry—and did. I learned so much from Robert Dale Parker’s Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, an anthology that’s also a superb work of scholarship. I discovered many poetic engagements with fantasy and science even when I wasn’t looking for them: an eerie split self in Sarah Kain Gutowski’s The Familiar; critique of supernatural rhetoric around Blackness in Gregory Pardlo’s Spectral Evidence; and the science of climate change permeating Claire Wahnaholm’s Meltwater and Jen Karetnik’s Inheritance with a High Error Rate. Finally, I have to call out a fun chapbook-length anthology of short pieces about cryptids, Mothman Was Here, edited by Will Woolfitt. Being asked to contribute a poem sent me down many Reddit rabbit holes about a local cryptid, Not Deer, a creature I hope not to meet in the dark forests of 2025.  

 

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 two Aqueduct titles, the novel Unbecoming and novel-in-verse The Receptionist and Other Tales, as well as the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds. 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, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Ecotone, and elsewhere.

 

 

 

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 11: Lesley Wheeler

 

Pleasures 2022

by Lesley Wheeler

 

I’m drafting these paragraphs during a December evening in Virginia as rain pounds the tin roof, but the book I’m turning over in my mind is Leslie Marmon Silko’s diaristic memoir of hot, dry Arizona, The Turquoise Ledge. I can’t quite get over the strangeness of the reading experience. The book’s energy isn’t suspenseful; the future doesn’t interest Silko nearly as much as the present and past (except for her cheerful anticipation of cosmic retribution to a neighbor who bulldozes the arroyo). Instead, The Turquoise Ledge is a recursive book about walking, cloud formations, geology, painting, and coexistence with many creatures. Sometimes I thought I could not handle another chapter about rattlesnakes. But the book’s power manifests in sneaky ways, like the pieces of chrysocolla that crop up on Silko’s hikes.

 

Like Silko’s long walks, my 2022 reading was nonlinear and full of random surprises. I certainly don’t feel able to present an overview of the year’s most stellar achievements. But one good reason for recommending a book is that something about it penetrates your distraction. Here are a few books besides Silko’s that stay with me.

 

On the fiction side, I can’t stop thinking about Carolyn Ives Gilman’s highly original world-building in Dark Orbit. I met Gilman at WorldCon a year ago and we bonded about being Aqueduct authors, but her book sat on my shelf for a while, like a mycelium waiting for the right conditions to fruit. If you missed it when it was published a few years ago, go back! I also loved the entanglement of hauntings in Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence and Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book. The dystopian title novella in Nicole Johnson’s My Monticello shifted how I see a local landscape—it always seems extraordinary to me when a book tilts my perspective.

 

In recent nonfiction, Jan Beatty’s American Bastard speaks powerfully about adoption and identity. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World intensified my curiosity about underground mysteries. That’s another momentous thing a book can do: teach you things you didn’t know you needed to know.

 

I read a lot of poetry but distraction isn’t good soil for it; I think some of this year’s good books just didn’t hit me at the right moment to sink their claws into my imagination. But a few strong ones that may be of special interest to Aqueduct fans are Jessica Cuello’s Liar, Jennifer Givhan’s Belly to the Brutal, and the bilingual book Búfalo en seis direcciones by Janet McAdams. All explore gendered trauma, and all are charged by a sense of the sacred. So is Trickster Academy by Jenny L. Davis, but in a twisty way, as the title implies, riffing on academic pieties while exposing the damages universities do. Finally, Cindy Veach’s Her Kind is memorably witchy.

 

Finally, this year I dug around for, read, reread, and taught two new books of Black British poetry: Warsan Shire’s Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head and Kayo Chingonyi’s More Fiya. I love them both, but the latter may be field-changing—it gave me a reading list that will keep me going for a long while.

 

Lesley Wheeler’s debut novel is Unbecoming, called “an excellent feminist fantasy” in a starred review from Publishers Weekly. She is also the author of five poetry collections, most recently The State She’s In; The Receptionist and Other Tales was a finalist for what was then the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Her most recent book is a hybrid memoir about reading poetry during a time of crisis, Poetry’s Possible Worlds. Her poems and essays appear in Speculative Nonfiction, Poets & Writers, Strange Horizons, Poetry, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Kenyon Review, and other magazines. Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, Wheeler lives in Virginia and can be found at @LesleyMWheeler and @LesleyMWheeler@zirk.us.

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2021, pt. 12: Lesley Wheeler

 

2021 Reading Pleasures
by Lesley Wheeler

 

 

 

2021 has NOT met my hopes in most ways, but the books continue to be great. I had the pleasure of meeting author Elizabeth Knox years ago in Aotearoa New Zealand and have been a stalwart fan ever since, so I was thrilled early this year to get my hands on The Absolute Book. I’ve read reviews that faulted it on pacing and sure, such capacious books often get the a threads a little tangled, but it’s nevertheless a brilliantly original reimagining of power relationships among worlds, including Fairyland. The Absolute Book is crime fiction as well as fantasy, and that was my other reading kick during the first half of 2021: I devoured all of Tana French’s mysteries, in love with their language, complicated characters, and powerful charge of the Weird. When I ran out, I mourned.

I’m a fan of books about schools of magic, and Naomi Novik’s recent take on that mode is unputdownable and funny. I was a notch less enthralled by the second book in the series, The Last Graduate, than Deadly Education, but they’re both terrific. I just caught up with Emily Tesh’s Greenhallow duology—great storytelling that also reads the Green Man legend as queer. And you shouldn’t miss the feminist sword and sorcery of Nancy Jane Moore’s For the Good of the Realm. For short stories, I recommend Anjali Sachdeva’s All the Names They Used for God, and for a wonderfully strange intergenre creation, Brittany Hailer’s speculative memoir The Animals We’ll Surely Become. 

 

Some wonderful poetry books I encountered this year are Eric Tran’s The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer; Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets; Monica Youn’s Blackacre; Sally Rosen Kindred’s Where the Wolf; Julie Marie Wade’s Skirted; Paula Meehan’s Geomantic; Bill Manhire’s Wow; Ashley M. Jones’s Reparations Now!; and Dana Levin’s Banana Palace. The volumes by Kindred, Meehan, and Levin are speculative as well as beautiful. 

In any year, my reading includes undergraduate writing for my day job; journalism as a citizen; too much social media; and thousands of poems submitted to Shenandoah, of which I am poetry editor. The new issue contains verses I’d call spells or prayers, but there’s an even denser concentration of weirdness in Spring 2021. It contains a themed portfolio plus a short essay by me about how poetry can constitute “uncanny activism.” 

 

Unbecoming, which Aqueduct published in 2020, is Lesley Wheeler’s debut novel. Her novella in verse, in the 2012 collection The Receptionist and Other Tales, was short-listed for the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Wheeler is also the author of four other poetry books, most recently The State She’s In from Tinderbox Editions. Her poems, essays, and reviews appear in Poetry, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, Ecotone, Cascadia Subduction Zone, and elsewhere. Winner of grants from Fulbright and The National Endowment for the Humanities, Wheeler is Poetry Editor of Shenandoah. She teaches poetry, sf, and creative writing at a liberal arts college in Virginia.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2020, pt. 1: Lesley Wheeler

 

The Best Thing About 2020

by Lesley Wheeler

There were stretches, this year, when I could barely read through the haze of worry and outrage. Many amazing books reached me anyway. I spend most of this column on recent publications in sympathy for authors trying to get the word out right now but also because my 2020 reading tilted toward the contemporary. 

 

When I’m low, I look for page-turners: novels high in suspense and full of characters whose fates I care about. Little else can clear the mental static. The experience of reading The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones was perfect. At a virtual convention this fall, he described the story as a slasher—not my genre, usually. Yet even as Jones delivers on the slasher’s propulsive energy, he dissects its pleasures. I’m still in awe of his more-than-human monster (a mother animal) and his intensely moving riff on the “final girl” trope. From an utterly different world, Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House also depends on formula while uncovering a genre’s disturbing understory. This school-of-magic tale is set at Yale, where secret societies manage terrible powers whose costs are paid by scholarship students, especially by vulnerable women. Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild offers a riveting Métis rougarou visitation, and Nova Ren Suma’s The Walls Around Us is a brilliant ghost story.

As I reflect on the novels that affected me most this year, I realize they’re not only page-turners but investigations of race, class, gender, and social power generally, both well-told and urgent. I needed them and learned from them. For the same reasons, I’ve been working my way through Victor LaValle’s wonderful backlist. I downloaded the audiobook of Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders—about literacy, social mobility, and the bubonic plague—before the contemporary plague was on my radar but found its account of seventeenth-century quarantine close-to-home. 

I also loved newer historical fictions penetrated by tendrils of the Weird, especially Afia Atakora’s Conjure Women and Sarah Tolmie’s The Little Animals. The latter is more than a year old now, but I’m nowhere near caught up with 2019, much less 2020. Among recent works I’m excited to crack is Master of Poisons by Andrea Hairston. I did read an advance copy of a late December release by Edward Austin Hall, Dread Isle, and it’s a terrific gender-bending, twisty novel with lots of Jules Verne in its DNA.

 

Poetry also kept me afloat this year, especially when I couldn’t sustain multi-hour literary voyages. Some favorite recent collections are Little Big Bully by Heid E. Erdrich, a manual for how to survive violence through a love of people and land; Leila Chatti’s Deluge, a first book about faith and the course of a bleeding disorder; and Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood, which brims with Virginia history and sharp meditations on mixed-race identity. 

 

  I reviewed Anna Maria Hong’s fabulous Fablesque here, and my review of Destiny O. Birdsong’s Negotiations will appear soon in Harvard Review, but in short, it’s a knockout. For charm-like poems intensified by letterpress printing beauty, see Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s Smaller Songs. Although I have a tiny entry in each and it might seem self-serving, I strongly recommend Annie Finch’s stunning Choice Words: Writers On Abortion; Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, coedited by Margaret Hasse and Athena Kildegaard; and Deep Beauty, coedited by Catherin Lee and Rosemary Winslow. They are wisely orchestrated anthologies, at moments breathtaking. I felt so grateful to receive my copies and to all the other editors and authors who made a tough year better.  

 

 

Lesley Wheeler’s debut novel is Unbecoming. She is also the author of five poetry collections, most recently The State She’s In, from Tinderbox Editions; The Receptionist and Other Tales was a finalist for what was then the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Poetry’s Possible Worlds, Wheeler’s essay collection about twenty-first-century poetry, is forthcoming in 2021. Her poems and essays appear in Massachusetts Review, Strange Horizons, Poetry, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Kenyon Review, and other magazines. Wheeler is Poetry Editor of Shenandoah and lives in Virginia.