Interview by Sally Huggins Toner
Hello, this is Sally Toner from Tupelo Press, and I’m here this afternoon with Leslie Wheeler, the author of our Dorset Prize-winning collection, Mycocosmic. How are you?
I’m doing well! I’m so glad to be here with you.
So happy to have you. So, because this collection does deal so distinctly with the natural world, and has these elements of science, what do you see as your relationship, or the poet’s relationship, with the natural world? And who are some of your biggest influences, as a poet?
I would say that what I want as a reader of poetry, for sure, is a wide range of relations to the natural world. There are going to be people who take walks in the woods, and I’m one of those. It can be somebody who gardens or farms. Iit can be somebody who, because of a disability or some social reason, doesn’t feel safe out in the world. There are so many different ways to have a relationship with the other-than-human world, but I think respect and curiosity should be through lines I want to see. The stuff of poetry is very close attention, whether you’re attending to how a tree grows, or how a family works, or some event in history, or any one of a million subjects. You want to be paying that very close level of attention and bringing all your senses to bear, delivering what you love as vividly as you can to a reader.
As far as people I read at formative moments, I think of two groups: when I was an undergraduate, the modernist poets. Yates and Elliot were two poets, in my modernism classes, whom I found myself thinking a lot about, but I also thought a lot about how the poets on the syllabi that I was receiving; there was just no diversity. There weren’t even white women on the syllabi, and one of the modernist writers I ended up discovering as an undergraduate, and reading to fill in the gaps, was the poet H.D. She used her initials versus her given name, Hilda Doolittle, so she was very important to me. Also, the middle generation of 20th-century American poets, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Audrene Rich, and Gwendolyn Brooks would probably be the quartet I read the most.
As far as how they influence my work, they certainly influenced my thinking about what poetry can and should be. They all exhibit that really close, charged attention to the world that I hope I do, too, and I can see little things. Like with Gwendolyn Brooks, I became really fascinated by how she uses enjambment, that spilling over from a sentence, from one line to the next, and how she uses slant rhyme. Those were tools she gave me. But as far as whether my work is like the work of any of these poets, I don’t know. I think that’s better for somebody else to say.
Yeah, there’s always a danger in comparing.
Yeah, and I don’t know what I sound like in a fundamental way. I don’t have objectivity. It’s easy for me to describe what somebody else’s work is like. I do that as a teacher and a writer all the time. But, my own? I don’t know.
It’s interesting you mentioned a lack of diversity, and the poet in the natural world, and I didn’t hear Dickinson in that.
Yeah, yeah.
Especially when you’re talking about slant…
And I can tell you that I remember my first encounter with a Dickinson poem. It was in a high school English textbook. I’m forgetting the first line of the poem, but it’s about frost coming and beheading flowers. And I thought it was really sentimental. I thought, “Well, this is the first poem I encounter by a woman poet in my English textbook, and it’s embarrassing!” I was embarrassed by the poem, and now I think that’s funny, because I think she’s maybe one of the most brilliant writers in the English language, and I adore her. But she wasn’t a poet I came back around to until I took a graduate class on Whitman and Dickinson, and it blew my mind. Like, “Oh, this is everything that I was missing!” I do think that’s something to tell any reader at any age. Sometimes, a writer who doesn’t mean much to you at one age, you go back to them five years later, and it’s a totally different experience.
I think that’s an excellent point because, as a teacher and then as a reader, Dickinson is HARD.
She is! Just following the grammar from line to line is hard.
And so brilliant, and that’s something that I don’t think many high schoolers might be ready for.
Right, right.
But that’s what’s so cool. Each time you read her, you get something.
That’s right.
That’s the beauty of that kind of brilliance. So, tell me about your personal relationship with science. I was interested in this. Do you have specific professional experience?
No, no, it’s, it’s an entirely amateur connection I feel I have to the sciences. And I say amateur, knowing that the root of that word is love. I love reading science that’s written for popular audiences. I keep up with archaeological or biological discoveries by reading the news, and I’ll often dip into books. There’s one that influenced me early on in the writing of this book called Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, and it has a ton of enthusiasm for the world of fungi. That was one of those deep-dive books for me. But it’s also one of the ways that I look for inspiration when I’m stuck, or I have a draft and think, for example, “This poem has a mushroom in it, but the rest of the language in the poem is kind of flat. What can I learn about the shape or the history or the biology of this particular kind of mushroom that might enrich how I’m using the metaphor?” So I do a ton of research as I write, to the point where not having the internet by my side would make it very difficult for me to write at all.
I think that’s the case with a lot of us. It’s like a rabbit hole that you go down.
Right. I’m a big follower of rabbit holes–everything from Wikipedia to scientific articles to Reddit threads.
It also gives you those fresh metaphors, too.
It does, it does, and I love scientific vocabulary. I love how weird and clunky it is. In general, I love how, the more you get to know about the fine workings of the world, the weirder it gets. Like the fact that most of the DNA in my body is not human; it’s mostly fungal and bacterial. How strange is that? It disorients my sense of self in a way that I find really useful.
I’ve always thought that was so fun. I do have scientists that I’m very close to.
Yes, me too!
And I had these discussions with them where sometimes, they’re intractable–everything is by the scientific method–and I say, “Wait a minute! The more I learn in science, the more I see wonder.”
Right? And there’s been some research in recent years about how healthy it is for us to experience awe. That, that feeling of awe… I mean, certainly you can feel it while reading a poem, but you can also feel it by looking at a gorgeous landscape, or listening to a bird song, or reading about some crazy new science discovery. Awe makes us feel more grounded and happy. It’s something to search for.
Absolutely! So this collection, what I thought was so cool is that it is deeply personal and also global, addressing what’s going on in the world, also with some very specific discussion of relationships, grief. Where did you come up with the mycocosmic concept? I always wonder because when I write, a lot of my work doesn’t always play well together. Someone put it that way recently, and I was, “Oh, yeah, same!” So that makes it difficult sometimes to make a collection, but we might see a couple pieces that come together and build off of that. Or did you have the concept first?
Oh, I was writing a whole mess of poems and did not know how they connected. So I was writing a bunch of poems about grief. My mother died, and the processing of the experiences of being with her as she died, but then also the grief afterwards was huge. I found myself writing a lot of poems about family secrets, things that I had never written about before. My mother’s formal education ended at age 16, but she always read my books, and I think I was steering away from material that would have upset her. Violence in my family, for example, or subjects of sexuality and mental health, and things that she had a very hard time talking about. So I had all these poems about grief, all these poems that were kind of rediscovering myself, and bringing buried material to light at the same time.
The rabbit hole I’ve been going down most often had to do with fungal life, and particularly not the mushroom as much as mycelium, which is that organism, the main part of the organism of the fungus that’s underground. It’s masses of threads, and when you hear people talk about the Wood Wide Web, what they’re talking about are the ways mycelium facilitates connections among tree roots. The roots of something like 80 or 90% of plant life on Earth are dependent on those connections that trees and other plants use to send messages, and also sometimes to send nutrients. Say, one tree is being attacked by a beetle. A more successful tree might feed those nutrients to another. I found that endlessly fascinating. So, I had the grief poems, the secret poems, and the poems about fungi. And I was thinking, “How am I possibly going to make a book out of all these disparate materials? Then I had an epiphany, a sudden realization that fungus metabolizes death. Without the action of fungi and bacteria, death would overwhelm the world. It became a kind of muse for me, an example of how you can take terrible materials and transform them into nourishment.
And of course, secrets and underground life, that metaphor was kind of already a little bit there, so that was when I finally saw the through line; that was when I wrote the underpoem–a long verse essay that runs throughout on the bottom of each page. That was a way for me to bring together all of the things that I was thinking about and show how those ideas connected the bits and pieces of the book to each other. It was also a way to honor some of the research I’d done because that was a form. You don’t want to put footnotes on a poem. But to put footnotes on the underpoem, which has that more essay-like sound, made a lot of sense.
Oh, yeah! I did not include that in my questions, but I love that… that technique. Like you said, it was a way to do that. Also, a way to give a nod to the scientific form.
Yes, right! I’m a scholar as well as a poet, so even though I’m not a scientist, I believe in acknowledging that everything you think and do when you’re doing research is in conversation with somebody who’s done the work before you. I think it’s important to honor our debts to others that way, and to bring them explicitly into the conversation.
Absolutely. And none of it’s linear, which is the other thing, when you’re talking about our relationships, the World Wide Web, The Wood Wide Web, the effect of one thing upon another in our society…Just brilliantly done.
I know this might cross paths with question one, but who are your favorite poets to teach? Are they the same as your favorites to read? And what is your biggest wish for the students, for your poetry students?
I certainly love to teach all the poets I mentioned before, but there were some poets that I didn’t discover until I was in my 20s and 30s, doing my graduate program, and then starting as a teacher. Langston Hughes and Edna St. Vincent Millay would be two of them. And partly that came with beginning to teach and realizing how much my students loved both performance poetry, but also just hearing old recordings of poets reading their work. It’s a way to connect with somebody in the rhythms of their voice, even when they’re dead and gone, or at least really geographically distant. I would say that I love teaching those poets, and I like teaching any kind of performance poetry.
Frank O’Hara comes to mind, because I teach a class on mid-20th century American poetry, and…Lord, my students love Frank O’Hara! And he’s got… it was not a voice I had encountered when I was younger, but he’s got this sort of witty New York bantering voice that’s really fun.
I would also say that I love teaching anything I haven’t taught before. That I make a point of teaching contemporary writers with whom I’m not entirely familiar, so I’m giving a hard assignment to myself sometimes. You can’t do it for every unit on the syllabus. It would be too overwhelming, but it’s great to be in that state of discovery, similar to my students. I feel like the classes have a great energy when we’re all forming opinions about the work together. So I love that.
As far as my wish for my students…I teach literature and creative writing, which are separate courses at the college level, and I am always hoping that everybody will find some poems they want to return to. There’s no way you’re going to like everybody I assigned to you, but if there are two or three, and you’re like, “Yeah, I’m not going to sell those books back to the bookstore, I want to keep reading that person,” that makes me very happy.
For the creative writers specifically, what I wish for them is courage. What I’m always trying to do is think about what I’m afraid to write. The sort of mess I’m afraid to poke because my feelings about it are strong, and they’re not clear. And I think, if you write toward what you’re afraid of writing, you may not get a good poem. You don’t always. But you will at least learn some things about yourself and how you’re thinking about a complicated issue. I do think, when it works, one of the things that readers most appreciate about poets is when they’re vulnerable, when they put something out there that’s hard to say, maybe a little embarrassing or frightening, or just really nuanced and complicated and hard to articulate. I think readers love that. It makes a poem really mean something to a reader–that the poet was willing to share this with me.
So I think going for that material that scares you and maybe in a poem that you wouldn’t share with anybody for years…still, it’s a really good thing to do. It’s hard, too.
It definitely is. And it’s funny, you know, you say courage, and I think the best thing a teacher can do is make themselves vulnerable, in an appropriate way, saying, “Hey, it’s alright for you to do this. This is a safe space.”
Right, right.
And then, in school, it’s amazing what they’ll give you. That whole constructivist idea of, we are learning together…
Yes. A learning team.
I know they’re separate courses, but do you have your literature students write poetry?
Yes. I tend to frame it as an option in a literature class because
I teach at Washington and Lee, where the students are always in the top 10% of their high school class; they’re high performers, and they care about their grades a lot. And some students are just really afraid of having to turn something in for a grade if they don’t know for sure they’re going to be good at it. Whereas, they’re old pros at writing a certain kind of essay. So, if you frame it as an option, and if you do it in sort of low-stakes assignments, like where students might, on a discussion board, have to post something about the reading before they come to class… I’ll make it due an hour or two before class so I can read them over before I come in and kind of see everybody’s attitude towards the material. If you do that and say, “Well, you can respond by imitating this poet, as well as responding by saying something sort of analytical about the poet,” you’ll get a lot of experiments there. Sometimes it really catches fire for people. At any rate, it’s a different way of paying attention to what’s happening in the work, and I think that’s really valuable, no matter what you’re coming to literature for.
Absolutely! I always tell my students, “If you can do it, then you can understand it. If you can actually try to do it, then it does make a little more sense.”
That’s right, that’s right!
Would you mind reading something from your collection?
Happy to! Is there anything particular that you’d like to hear?
I would like you to choose.
Okay, okay. Shall I do one of the poems [in the Tupelo Press lesson plan], though?
Fabulous! Yes.
I’m correct that “We Could Be” was one of those poems, right? It is the first poem in the book. So this is one of those poems in which the title slides into the first line. That’s a trick I learned. I think the first poem put in English to do that was Marianne Moore, about 100 years ago. There’s a way that gives a poem a kind of energy when you can’t pause at the end of the title. And the title isn’t summarizing the poem for you, it’s just kind of launching you fast. So I think if you’re a beginning poet, that’s a good thing to try, like, how could that work?
I will say, too, that I was a big David Bowie fan as a teenager, and if it causes an echo in anyone’s head to the song “We Could Be Heroes”, you’re not wrong.
I’ve explained what mycelial is. I don’t think I have to explain the other things. The other things, like flagellate–they’re the kinds of shapes of mushrooms.
Lesley Wheeler (Reading aloud):
We Could Be
mycelial, eating toxins together,
decomposing what’s still indigestible
about this place. The singed taste.
Could spread our soiled hands wide,
vegetate, infiltrate, collaborate.
Below ground, we could grow
fat on loss, bust out in the wildest
shapes. Puffball. Flagellate.
Our mistakes gorgeous in dispersal
across polluted skies. Help me try.
So I put that poem first as a kind of invitation to the reader, but I’ll also say that one of the things I love about mycologists, people who study mushrooms, is they’re more hopeful about the world than a lot of other scientists I’ve talked to. Their fungus can even restore landscapes after things like wildfires. Turning all that death into nourishment. It can also restore our landscapes after pollution. It can filter out heavy metals. People are finding, in mycelium, new building materials and new materials for making clothing, leather. The idea that there’s this whole world of possible new materials and processes to explore that could help fix some of the mess of the planet, the mess we humans have made of the planet–I love that. I wanted to get a little bit of that hopefulness in the beginning of the book.
I saw that all the way through the collection. Obviously there’s a lot of grief.
That’s right.
And I was aware of your mother, and again, I’m so sorry.
Oh, thank you.
The grief, it doesn’t go away.
No, it doesn’t. It’s a really hard loss.
I think what is also illustrated in your poems, like you said, is what happens after.
Right.
There’s that, but there’s also… grief over the state of the world, but there’s also this possibility of wonder, of fungi, of nature, of the planet, and it’s… we’re still here.
Whatever gives us hope, I’m there for it.
Exactly. Thank you so much.
Oh, this was such a pleasure.
Really, really appreciate it. Again, Leslie Wheeler, Mycocosmic. Available from Tupelo Press.
About the interviewer: Sally Huggins Toner, a Pushcart-nominated writer, is the author of Anansi and Friends, a hybrid collection of poetry and essays centered around her experience with triple-negative breast cancer. Her work has appeared in Northern Virginia Magazine, JMWW, Gargoyle Magazine, The Delmarva Review, Watershed Review, Fractured Lit, and other publications. Her fiction is also included in two anthologies of the Grace and Gravity series—collections of work from Washington, D.C., area women writers edited by Richard Peabody and Melissa Scholes Young. Her fiction is also included in And if that Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative published by Alternating Current Press. Her nonfiction also appears in America’s Future–an anthology published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House in 2025. You can find her on Facebook as Sally Huggins Toner, @salliemander.bsky.social on Bluesky, https://www.linkedin.com/in/sally-toner-65290346/ on LinkedIn, salliemander70 on Instagram, and on X at @SallyToner