Lesley Wheeler and Edward Hall

[00:07] ED AUSTIN HALL: My name is Ed Austin hall. My age is 59. Today's date is April 22, 2021. And my partner today is Leslie Wheeler, my friend, fellow poet, and colleague in the world of weird fiction.

[00:28] LESLIE WHEELER: My name is Leslie Wheeler. My age is 53. Today's date is April 22, 2021. My partner today is Ed Austin hall. And Ed is my friend and a writer of weird fiction and poetry whose work I admire tremendously.

[00:48] SPEAKER C: I'm sorry, Leslie, I am getting some feedback. Could you turn down your volume a little bit? That just started. Okay, let's go through.

[00:59] ED AUSTIN HALL: You want to do that again?

[01:05] LESLIE WHEELER: Help me.

[01:06] SPEAKER C: Yeah, go ahead with your conversation. I'll keep an eye out.

[01:09] ED AUSTIN HALL: Okay. So, Leslie, the damnedest thing happened while I was reading Unbecoming. And you can. I'll let you provide your own description, but my shorthand of it is, this is about a woman who is entering menopause or perimenopause and begins to suspect that she has magical powers. And so, of course, there's a lot of blood involved. And before this thing that happened, happened, I was making some pasta dish and skinned one of these knuckles. And so I'm reading your book, and I'm on page 38, and I realized that this little divot where there's no skin on my finger is fused to the page of your book. And I literally kind of pull it away. It's like your. Your book is a leech. Right?

[02:19] LESLIE WHEELER: It's a vampire book. That's great art book.

[02:21] ED AUSTIN HALL: And. Okay, so. Okay, that would be disturbing enough. However, it. The word. Literally, the word I've noticed I was reading when I noticed that I was fused to your book was. Let me make sure I made a note here. Rusty collar. I'm reading the word rusty collar when I realized. So I put my finger away. This is right at the bottom of page 38, which ends a closed quote, which ends with a period. And I left a tiny little mark right under the period. So I literally made. I contributed period blood to your novel.

[03:06] LESLIE WHEELER: That is a wonderful line.

[03:07] ED AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, I were just imagining things. And this happens a lot in your book. I should point out the very next thing at the top of page 39, at the end of the period, and the first words on page 39. Okay, Leslie, is there something I need to know?

[03:25] LESLIE WHEELER: I think that uncanny things happen all the time, and you know that, too. So, yeah, yeah, the book was responding. Responding to you.

[03:38] ED AUSTIN HALL: That sounds like the glibest, slipperiest rejoinder from an enchantress I've ever heard. But okay, I'm gonna. I'm not gonna press you on it. We can. We can move on. But I expect me to circle back to this because I.

[03:57] LESLIE WHEELER: All right.

[03:59] ED AUSTIN HALL: Really? Seriously. So I'm going to give you the opportunity to summarize your novel as you see fit, since I kind of jumped in and did that from my perspective. But please tell us about Unbecoming and a little bit about how you came to write it and how long it took, that kind of thing, please.

[04:18] LESLIE WHEELER: Right, right. So I started writing this book in 2015. I was at the time, 47 and approaching menopause. My children were leaving for college. I was feeling that this was not a good phase of life to be entering, that I was basically on the verge of death, which is ridiculous. But what I needed to do was find a way to understand the transition as to reframe it as a power empowering transition. And I looked into myth, I thought about stories. There's actually, until very recently, there's been very little to read about menopause. So I didn't find enough out there. So I decided to try to write the book I needed to read. And I wasn't at all sure I could do it. I'm a poet and I've written several books of poetry, but I wasn't sure I had the stamina for a novel. I wrote the first draft in seven weeks. I just sat down and I went into a kind of dream or fugue and just wrote almost around the clock. And then, of course, I spent years revising it because I did not know what I was doing. But the first experience of writing it was really kind of magical. And even though I did not myself gain uncanny powers with menopause, I did gain the power to write a novel, which seems kind of strange and unlikely to me.

[05:58] SPEAKER C: I'm sorry, I need to jump in. There is some feedback on your line, Leslie, that seems to be echoing. Maybe we can go back to the headset and just see how that is.

[06:07] LESLIE WHEELER: Okay.

[06:07] SPEAKER C: I am sorry.

[06:09] LESLIE WHEELER: No, that's all right.

[06:14] SPEAKER C: Great. Would you just count backwards from 10.

[06:18] LESLIE WHEELER: Once you're all set? 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

[06:28] SPEAKER C: Okay, I think that's better. I'll keep monitoring.

[06:31] ED AUSTIN HALL: I'm sorry, I think I was hearing that noise too. Okay. A little bit of reverb, sort of. So thank you, Daniel.

[06:42] LESLIE WHEELER: Do we need to repeat that Q and A?

[06:44] SPEAKER C: No.

[06:46] ED AUSTIN HALL: So. And thank you, Leslie. That's. That's. It's good. Don't feel slippery to me. I. So it just. There. There are times in your book, where it feels as if your book is not just recounting the story you described, but it's also the characters. At one point your protagonist says, what kind of story am I in? And that's. She teaches English. Have I got that right?

[07:24] LESLIE WHEELER: Yes, she does. She's an English.

[07:26] ED AUSTIN HALL: She also teaches English. And so that's not an unusual comment for an English teacher to make about her own life. But coming in your novel, it feels. It has a different feel to me. Right. I feel like you're. There were times I felt like I could see you literally casting spells on the page.

[07:52] LESLIE WHEELER: Well, I really appreciate that. And as I said, writing the novel had a spell like quality to me. But I also think, you know, that's one of the reasons I'm attracted to weird fiction or fantasy fiction is because I don't know what the boundaries of reality are. They have been. I've perceived them as slippery my whole life and life as a profoundly strange, weird thing that is full of uncanny powers and forces that I don't always understand. And certainly writing partakes of that. But. But yeah, I certainly think that somebody who reads and writes literature is aware too, of how one source of literature's power is that sense of strange connection that you feel when you read, as if you're eavesdropping on somebody else's thoughts and that this person made out of words suddenly comes to life for you. And it was interesting to experience that. Much more as a writer than I had previously is that sense of the characters all taking on lives of their own. And I would be in the shower and they would say things in my mind and I'd get out and I knew what the next thing, next paragraph was. It just wasn't something that I felt totally in charge of.

[09:23] SPEAKER C: Ed, could you turn down your volume and if you have it, also kind of stick in a headset? I'm still getting a little bit of feedback. I'm worried it's coming in on your line.

[09:32] ED AUSTIN HALL: Me?

[09:32] SPEAKER C: Yes, yes. If you.

[09:34] ED AUSTIN HALL: I have no headset.

[09:34] SPEAKER C: Can you.

[09:35] ED AUSTIN HALL: Just. Can't help you there, but I can lower the volume.

[09:38] SPEAKER C: Yeah, please.

[09:39] ED AUSTIN HALL: On.

[09:41] SPEAKER C: Just on your computer.

[09:42] ED AUSTIN HALL: Yeah. How. How's that sound now? How now?

[09:57] SPEAKER C: Just keep trying.

[09:59] ED AUSTIN HALL: Okay, so characters talking to you in the shower that, That I. I'm not unfamiliar with, with that phenomenon, although mine came in a rather different context. I'll. Another time I'll tell you that story. It's. It's not. So. It's not a cheery story, but that happened with my first novel. But, yeah, it was genuinely scary. So let me pivot here and ask, how many languages do you speak or read? Or are you versed in? And have you ever lived abroad, Leslie?

[10:46] LESLIE WHEELER: I studied abroad in England when I was an undergraduate, and I had a Fulbright to New Zealand in 2011. Those were the only times that I've lived out of the country for an extended period. I studied French and Latin in school. I went back to France for a vacation a few years ago and discovered almost none of it is left. I can point to a croissant and ask for one, but that's about it.

[11:17] ED AUSTIN HALL: So I bring this up because early in the book, the figure of Hanako, yes. Manifests the toilet. The toilet stall ghost of Japanese. I gather, modern Japanese folklore.

[11:36] LESLIE WHEELER: Yes. That's my sense, too.

[11:38] ED AUSTIN HALL: Toilet stalls not being particularly ancient. And the reason that I ask about this is. There's something. Let me look it up, because again, Back to page 39. So Hanako is invoked hanako san. And then in the very next paragraph, I remembered I should check on feet. I needed to thank her for the flowers. Do you know the roots of the name hanako?

[12:08] LESLIE WHEELER: No.

[12:09] ED AUSTIN HALL: Hana actually means flower in Japanese. It's like the only Japanese word that I know off the top of my head because I was creating a Japanese character years ago and I thought about naming the character Hana. That character remains unnamed to this day, but H A N A is flower in Japanese.

[12:28] LESLIE WHEELER: So you're finding more uncanny coincidences in the book, things I didn't know this is talking about.

[12:37] ED AUSTIN HALL: So, similarly, do you know Royal Tyler's book of folklore, Japanese tales?

[12:43] LESLIE WHEELER: Yes, I have.

[12:44] ED AUSTIN HALL: Okay. Okay. Is that who the character Royal is named for by chance?

[12:48] LESLIE WHEELER: No, I didn't even think of that.

[12:50] ED AUSTIN HALL: I hadn't thought of it either. And then I was like, I have to ask. Oh, wait a minute. I wonder, is she dangerous? Because I thought Leslie wouldn't do that. That's probably just a coincidence, right? I tend to. I tend to give writers crap when they do that, right? Like, just look to the bookshelf and name somebody, notoriously, Larry Niven in the first draft of a novel. He changed it later, but he named the character Octavia Butler. So, yeah, I was like, nah, she wouldn't do that. It's just too easy. So where did you study English?

[13:32] LESLIE WHEELER: I studied. I earned an undergraduate degree at Rutgers and a graduate degree at Princeton.

[13:41] ED AUSTIN HALL: And when did you start writing poetry versus when did you start publishing poetry?

[13:48] LESLIE WHEELER: I started writing poetry, actually, when I was a kid and I went to a Catholic, all girls high school, and I had a very strict English teacher who was a nun, Sister Ignatius, who demanded that I enter a literary prize, a poetry prize for area students. And I won first prize. And I decided, oh, maybe I'm not so bad at this. And then in college, you know, I was at a big state school and poetry classes were smaller than fiction classes. And I loved to be able to participate. And so I sort of. I love sound. I'm a very sound oriented writer. So poetry is very appealing for that reason. But I also think that there were those bits of luck and circumstance that sent me down that path. I was always a really avid fiction reader, too. I was somebody who read all through every spare minute growing up. But poetry kind of became the focus. And partly because of those accidents and partly because of just that love for its qualities, its sound qualities.

[15:01] ED AUSTIN HALL: Do you have a favorite work of fiction by chance?

[15:05] LESLIE WHEELER: Well, off the bat I can't say that I do. But I can say that the book that's probably shaped my imagination most is Jane Eyre. That's a novel. My mother is British, and so she. When I was a child, she just gave me all the novels she read growing up. And so she handed me Jane Eyre when I was 9. And I read it first then when I was the age that Jane Eyre was in that red room scene at the beginning. And I read it very much as a sort of adventure story of the suffering of a young woman who then triumphs and just kept rereading it as I got older and my sense of the stakes and the concerns of the novel kept changing. So I would say that that novel more than anything else has inflected my sense of what a story can do. You mentioned Octavia Butler. I'm a huge fan of hers as well and probably 25 million other fiction writers I could name if I could think of them.

[16:16] ED AUSTIN HALL: So what were your parents names, please? Before I forget?

[16:23] LESLIE WHEELER: Yeah. Patricia and William.

[16:27] ED AUSTIN HALL: What was your mother's maiden name?

[16:29] LESLIE WHEELER: Cain. C A I N Like Cain and Abel. Yep.

[16:34] ED AUSTIN HALL: I was gonna say yes, yes, yes. And who in material that I used to. When I wrote for White Wolf, Kane was the original vampire. Kane sire vampires in White Wolf's world of darkness for their Vampire the Masquerade game. So.

[16:52] LESLIE WHEELER: Right. Right.

[16:53] ED AUSTIN HALL: I guess your book is a vampire after all. Legit. So. And where did you grow up?

[17:04] LESLIE WHEELER: So my mother emigrated to the States in 1962. Met my father on a blind D and they married in 65 and they lived in Long island at the time. So I grew up partly there and partly in New Jersey moved there when I was.

[17:25] ED AUSTIN HALL: 10.

[17:25] LESLIE WHEELER: 9 or 10. Jane Eyre reading age.

[17:30] ED AUSTIN HALL: You have siblings?

[17:32] LESLIE WHEELER: Yes. So I'm the eldest, and I have a sister a few years younger and a brother who's almost 10 years younger than I am.

[17:40] ED AUSTIN HALL: That's my situation.

[17:42] LESLIE WHEELER: Oh, all right. Yeah.

[17:44] ED AUSTIN HALL: Also the caboose. Ten years behind the sibling closest to me and not to the eldest. She's 14 years my senior.

[17:55] LESLIE WHEELER: Wow. Wow.

[17:56] ED AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[17:57] LESLIE WHEELER: See, you're supposed to be the creative one. As the youngest child, I'm just supposed to be bossy.

[18:03] ED AUSTIN HALL: And are you?

[18:07] LESLIE WHEELER: Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I work very hard at not being a control fre freak, but that is my disposition.

[18:15] ED AUSTIN HALL: So now when you say control freak, is that. Are you casting any runes to do that? I'm gonna catch you. Right. Like, there's totally, you know, you. What. What's the line? There's a. There's an exchange that I think the characters. Fee and Cynthia. Your. Your. Right, right. That they have. Where I think Cynthia says are. Is everybody. Are all women casting spells? Are all women working magic? And what's the response? Please?

[18:48] LESLIE WHEELER: The smart ones? Something like that.

[18:54] ED AUSTIN HALL: Damn.

[18:55] LESLIE WHEELER: Yeah. I think, you know, that we do have influences that we're not always completely consciously in charge of or that. And certainly there are a million terrible things that we could fix about the world if we had those magic powers. Right. Like, too bad we don't. But. Yeah. Going back to what I said before about the weirdness of the world and my sense of uncanniness permeating it, you know, I don't. I can't influence reality to the extent of any of those characters in the book. And I don't know any recipes for magic spells. But I do think it's important to discover what kind of power you have and use it for the betterment of the world.

[19:48] ED AUSTIN HALL: There's another writer I want to ask if you're familiar with. There's something that Fe says at one point she talks about that she prefers to travel light. And I wondered if you were purposely referencing the Naomi Mitchison novel by that title.

[20:08] LESLIE WHEELER: No, I wasn't. What's it called?

[20:15] ED AUSTIN HALL: Travel Light.

[20:17] LESLIE WHEELER: No, no. I have no.

[20:19] ED AUSTIN HALL: I want to say it's a fantasy novel, 20th century fantasy novel about kind of magic waning from the world. It's only like half a magical. A fantasy novel. That half of it's very much, very mundane, extraordinarily mundane, because it's about what John Kloop refers to as thinning basically trickles away.

[20:42] LESLIE WHEELER: Right.

[20:44] ED AUSTIN HALL: And I kind of stopped enjoying it halfway through But. But I'm glad I read it. You will recall, I know you'll recall this. My novel has a quote from her brother, from Naomi Mitchelson's brother, Haldane. Can't remember his initials. Jbs. JBS Haldane is Nami Mitchison's brother. And I think they were both. I didn't realize this the last time I name checked him, but I think they were both eugenicists, so.

[21:17] LESLIE WHEELER: Oh, no.

[21:19] ED AUSTIN HALL: Yeah. Oh, no. But that's my version. The quote from Haldane is my version of what you talk about. But the world is genuinely uncanny, right? The world universe is not only queer than we suppose, but queer than we can suppose.

[21:35] LESLIE WHEELER: Oh, that's an epigraph to your book, isn't it?

[21:38] ED AUSTIN HALL: It is. That's. And I. I'm with you. I. I've never seen a ghost, but at this stage. And I had to tell this story to a friend recently who accused me of craziness. And also, I think when I emailed you about preparing for this, I said, I don't want to give you too many details lest you think me insane, right? Because again, I had this thing with your book, with the leech craft of your book, like, oh, let's get a blood sample from this guy. But I did have this episode a couple of years back where I was having the stabbing pain in the side of my neck, which could have just been neuralgia. But when you start having stabbing pains in the side of your neck and you're a student of Vodou, you start to wonder if somebody's like, poking up an effigy of you somewhere else in the world, right? And as it happened, there was somebody that could have been really pissed off at me who happened to be in a part of the world where they might have come by this. And this happened only when I was asleep, like in the middle of the night. And I mean, just excruciating pain. And so it happened over a couple of nights. And I think two or three nights in, not necessarily successive nights, I feel something grasp one of the thumbs on one of my hands. Like, literally, I feel another hand pinch my thumb and drag it between my index and middle fingers. And I wake up with my hand in that position, which is really creepy because the thumb, as you probably know, the thumb between those two fingers, that's a mystical gesture in a lot of cultures. It's also an obscene one in, I think, many more, but it's Malochio. In one of my ancestral cultures in Italy. It's literally the. It's what you do to ward off the evil eye. The evil eye.

[23:58] LESLIE WHEELER: You know, ghosts are not always things that we see. They. We perceive them by other means. And the way I described hearing characters, voices, particularly the voice of the most uncanny character in the novel, Fee, she talked to me all the time. I hear voices occasionally, especially when I'm waking up or falling asleep, I'll hear a funny little message or maybe just somebody calling my name. And I don't know what that is. But another weird thing that's happened to me is I live in a town. When I first moved there, I used to hear a train whistle in the middle of the night, and I used to take walks in the area looking for where the train tracks are, like, what? What am I hearing? And could never find it. And eventually I learned that I do live around the block from where the train used to run and the rails were pulled up in the 40s when the train service stopped. But there had been a train right there, just around the block for years and years. It was decades. So, yeah, that was uncanny. Like, what did I know that I didn't know that I know.

[25:09] ED AUSTIN HALL: Don't you have a poem about that in the State She's In?

[25:12] LESLIE WHEELER: Yes. Yes, there is.

[25:13] ED AUSTIN HALL: So I thought I remembered that. Great collection of poems, by the way. Thank you.

[25:19] LESLIE WHEELER: Thank you.

[25:20] ED AUSTIN HALL: If you're hearing this and you like poetry, you should invest in that book, the State She's In.

[25:29] LESLIE WHEELER: Thank you. I was writing it more or less at the same time I was writing the novel Unbecoming. So there is definitely, definitely this crossing back and forth between the thinking about the territory of Virginia where I live and thinking about the territory of middle age.

[25:45] ED AUSTIN HALL: Well, I'd like to talk about both of those things. Let's talk about Virginia first. We are now what days beyond the. I've heard a lot of people use the phrase, I feel like I can breathe again in the aftermath of the conviction of Derek Chauvin. For now, we can literally now say the murder of George Floyd. And so there's a. In both the State she's in, which is a multivalent title, and in Unbecoming, there's a lot of stuff about race and. And how you as a white woman, me as a black man and a reader of your work, you know, I appreciated and found. Very thoughtful and so talk about that. Some talk about the role of race and living in the south and living in the former.

[26:51] LESLIE WHEELER: Yes, I live in.

[26:53] ED AUSTIN HALL: Have I got that right?

[26:55] LESLIE WHEELER: So it's not the former capital of the Confederacy, but it's a really important site for it because I live in Lexington, Virgin, Virginia. I teach at a place that is still very unfortunately named Washington and Lee University. Robert E. Lee is buried on campus, and as a namesake, he was president of the school for a while. And Stonewall Jackson is also buried a few blocks from my house. So it was a very strange place to move from New Jersey in 1994. I had no idea what I was getting into, but it was profoundly weird to see Confederate reenactors marching up and down Main street once a year and flaggers. Confederate flaggers, they call them, all over the place. And so, you know, it was a distressing move. And I think for a long time, my feeling was, I am not from here. I am not complicit in this. And I was looking down my nose, and especially in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, it became clear to me that that was not a tenable position, that I was complicit, that I had to. That I was being paid a salary by an institution that had been bequeathed a large group of enslaved people and then sold them down the river to improve its operating budget, and that I needed to own up to that. And I think everything I started writing from then on, I was both trying to come to terms with the place I lived in a natural way, in what the ground and the land feels like and what it means to live on it as gently as I can, but also coming to terms with a really brutal, brutal history, not only of the enslavement and Jim Crow, but also of the genocide of Native American populations that once used that area as a hunting ground. And it seems really dishonest to me to write about place in the south as a lot of white writers do, without acknowledging the complexity of race and what it means. It's intimidating. It's hard. I know that as a white woman, I'm bound to be stupid about so many things that I have not been forced to think about in my life. But you do your research and you try. Like you. You acknowledge the complexity of the world, just as you acknowledge the strangeness of the world in a slightly supernatural way. You acknowledge the strangeness, the political strangeness, and the. And the awfulness of what has enabled the way that you live now. You just have to. It's just wrong not to.

[30:13] ED AUSTIN HALL: Talk more. Also, what this felt like, given that you were also menopausal or pre menopausal as all this is happening. What?

[30:30] LESLIE WHEELER: Yeah, I mean, I think that there was a sense, you know, I was. I had Hit middle age. I couldn't deny it anymore. And that meant that I had then at that point lived more than half my life in the south without thinking of myself as a Southerner and. And also was just depressed like, you know, so I am. This is not where I expected to be. I did not expect to spend most of my life in the small town south next to the ghost of Stonewall Jackson. Like, this was not what I had wanted for myself. And there's a poem in the poetry collection called Turning 50 in the Confederacy. And that's what I felt that I was facing, you know, and that I don't think that that is. Those are exactly the concerns or worries of the character in the novel. But that sense of being stuck and being awash in powers that you don't want to acknowledge that you have, like those powers for sin, the character in the book are also the powers to improve the racism or mitigate it at the institution for which she works. You know, she has not been acknowledging those powers either. And part of what, how she needs to change over the course of the novel is to recognize that if she refuses to own up to the privilege and the power that she has, she's doing more harm. So, yeah, yeah, those things did feel deeply linked to me.

[32:21] ED AUSTIN HALL: Thank you. That's all good to hear. And honestly, deeply reassuring.

[32:30] LESLIE WHEELER: Can you explain why reassuring.

[32:37] ED AUSTIN HALL: On one level it is that it's great, particularly I think in the realms of weird fiction. I mean, I expect this in the precincts of literary fiction. I got in, I think I was at the point of watching a fight break out on the State of Black Science Fiction website which I helped administer on. I posted a picture of Samuel Delaney and this is actually a story, core story. Daniel. I posted a picture of Lauren McAlpin and Samuel Delaney. So a white, a man that Chip Delaney identified as a white gay man. And then Chip Delaney is famous science fiction writer, African American, from a long line of Delaneys. Born in Harlem, grew up in Harlem, lived in New York for many, many years. Now lives in Philadelphia, coincidentally. But Chip is very light skinned. And now he looks like Santa Claus now.

[33:51] LESLIE WHEELER: Yes.

[33:52] ED AUSTIN HALL: And so there's a picture of this guy who looks alarmingly like Woody Harrelson and this other large man who looks like Santa Claus. And I posted on this, this now private group for black science fiction writing, Afrofuturism, all that stuff. And one of the other black members wanted, asked me like, why are you putting this here? And. And I thought because my, my comment was with. It was in this storycorps interview. Because the StoryCorps interview that chip had been looking for for years had never heard it. And I found it in the archive, and I linked him to it. And this member of the group wanted to know why I had put it there. And I thought, I'm gonna presume he knows that Chip is black. Because what I wrote was, Chip Delaney reveals the biggest open secret about New York city in the StoryCorps interview.

[34:50] LESLIE WHEELER: Right.

[34:51] ED AUSTIN HALL: And so I explained that remark and what it was. This was Chip was talking about in the 60s when he spent. Somebody essentially dared him to spend 24 hours at a stretch in Grand Central Station, which he did. He was actually there for 28 hours and realized, remember, in the 1960s, not like homelessness is now in the United States. It was largely invisible.

[35:18] LESLIE WHEELER: Wow.

[35:20] ED AUSTIN HALL: And so he realized that there were people who lived in Grand Central Station.

[35:24] LESLIE WHEELER: Right.

[35:26] ED AUSTIN HALL: And so I watched a lot of people basically dog pile this. This person who asked this question, like, don't you know Samuel Delaney is black? And I. This kind of went on for a little while. It was starting to get out of hand. So I said, first of all, I said, y'all need to modulate your tone.

[35:45] LESLIE WHEELER: Yes.

[35:46] ED AUSTIN HALL: And. And I. And. And the commenter said, you know, no, I knew what his race was. I said. And I. And I took that comment as sincere, and I presumed it to be about the New York part of it. And so I explained the New York part of it. And I never addressed Chip's race at all. But that's kind of my habit. Right? You've read my novel. You know that the omniscient narrator in my book never identifies the characters racially. You don't have that luxury. And so for you to be touched, for me, there's a certain amount of courage that comes with any white person who chooses to wrestle with the issue of race in the United States on the page. And thank you for that.

[36:39] LESLIE WHEELER: Thank you. Although I feel like my courage is nothing compared to the courage of people who are facing up to the daily experience of. Of violence in the US that's based on race. So, I mean, for heaven's sake, at least I can do.

[37:00] ED AUSTIN HALL: I agree with you. But the other. There's a second part to my comment, and that is, you know, I'm sure there are people who will be unhappy with me saying this, but on the page, and I know this. I've seen this happen in literary salons I've run. Everybody gets racial stuff wrong in the United States. Everybody is capable of it. And it's not that black people are not immune to doing that.

[37:32] LESLIE WHEELER: Sure.

[37:33] ED AUSTIN HALL: And I'm sure that I will be there. There will be people who will. Who will. I fully expect eventually somebody will come at me for my handling of race, which is not strictly about black and white, I should say, in my.

[37:44] LESLIE WHEELER: Right, right, right.

[37:46] ED AUSTIN HALL: And in some cases, the race of the characters is mysterious.

[37:50] LESLIE WHEELER: Right, Right. We don't know everything about our characters. Right.

[37:54] ED AUSTIN HALL: Yeah. Oh. I mean, I actually do know the race of the characters.

[37:57] LESLIE WHEELER: Oh, yeah, yeah.

[37:58] ED AUSTIN HALL: But, you know, I'm playing those cards close to the vest and that gets revealed, but only when the characters talk about it. And it's. Right. My novel is much more compressed than yours. About how many. About how long does Unbecoming take to unfold? Is it.

[38:15] LESLIE WHEELER: It's about 70,000 words, so it's still fairly short.

[38:19] ED AUSTIN HALL: I mean, in terms of fictional time about.

[38:22] LESLIE WHEELER: Oh, school year. That felt natural.

[38:25] ED AUSTIN HALL: I thought it was about a year, so.

[38:27] LESLIE WHEELER: Yeah. Yeah.

[38:29] ED AUSTIN HALL: And I, you know, like the old series 24 comes to mind when I think about my book. Right. Like, it's a really compressed amount of time. It may unfold in as little as, like, three days.

[38:43] LESLIE WHEELER: Right.

[38:44] ED AUSTIN HALL: But I haven't really timed it out. There's a. There's a trip, and I don't. I don't need to know how long that trip takes. I just know it takes some. It. There's some day, night stuff that happens.

[38:54] LESLIE WHEELER: Right.

[38:56] ED AUSTIN HALL: I think we are very close to time at this stage. Are we? Is there anything that I have not asked you that you'd like to just say really quickly, Leslie, about anything.

[39:10] LESLIE WHEELER: Right. I guess what I would like potential readers to know is that I really did my best to write a novel that's deeply absorbing, that moves fast, and that moves in an empowering direction that certainly helps people who are in a position similar to mine to see that power can flow back into your life and be used for your own good and the good of other people. And I really wanted to write a book that would make the world just a notch better, and I hope that it's a pleasure to read. I'm trying to make a spell that is pleasant to be in.

[39:59] ED AUSTIN HALL: Well, I can say that that spell was cast impeccably.

[40:04] LESLIE WHEELER: Thank you.

[40:05] ED AUSTIN HALL: As you already know, it's far and away the best. 2020. I didn't read many novels from 2020, but it was way, way better than any other one that I read. And the one that I published, no.

[40:22] LESLIE WHEELER: Dread Isle is Magnificent. And I can't thank you enough for saying that because this is Yeah, I think it was a pretty good year for books.

[40:30] ED AUSTIN HALL: Well, I will beg to differ with you. It was leagues beyond what I did. They're both first novels, and it's an extraordinary accomplishment. My hat's off to you, and I won't accept anything else on that front. So, Leslie, thank you for everything that you do that you've done. Keep up the good work. And thank you so much for making time to talk with me today.

[41:00] LESLIE WHEELER: Oh, thank you so much. It has been a pleasure to be here.

[41:04] SPEAKER C: Leslie, would you just talk to Ed a bit about the difference between writing poetry and writing a novel? And mostly, I think what I'm talking about is poetry is really talked about as being so audio oratory. Right. You just speak it.

[41:18] LESLIE WHEELER: Right.

[41:18] SPEAKER C: It's. Poetry is meant to be spoken. Right. But the novel, especially when somebody. When you're writing, a lot of folks say when you're editing, speak it aloud. So I'm wondering, like, did you find it was more of a connection than you initially thought, or are they just two different animals?

[41:36] LESLIE WHEELER: I found them to be deeply different animals. I found that writing a novel. I thought I knew how to write good sentences until I started to practice fiction. To me, the main difference is time. That in poetry, you're creating maybe a single moment or a very short narrative and lingering in it and endlessly trying to expand it. And that's why poems are sort of meditative, pleasure to read. Right. You're lingering in that moment with the writer writing a novel, it needs to move. You need to get the extraneous details out. You need to pare away the adjectives and adverbs. You need to make the prose tight so that you're leaping from moment to moment in a way that there's enough detail for a reader to make those leaps with you, but not to distract anybody or bog them down. Just enough detail to create the world so that you can keep everybody moving through it with suspense. Yeah. So for me, really, really different processes.