“Zombie Thanksgiving,” a poem by Lesley Wheeler, is up this week in Fringe. It, along with poems from Wheeler’s previous Fringe appearance, is part of her new collection, The Receptionist and Other Tales, forthcoming from Aqueduct Press. Poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips asked her about the book, the poem, and strategies for packing to go to conferences. Find her responses below, and please share your own thoughts in the comments section.

You’ve got a series of zombie poems going, including some charming short poems. How did the zombies invade your work?

As usual, it’s a combination of things: pleasure in supernatural or fantastic stories; The Walking Dead TV and graphic novel series; teaching T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and starting to think of it as a zombie tale; and writing some other poems with elements from genre fiction. I also gave two readings including “Zombie” from my book Heathen and received intense responses from the audiences. After the first event, a student shot her hand in the air and demanded urgently, “What’s scarier, fast zombies or slow zombies?” That isn’t one of the usual post-poetry-reading questions. The second took place in Pittsburgh, George Romero-land, where zombies are always serious business.

“Zombie Thanksgiving” seems partly to do with how regular (nonzombie) people tear each other apart. The Thanksgiving dinner scene could almost be any family’s. Has the trope allowed you to cover territory you might not have?

Yes, it’s an extended metaphor for family dysfunction and I definitely drew on my own experiences as well as holiday horror stories from friends. My extended family endured a few painful upheavals in the past couple of years and I was thinking about the limits of toleration: when a family member is a damaged and damaging person, what does one owe him or her? Where do you draw the line? How does having children affect those calculations? I’ve had enough of meanness and am not willing to admit more into my life; my spouse gives people many more chances than I would. This is a long-running conversation between us, probably an eternal one, because neither of us is entirely wrong or entirely right. My ruthlessness is, however, a better response to zombie apocalypse: in this poem I set up a situation in which my approach wins.

This poem is part of a collection that will soon be published by the feminist speculative-lit publisher Aqueduct Press. When you announced the upcoming publication on your blog, you expressed some anxiety about publishing speculative poetry and remaining a Serious Poet. I think a lot of us who inhabit the land of the serious will own up to loving sci-fi and fantasy novels by now (I still reread the Finn Family Moomintroll books when I’m feeling dreary and find something new in them every time). But examples of good speculative poetry are less out in the open. Are there other poets whose sci-fi-inclined work you like?

People call Emily Dickinson’s poetry “gothic” often enough, but what happens if you call it speculative fiction? I’m still thinking through that question, but I suspect reading her work through that lens would be productive. Mystic poets W.B. Yeats, H.D., and James Merrill are definitely writers of speculative fiction, as is anyone whose poetry centers on myth or fairy tales. When you start looking, it’s surprising how many really great poets have a superhero piece, a meditation on vampires or aliens, or a few poems about ghosts. Often the fantastic element is the vehicle of a metaphor, but a metaphor the writer undertakes thoughtfully, intelligently, and with enthusiastic commitment.

Futuristic poetry seems rarer although Janet McAdams has some pieces I read that way. A few other contemporary writers who keep coming back to these themes are Van Jordan, Cynthia Hogue, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. I just found a good zombie poem by Kim Addonizio (“Night of the Living, Night of the Dead”), but Jay Snodgrass has got to be the king among contemporary poetic zombie interpreters.

How did you decide to submit this manuscript to Aqueduct rather than to a more-traditional poetry publisher?

This book, The Receptionist and Other Tales, just doesn’t look like the books I see from all those wonderful independent poetry presses, so I posted a query about options to Wom-po, the Discussion of Women’s Poetry Listserv. Lawrence Schimel of A Midsummer Night’s Press backchanneled me and asked to read it. The central long poem, “The Receptionist,” literally doesn’t fit his format—he makes beautiful tiny books—but he suggested the Conversation Pieces series at Aqueduct so I checked out their list (Ursula Le Guin! Gwyneth Jones!), ordered a couple, became enchanted with the idea of reaching a totally different group of readers, and sent it in.

You’ve continued to be really productive in realms both scholarly and poetic since your last Fringe appearance. On your blog last fall, you wrote about balancing these things along with the rest of life. About finding time to work on poems, you noted, “I don’t have a lot of time, but there’s an hour every once in a while, and I don’t spend it on what I care about the most.” You’re certainly not alone in that. Do you use any strategies or tricks to make it more likely that you’ll spend that hour on a poem?

We’re still in the post-New Year’s-resolution phase so I’m making more time for poetry writing than I was in the fall. I reorganized the house so I have a better work zone. I asked for a light-up pen for Christmas so I could write down ideas in the night without turning on a lamp. I returned to the practice of keeping a small, easily-portable journal with me—that makes a big difference. And I’m keeping semi-regular writing dates: ninety minutes to two hours, more if I can, on Sunday afternoons and on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I haven’t yet managed to keep all three dates in a single week, though. And what I’m not doing is revising and sending work out regularly. People keep asking me to do interesting scholarly projects and I keep saying yes, helplessly; it feels worthwhile but those projects lead me down paths that diverge from what I want to write most. I ought to make an annual date at a writer’s retreat to guarantee some sustained focus but I just feel so guilty at the idea of leaving my family for two weeks.

I loved your essay “Rhymes with Poetess,” published last summer in Kenyon Review Online. In it, you talk about stylistic choices: the various dress codes of different academic disciplines; how women assess each other by their clothing; and women’s choices around writing metrically and in rhyme. They’re things I am constantly thinking of but that are rarely talked about so directly (the Seam Ripper feature on Delirious Hem being a refreshing exception). How did you initially unite the questions of whether (and how much) to rhyme and what (and how much) to wear?

I don’t know; it just seems obvious to me that they’re basically the same thing. I keep drafting answers to this question and then deleting them, but how about this: both sartorial and poetic styles are ways of projecting identity and, potentially, tribal identification. There’s a certain safety in dressing like the people you admire or the members of a group you’d like to join. Even when people want to assert difference, they do so the way others have successfully asserted difference. Maybe there are only so many ways of dressing or lineating so we all fall back on the same few strategies. I know I don’t dress like an upwardly mobile poet (I hate uncomfortable shoes) but I can’t help obsessing about it.

What I didn’t discuss but still nags at me is that so many successful women poets in their forties (my age) are thin, fit, and fairly good-looking. Style is linked to weight as well as money, access, and ambition, and there are definitely fashions in body types. That essay needs to be written. Why aren’t there more poems about dieting, about choosing always to be hungry?

On a more cheerful note: soon I get to go to speculative fiction conferences and analyze the codes there. I’m SO excited, even though I know I’ll pack all the wrong things.

A question that bedevils me: What sort of suitcase do you take with you to conferences? I never want to take a giant one, but the small carry-on never seems enough for both books and clothes.

I make my personal item a large light purse, not quite a briefcase but big enough for a small laptop, reading materials, and snacks. My carry-on is a lightweight rolling duffel. It has one downside—it won’t sit upright on the wheel end without being propped—but I love it. You can get a lot in there, it’s easy to hoist around, and its bright green color stands out when I have to gate-check a bag. I also obey the usual wisdom about planning a series of mix-and-match outfits on a base color of either black or brown. I don’t have a briefcase/ purse that matches brown-based outfits at the moment, though, and I’m going crazy looking for one that’s lightweight, just dressy enough, and doesn’t cost a lot of money.

Have you ever participated in a zombie lurch? If you did, what would you wear?

No! When I was little, my mother had a long pink velour bathrobe with matching slippers, which strikes me as the safest, most comforting outfit possible—that would be a good one to zombify. Cold cream would be a key accessory.