Animating the Archive :: A Conversation with L. Ann Wheeler
L. Ann Wheeler is the artist and writer behind Abandoners, a hybrid graphic text that is at once creative nonfiction, poetry, catharsis, and generally genre-non-conforming, and which is, also, forthcoming from The Operating System in December 2018.
Excerpts of Abandoners previously appeared at Entropy and Omniverse.
Part I, “A Little Hell of Its Own,” was selected by Barbara Henning to win Bone Bouquet’s 2014 Experimental Prose Contest, and appeared in issue 5.1.
“Poetry, prose, documentary, collage — this mesmerizing book puzzles together a tormenting mistake, the peril of its discovery, and public accounts of women out of options. It begins, in a way, in the marsh grass at Coney Island, 1922, and ends at the head of a line of 21st century Kansas City schoolchildren whose teacher leads them, walking backwards. What is being passed to the reader feels obliging, covert, transactional, an ‘identity in an envelope with / the flap tucked in.’ Abandoners is a work of consequence.” — Brian Blanchfield
Greetings comrade! Thank you for talking to us about your process today!Can you introduce yourself, in a way that you would choose?
My name is Lesley and I am a writer and artist. I live in Los Angeles with my husband and our two dogs. I’m from Massachusetts and when I dream I’m mostly in New York or lost on a midwestern highway, off ramps after unknown off ramps.
Why are you a poet/writer/artist?
I can’t imagine being anything but. It’s too late to turn back now.
When did you decide you were a poet/writer/artist (and/or: do you feel comfortable calling yourself a poet/writer/artist, what other titles or affiliations do you prefer/feel are more accurate)?
In fifth grade I went to a Worcester County Young Writers conference, and I have a vivid memory of being in a big room full of other kids and we were all freewriting silently. The feeling in that room stays with me.
What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway?
What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?
I struggle with this question. Sometimes I wonder whether or not I’m helping the world, or what it matters that I come back to my art forms day after day. But I read something recently that pointed to art as being something that humans can see our interconnectedness in, something to let us know we are not alone, that we share experiences and emotions and are tethered together in all sorts of invisible ways. I like that.
Talk about the process or instinct to move these poems (or your work in general) as independent entities into a body of work. How and why did this happen? Have you had this intention for a while? What encouraged and/or confounded this (or a book, in general) coming together? Was it a struggle?
The Leah sections of the book came first. I started them when I moved from Brooklyn to Iowa City and was having a difficult time adjusting to the Midwest. I took a research poetics class with Cole Swensen, and my longing for New York drove me to scour archives for a story I could latch onto. When I found Leah, and the other babies abandoned on Coney Island, it felt right. I needed to uncover as much as I could about her. She was from Massachusetts (as am I) and ended up having this totally life-changing, terrifying thing happen in Brooklyn.
I worked on those sections on and off for five or six years. Working in the text and visual modes was exciting for me — I realized that I did not have to groom my natural inclinations to fit the forms of poetry that I had read and been taught. It felt like a true representation of myself as a writer. While working on the Leah project while at a residency in Vermont I really thought I was going to write a non-fiction book, or a historical novel, and would have to circle back around to the fact that not only do I not know how to do those things, I preferred working in this hybrid mode even though it felt free-form or uncharted.
The other parts of the book all came separate. “In Service of Him or, What I Thought Service Was,” [ed: excerpt appears at Entropy] also took a few years to come together. Writing about abuse, about my abuse, was something I thought would never happen. But as I saw many women coming forward and sharing their experiences — especially within the writing community — I realized how important it was to commit my story to paper. The catharsis of writing it was spurred on by the strength and understanding I felt by simply reading the stories of others.
All the while I’d been writing and putting aside poem-poems, and the ones that appear in this book are together a velvet door stopper tempering the more unruly aspects of experience. There’s many other poem-like poems that didn’t work for this book. I made a handful of manuscripts of these other poems, sent them out all over the place and nothing seemed to connect. It took a lot of deep consideration to realize that I had the pieces to the manuscript that I had been wanting to make all along right in front of me — I was truly unsure of how it would be perceived, what with all of its incongruous forms and modes. But when I put the essays, the poems, all of the pieces together, I knew that it made a whole.
What formal structures or other constrictive practices (if any) do you use in the creation of your work? Have certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings/work of other creative people informed the way you work/write?
Not many! In fact, it was key to this manuscript to avoid a prescribed format. In some way, the constriction was to be true to my writing and not go back and undercut or edit out my instincts in favor of something more “recognizable.” It’s the most challenging to be honest with myself. I’m lucky to have studied under many writers I adore (Sarah Manguso, Megan Kaminski, D.A. Powell, Cole Swensen, Jen Bervin, Brian Blanchfield to name a few) in a range of environments. The continual internal conversation I am allowed to sustain with myself and writing through all of these learning environments has helped me to define and redefine my work. And my writing would not exist without my visual art practice — oscillating between the two mediums is what keeps me engaged with expression.
Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated? Talk about the way you titled the book, and how your process of naming (individual pieces, sections, etc) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.
Abandoners first was the title of the last piece in the book. The word appeared in nearly every news article I found about Leah. I decided to make it not only the title of this piece but of the whole manuscript because of the way it seemed to shimmer when held up to the themes that run throughout. Abandoning as a way of shedding what is not needed, abandoning as hopelessness, as a choice, or as something that happens to you. A celebration of abandonment.
What does this particular work represent to you as indicative of your method/creative practice, history, mission, intentions, hopes and/or plans?
This work has the past ten years of my life wrapped up in it. It’s made of all the modes I work in. This whole process has affirmed my belief in negative capability, as difficult as it may be to trust in it.
What would be the best possible outcome for this book? What might it do in the world, and how will its presence as an object facilitate your creative role in your community and beyond? What are your hopes for this book, and for your practice?
I hope someone reads Abandoners and leaves with new ideas or is happy to have spent time with the book. I see Abandoners as a questioning of linear time, animating the archived alongside the now. Who else is in the archives, or more importantly, left out of the archives? How can we ensure their stories are heard? I hope this book does some work of unerasing the overwritten.
Let’s talk a little bit about the role of poetics and creative community in social activism, in particular in what I call “Civil Rights 2.0,” which has remained immediately present all around us in the time leading up to this series’ publication. I’d be curious to hear some thoughts on the challenges we face in speaking and publishing across lines of race, age, privilege, social/cultural background, and sexuality within the community, vs. the dangers of remaining and producing in isolated “silos.”
Finding the archival material for this book was magical for me. To sift through newspapers and censuses available freely online and in libraries and find these stories is a reminder to me of the importance of preserving information for those who come after us. I was able to collaborate with writers and people from the past, to build on what they started. In that way it was a self-perpetuating endeavor — because I found stories that inspired me, I was able to tell my own story in hopes that someone else would find it when they needed it. It is not easy to be honest in writing, but it is important — we see ourselves more clearly when we see each other truthfully.
L. Ann Wheeler is a writer, artist, and teacher in Los Angeles. She holds degrees in creative writing from the Pratt Institute and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Omniverse, Bone Bouquet, Entropy, ILK, among others. She’s taught elementary school on Coney Island, college writing in Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas, and high school in California. Abandoners is her first book.
