Catching Up with Steve Wheat

Steve Wheat has been an itinerant English teacher across continents and has settled in the San Francisco Bay Area to work on renewable energy and de-carbonization. He previously taught fiction and poetry at the San Francisco Writer's Studio and his pieces have recently appeared in OnSpec and Star*Line, as well as pieces published in Issue 8 of Radon Journal that were nominated for a Pushcart and Rhysling Award in 2024.

Steve is the author of “Mend Your Broken Bow / and Aim It at the Sky” from Issue 10, along with "10 Reasons Why the AI Predicted American Salvation" and "The Last Voyage: Island Relocation Program" from Issue 8.

Read Steve's first interview with us by clicking here.

Q: What’s new in your world since we last talked with you in 2024?

I’m going to take this opportunity to suck up a bit. One of the most profound changes in my writing life came from being chosen for Radon last year. I got my first Pushcart nomination, which had been my highest writing goal for the last five years. I was also nominated for a Rhysling Award, which includes a huge list of gobsmackingly talented writers.

I was added to Radon’s discord and was totally blindsided to find what might be one of the very best network of writers I’ve ever been a part of. As of this writing, I’ve had four poems accepted for publication this year in four different journals, a personal best for me. It might have been luck or happenstance, but it’s been really wonderful few months since we last spoke.

Q: Are you trying anything new with your writing this year?

In 2025 I’ve been trying to challenge myself to buy and read at least one new book of poetry a month (sometimes successfully) and create almost a mini class out of each one.

I take some poems that resonate either because of form or subject matter and use them as a scaffolding for some idea I want to get across for something either more speculative, or focused more on climate and place.

I’m also trying to do my best, whenever possible, to go a little further in the search for a bit of hope even if the pieces are often a descent from where we are to where we might go. It seems more important in 2025 America to remember hope is a verb.

Q: In your Issue 8 interview, you shared your perspective on optimism and how your writing aims to help people cultivate the desire to fight for a better world. Would you say this desire still fuels your writing? Did it inspire the creation of your latest Radon poem?

I am in so many ways incredibly lucky to have been born in the time and place I was and allowed to make the decisions I could make. Also to travel extensively and experience so much of the world as it was and before it fell down the precipice of so many acute short- and long-term changes.

When I speak to people with small children, who may be ten or fifteen years from the age where they could go scuba diving, hike a mountain, or camp in an out of the way area, I wonder how many of the places I experienced will still be there for them or be remotely enjoyable in the same way.

In some ways it doesn’t matter, and I think it’s coded so deeply into us that the last tree on Earth will be as venerated as redwoods, sequoias, and rain forests are today. I think that comes through in this Issue 10 poem, how we’ll love nature no matter how it changes. But my poem should also kickstart a desire to preserve the type of nature we love today.

Q: All three poems published with Radon play with structure in a unique way. How do you approach form in your poetry, especially in “Mend Your Broken Bow / and Aim It at the Sky”?

I wish I could say that I had some kind of system that informed experimentation that sounded intellectual or planned. For a while novelists have been asked the binary of whether they are a gardener or an architect. But I think for poets it’s probably a slightly different set of options.

I think there are the poets who delve and go really deeply into forms or into the work of individual poets or traditions. Then there are some of us who graze, and sort of wander in a state of helpless curiosity. I’m definitely more of that second type. I try to keep my mind open, and “If I see something, write something.”

“Mend Your Broken Bow” started as an assignment at the writer’s studio years ago whose origin I can’t remember anymore, while the oddly structured piece in Issue 8 was just a split screen in my brain that had to work itself out.

Q: One of the ideas you grapple with is memory—those “farewell posts,” “suitcases left open,” and “ghosts of our past.” How do you see this poem interacting with the theme of collective memory, especially as it relates to the climate crisis?

For most of our history the worst refugee crises have been the results of war, political upheaval, genocide, persecution; in otherwords human decisions and failings. I hope I’m wrong in my prediction, but my guess is that climate change is going to simply augment these things in ways that we can’t fully envision. At the same time, there will be refugees, refugee communities, and whole populations with the shared trauma of leaving or fleeing their homes because where they lived is no longer fit for human habitation or is impossible to keep adequately resourced.

When large groups of people move at the same time, I can’t help but assume the collective grief and trauma tip stories into mythology more quickly. There are too many individual details for everyone to know. Holes emerge to be patched in with assumption, longing, wishing, and the little artifacts left behind take on the entire weight of the grief associated with the larger movement.

As we speak, the island nation of Tuvalu is the first in human history to have made a political decision to depopulate and move an entire country. Whatever infrastructure is left there, and whatever methods future people have to access them, above or below water, is going to carry the weight of that decision, that moment in time.

Q: As both a writer and somebody whose work really confronts climate change, how do you balance grief and anger with hope and survival?

I like to think of myself as a reluctant cynic and half-defeated optimist. I think if everyone was left to their own devices in a reasonable environment, the vast majority would choose to do the right thing. So when the environment is unreasonable, and when the incentives for doing good and doing well are misaligned, our job is to do our best to change the environment.

I think I balance all of these things in speculative work by focusing on the fact that humans are survivors, that they are remarkably adaptable, that we can be angry at all of the unfairness now and that has come before, reckon with it, and still act in ways that aren’t so hopelessly selfish that cycles are guaranteed in the future. I guess I try to balance horrifying future environments filled with forces beyond human control with people trying to do the right thing when they can.

Q: After finishing this poem, what do you hope the reader will walk away feeling or understanding differently?

I think most of my work, especially my recent work, has a focus on taking this enormous, inconceivably large problem, of climate change and a warming world, and all of the parts of human civilization it’s going to pull on and change, then zooming in on a tiny piece of it to make that possibility more real.

This poem in particular balances a lot of sensory imagery and a voice of an imagined elder. But you can juxtapose that with any generational change, saying goodbye to an old order and welcoming a new. Doing our best to direct those that come after us to the best possible outcome. I think the hope is that some of these universal human instincts mixed with a precarious and difficult possible future could activate something in a reader that feels a little more urgent than it did before they sat down. After that we’re all left to navigate an uncertain present to an uncertain future in our own way.

Q: How have you stayed sane watching the country slide into authoritarianism?

At this point I don’t think anyone could accuse me of staying fully sane. I’m not even sure sanity is a reasonable response to what’s happening. I think for any person living in the USA who is comparatively empathetic and factually informed, “How are you?” has become a loaded question.

Like many of us, I wake up wondering what fresh horrors will greet me, what previously unassailable norm, or rule, or law, or freedom has been pressed up against the side of an unmarked van today. My industry, devoted to (at least some of us) to providing a barrier against the worst ravages of climate change by deploying clean energy is under daily assault. Really, every single pillar that I can imagine needed to make a good world (treating every person with dignity and respect, providing a tiny fraction of resources to people in the country and around the world most desperate for a single meal or a night in a bed, medicine for chronic illness for pennies on the dollar, unbiased or at least fair news from the associated press, children’s programming based on the science of child development from PBS) is under attack.

In a way I’m lucky because I’ve always been an interested generalist. And being informed, even remembering the way things are supposed to be when the most evil forces want you to forget, to unlearn—the act of being curious can be its own revolutionary act.

It won’t stop what’s happening, but knowing what’s real and what’s right while knowing it pisses them off that people refuse to forget, may be just that tiny bit of light holding the total darkness at bay.