Hall of Fame Writers You Need to Read Now - Steve Gerson
- Ruchi Acharya
- Apr 9
- 12 min read
Hey ho, let’s go.
Welcome to the Wingless Dreamer Publisher’s Hall of Fame wall— to honour the bards from our literary community who etched their marks on the Hall of Fame section of Wingless Dreamer through their outstanding performance, remarkable talent disposition, and thinking out of the box – innovating techniques in the realm of the subject English Literature. They have indeed left our editors awestruck with their exemplary works.
Through the Hall of Fame Wall, we proudly celebrate a carefully selected group of writers from our contributors’ circle—those whose work has stood out not only for its craft but also for its courage, originality, and emotional depth. These exemplary writers have nailed the art of expressing emotions through their works, which very well resonates with our motto, “Feel the Feels”. These are the voices that linger long after the last line, the ones that dare to push boundaries and redefine what storytelling can feel like. At Wingless Dreamer, we truly value experimental and ekphrastic literary works.
Those who have been following us since the beginning of our journey in 2020 know how much effort we put into our writing contests, editorial services, podcasts, and publishing—supporting writers and nurturing the writing community.
The addition of the Hall of Fame blog section just seems right to boost the morale of our writers. If you’re new here, no sweat! You can always participate in our writing contests, and who knows, you may end up earning your own certificate as a Hall of Fame writer.
The Hall of Fame is more than just recognition—it is a living archive of excellence. Through this space, we aim to honour consistency, creativity, and the quiet resilience it takes to keep showing up for one’s art. Each featured writer represents a journey of growth, discipline, and fearless expression, reminding us that literature is not just written—it is lived.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one.”- Geroge R.R. Martin
Wingless Dreamer, we believe that even without wings, words can fly—and in this Hall of Fame, they soar.
Without any further ado, let’s honour our Hall of Fame writers.
INTERVIEW WITH STEVE GERSON
At Wingless Dreamer, we’re always intrigued by writers who refuse to stay in one lane—and Steve Gerson is exactly that kind of voice.
With a striking collection of chapbooks ranging from Dystopia to Who Am I Today, Steve’s work feels like stepping into a series of shifting rooms—each one echoing with questions of identity, anxiety, time, and the beautifully uncomfortable truths we often avoid. His titles alone read like invitations (or warnings), and once you’re in, there’s no escaping the introspection.
Quirky, probing, and unapologetically honest, Steve writes with a rhythm that doesn’t just tell stories—it unsettles, lingers, and quietly insists that you look a little closer at yourself.
In this conversation, we dive into the mind behind the words—where curiosity meets chaos, and poetry becomes a way of making sense of it all.
Dear Steve,
Congratulations on being honoured in the Wingless Dreamer Hall of Fame wall.
1. First of all, congratulations on being featured in the Wingless Dreamer Hall of Fame. Your body of work—from Once Planed Straight to Dystopia—reflects a remarkable range of themes. What continues to drive your creative spirit across such diverse explorations?
Ruchi, thank you and Wingless Dreamer for giving me this opportunity to talk about poetry. What a joy!
Let me answer this first question, what drives my creative spirit, by sharing an anecdote. I had an uncle who was a university art professor. He told me that one day, a student said to him, "I don't know how to begin. What should I paint?" My uncle replied, "Just look out the window. Paint the light." In other words, the instruction was to observe what's in front of you. I think this applies to poets as well as painters. How do I write about diverse topics? I keep my eyes and ears open. Let me give you two examples. One time, I was driving through a neighborhood and saw the result of storm damage. A tree limb had fallen and impaled itself on a house's roof. The image struck me, a story emerged, and, as I drove, I composed one of my favorite haikus:
A tree blown down, cracked,
Limbs splintered like burst vessels,
Dreams of voyaging
Another time, while driving (I seem to do that a lot), I heard a phrase on the radio related to an advertisement for mascara. Just one line sent me into a realm of creativity, like a rock thrown into a pond, waves rippling. Here’s the poem that resulted
Modern Romance
She wore toxic mascara.
It scribed her face in icicles
When she cried, often.
She filed her nails
into penknives to carve
down his back, his chest, his arms, his face
in romance, in anger, as often.
He bathed in Agent Orange.
It wafted from him as mephitis
from sulfurous sinkholes.
His pointed, steel-toe stingray
boots, sharpened on acid,
bit into her with each embrace.
They married when the wind
screamed, guests, applauding
their divorce.
My point is simple. I try to stay alert. I await an opportunity. What I see and hear often results in poems. It’s like touching an electrical outlet and feeling the shock.
2. Many of your chapbooks touch on introspection, identity, and even anxiety. How do you approach translating deeply internal experiences into something readers can universally connect with?
I depend on similes and metaphors to translate internal experiences into universalities that my readers can identify with. Abstract concepts like love, anger, pain, want, hope, loss, or anxiety are hard to quantify. They need something concrete and commonplace to make them manageable. Similes and metaphors accomplish this goal. If I can compare an invisible concept like emotions to something visible, something everyone has seen or heard or experienced, then I can make my personal feelings universal. For example, in my poem "The Plaintive Moan of a Dry Man," published in Wingless Dreamer, I try to do just that—make abstractions (ageing, loss, fear) understandable through similes and metaphors, as seen in the following, selected couplets:
Sound comes to me as crowcoughs from a dark mound. I reach to turn the doorknob with palsied hands, fingers crooked as question marks. Why have we surrendered to evil, history smouldering in charred pages, the predator teeth of war raking children's innocence?
We’ve all heard the discordant sound of crows cawing. We’ve all asked questions. We know what a charred page looks like. We all fear a predator’s fangs. Can you feel the despair through these similes and metaphors? If so, I've succeeded in quantifying abstractions, making emotions universal.
3. Titles like The 13th Floor: Step into Anxiety and Who Am I Today suggest an ongoing dialogue with the self. How has writing helped you navigate your own evolving identity over time?
I don’t write about myself. I don’t even think about myself. I write about what I have experienced and observed, but I’m not on a voyage of self-discovery. I’m not even driving the bus. If anything, I’m riding in the back of the bus, watching.
In my poetry, I’m an everyman, trying to voice universal concerns. In my chapbook entitled Who am I Today?, for example, I wear personas. I’m an immigrant, a war veteran, a homeless person, a woman. I am infirmity. I am anxiety. I am mortal.
One of my chapbook reviewers wrote, “Steve's poetry gives voice to readers' amorphous ideas and fears. For those who don't have the same ease putting thoughts on paper, Steve's voice expresses things typically too intangible to make solid. Read this and know you’re not alone. Even in darkness there is light. While things may seem dire, change is always possible. But, sometimes you just need to yell loud enough for others to hear.”
I think of my poetry as a canary in the coal mine. I’m shouting a warning for others to hear. I think of my poetry as litmus paper. I’m testing the acidity in the air. I think of my poetry as a tuning fork. As I pound my words against society’s challenges, I want my poems to thrum.
I’m not writing about myself. I’m writing about the self, a collective consciousness. Walt Whitman famously said, “I am large. I contain multitudes.”
PS—Walt Whitman and I share the same birthday, a weird coincidence.
4. In today’s fast-paced literary landscape, chapbooks remain a unique and intimate form. What draws you to this format, and how do you see it shaping the reader’s experience differently from full-length collections?
My chapbooks are all thematic.
Three of the books (There is a Season, And the Land Dreams Darkly, and Once Planed Straight) focus on how modernity has negatively impacted the American Midwest (where I live). Once this region of plains and prairies was fertile for adventure and exploration, but family farms died out, weather eroded the land, and people moved to larger cities. A vestige of America’s past diminished.
Five of the books (Dystopia, Viral, Who am I Today, Have Not, and The 13th Floor: Step into Anxiety) focus on COVID and an unstable government. Here, I share my stress from disease, divisiveness, and loss of self with an audience that surely suffers similarly. We’re all the world’s “have nots,” people who might be unemployed, lacking in healthcare, suffering from illnesses, and distressed by our collective troubled times. These five chapbooks of poetry and flash are almost reportorial.
My ninth chapbook, What Is Isn’t, combines art and haiku. A colleague of mine, an art professor where I taught for 38 years, created collages. I, in an ekphrastic manner, wrote haiku about his art. We engaged in a collaborative dance, melding two art forms. In doing so, we commented on themes such as uncertainty, fear, loss, hope, politics, and technology—humanity.
All of the books shape the readers’ perceptions in that I take them on journeys. Each book has an arc, usually from love to loss, or loss to love. I hope readers enjoy the travel . . . or, at least, become very unsettled.
5. Your work often balances darkness with reflection. Do you believe poetry should comfort, confront, or simply coexist with the reader’s emotions?
This question ties in nicely to the last answer above. I do not seek to comfort my readers. They can get comfort by watching a sitcom on TV, playing cards with friends, or enjoying holidays with family. I want to take them outside of themselves and have them look into a carnival mirror of fright.
Nor do I want to coexist. Someone once told me that in order to stay sharp, knives need to be honed against rough surfaces. My poetry can be rough.
6. As a Hall of Fame writer at Wingless Dreamer, what advice would you give to emerging poets who are still finding their voice in a world full of noise and comparison?
I have two pieces of advice for emerging poets: read and write.
1. Read: I read lots of poetry. I read Emily Dickinson, E.E. Cummings, Theodore Roethke, Pablo Neruda, Margaret Atwood, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many, many more. These poets give me inspiration and ideas; they challenge me; they threaten me; they make me want to be better through their talents. In their words, I see new possibilities for expression. They take me on adventures I would not have travelled otherwise.Let me focus on three, very diverse poets for clarity.
· Emily Dickinson—her simple tercets and quatrains, her simple tetrameters, her simple images hide amazing depth. Here's the first quatrain from one of her poems:
There's a certain slant of lightWinter afternoonsThat oppresses like the heftOf cathedral tunes
We've all seen her slanting light emerging from winter clouds. But she imparts their emotional impact like a slap on our faces. Her lines sting . . . and I strive to meet her challenge as a poet, to make simple images provocative.
Here’s one of my love poems published by Wingless Dreamer that leans on Dickinson’s slanted light.
Breathless
Caravaggio called it chiaroscuro,
where darkness disappears from the light,
like the Chichauhaun sun
setting at night,
light illuminating beauty,
shadows creating mystery.
That’s you, leaning against
the door to our yard,
your left shoulder raised toward
the pasture, light caressing,
your right shoulder leaning into suspense.
I’m behind you, enthralled
by each curve, dip and mound,
you, the landscape of our farm,
cleft and sculptured swirl,
the swirl of your hair bound in a braid,
your body aglow as if daubed
by a painterly hand, beguiled
brushstrokes tracing your contours.
Dusk colors of sunset
becoming evening warm you
in embrace. And you start to turn,
the tug of your chin inching,
a stray tendril from your upswept
hair enticing, and I await your splendor.
Breathless in the desert.
That’s me, looking through a window, painting light.
· E.E. Cummings—he has nothing in common with Dickinson. I read him to see how to rebel against grammar rules. In Cummings, commas and periods and traditional line spacing can be ignored, even abused, to make a poetic point. Here's how I've adapted his techniques in one of my poems:
!not
going to: follow your punctuation rules
for who you think, I am, today
a pink (gauzy) syntax
in your red/state white/male cataract
no!t going to be pastel
quiet interrupted a grl
mascara my (im)perfection wear froth
to slake your thirst your hand
holding my throat like a beer bottle
?want me to dress like something edible
a pomegranate pansy whirl of cotton candy
to sweeten teeth not going to
bend under your shard ceiling bend over
ogled an objet d’morsel fckd
on your testosterone timetable accept 7/10th
of a dollar my X boxed in [by your y]
not going to stay in line pirouette on cue
stand on blistered toes to reach higher
dance for your reality show government
, can’t, won’t:
Thank you, Mr. Cummings, for giving me the courage to break the rules. I hope my poem’s fractured form conveys the poem’s contentious content.
· Theodore Roethke--again, Roethke shares nothing with Cummings and Dickinson. While Dickinson's poems are succinct and Cumming's are disruptive, Roethke writes poems that read like short stories. His poetry has a story line with plot and characters. From Roethke I learn how to tell a tale. Read his "My Papa's Waltz" and " Elegy for Jane," for examples.
2. My second piece of advice is to write. Don't stop. Don't be dissuaded by rejection. Keep putting words on the page. I am proudly now a "Hall of Fame" poet. Wow! Despite this accolade, I bet that 90 percent of my poems have been rejected (even Wingless Dreamer has rejected me in the past). Yet I keep plugging away. Editors do not define me. They do not define you. J,K, Rowling's Harry Potter was rejected 12 times before a publisher accepted it. And she's doing fine.
Gift Advice: here's one more bit of advice. Find journals, like Wingless Dreamer, that provide prompts. Wingless Dreamer's contests will give you new ideas for creativity, new opportunities to consider new themes for your poetry.
Let’s come over to Rapid Fire Round. Are you ready?
1. Coffee ☕ / Tea 🍵 / Existential crisis 😵💫
Coffee—I like caffeine.
2. Write in silence 🤫 / With music 🎶 / With chaos 🌪️
I could never write with music. Either I’d listen to the music and forget to write, or I’d write and forget to listen to the music. I like silence, though I write about chaos.
3. Poetry 📜 / Flash fiction ⚡ / Stream of consciousness 🌊
Yes, all three, sometimes at the same time.
4. First line comes easy ✨ / Last line hits hardest 💥 / Middle is a mess 😅
Every poem I’ve ever written starts with a first line, maybe three words, maybe a phrase, and from those few words, my poems evolve. I aim for a final line that hits. My middle lines tend to organically emerge. I let them happen.
5. Dark themes 🌑 / Hopeful endings 🌅 / Bittersweet always 🌫️
I’m usually pretty dark, and for this, I offer my apologies.
6. Pen and paper ✍️ / Laptop 💻 / Notes app at 2 AM 📱
I write on my handheld phone app. It’s so convenient. I’ve even written an entire novel on my phone (then I download it to a computer for proofing).
7. Edit endlessly 🔁 / Trust the first draft 🔥 / Depends on the mood 🎭
I’m not an editor of my work. I trust the first (or second) draft. Things usually work out fine. Too much stirring makes the dough tough. Too much stirring turns whipped cream into butter.
8. Inspired by life 🌍 / Inspired by pain 💔 / Inspired by questions ❓
Yes, all three, all of the time.
9. Write for self 🖤 / Write for readers 🌐 / Write for legacy 🕰️
I usually write for myself, though it sure is great to have readers. I give my chapbooks to my friends and family. That’s the only legacy I seek.
10. One perfect poem 🏆 / A hundred honest ones 💯 / An unfinished masterpiece 🎨
I strive for a hundred, or a thousand, honest poems. What would be the purpose of anything that’s unfinished? I write a poem and move on to the next one.
Ladies and Gentlemen, a thank you note by Steve Gerson.
Readers, thank you for spending time with me. I appreciate your listening to me contemplate. Poetry is a dialogue . . . between the writer and the reader, sometimes between the writer and him or herself. I’ve been speaking to you. I can’t wait to read your work in future Wingless Dreamer publications.
Most importantly, thank you, Wingless Dreamer editors, for giving us poets an opportunity and a voice. Your venue is a place I hope to visit often.
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