AnnaLee Wilson

Essayist, Memoirist, Short Story Writer

United States

AnnaLee Wilson's essay, memoir and short fiction writing has appeared in anthologies and journals. Her essay "My Mother's Geranium" was recently featured in Kaleidoscope, Summer/Fall 2022 and accompanied by a podcast. Additional writing has appeared in Storied Dishes, Dime Stories, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, This Is the Way We Say Goodbye, The First Line, and others. Wilson is completing her memoir of launching Kaeser and Wilson Design during the 1970s when only five percent of businesses were women-owned. The era was researched through a Wertheim Room Residency grant from the New York Public Library. In addition, Wilson moderates New York Public Library's One Page Poetry Circle at St. Agnes Branch, and co-produces the Hundred Word Happening, a reading and writing event now in its fifth year, which has delighted audiences at the Marjorie Deane Little Theater and, most recently, the Marlene Meyerson JCC in Manhattan.

Portfolio
Pschoanalytic Perspectives
01/01/2012
Father's Day

My graphic design firm was a year old in 1975 when Dad paid his one and only visit. Why had I chosen this day to invite him for a lesson in preparing design boards for printing? This was no time to be tutoring anyone, much less my father. Revisions had been arriving all week for the project my partners and I were working on, and I was taking a big risk trying to teach him a new job. What would he think of my office? Would he roll his eyes at the Tampax on the toilet tank and the macramé plant...

This Is the Way We Say Goodbye
01/01/2012
Feeling the Power

For years I dreaded Sunday, the day I went to the Bronx to visit my mother. By the time my mother died at 80, she had evolved into a marionette with its strings clipped. Except for her face and neck, muscular dystrophy had destroyed most of her ability to move. I say, most, because once when I followed her instructions to arrange her arm so that it was bent to a precise angle from the elbow, yet did not touch her body, I happened to slip my hand in hers and felt a feeble, but distinct...

The First Line
01/01/2005
Playing to Win

“That was the best game we’ve ever had!” Belle was flat on her back smoking in bed. “But it's a new week and another one to look forward to.” With a pillow under her elbow, Belle’s arm was propped up, a Pall Mall wedged between two fingers. Her hand in limp salute dangled the cigarette near her mouth. “My score topped 400,” Belle crowed as she curled out her top lip to take a last drag. Then in Rube Goldberg fashion Belle’s wrist rotated so the butt fell into an ashtray beneath her chin.

Dime Stories
01/01/2014
Old Boyfriend

The e-mail from my old boyfriend asked if he and his third wife could sleep on our floor for a week. I hadn’t seen Henry in years. I wanted to say yes, but I knew my husband Wil would be jealous. “Tell me a story about having sex with an old boyfriend,” Wil sometimes said during lovemaking. “It turns me on.”

Storied Dishes
01/01/2010
End-of-the-Month Food

“Filet mignon, medium rare.” I say over my shoulder to the formal attired waitperson. In the background the Bat Mitzvah girl and her thirteen-year-old girlfriends in gowns and low cut socks slide across a polished floor. Some hold each other and dance. Boys roam the room in a pack. In between disco and rap, an entertainer’s voice rises in perfect imitation of Roy Orbison singing Blue Bayou. The server nods approval and I feel smart. Moving around our table, she recites the choices—filet...

Kaleidoscope Magazine (UDS)
06/01/2022
My Mother's Geranium

Toward the end of her life, my mother kept a red geranium in a terracotta pot. Geranium is a common flowering plant with a mistaken identity. When the Dutch brought the plant from South Africa in the 17th century, horticulturists mistook it for one that grew wild in Europe. Botany was an imprecise science at the time, but like so many other assumptions about life, that idea stuck when it was, in fact, a Pelargonium. My mother’s plant sat alone on her bedroom windowsill in her apartment in the...