Welcome to Ask a Professor, our series that offers an insider’s view of life in academia. This month we interviewed Rebecca Lehmann, Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Saint Mary’s College. An award-winning poet, essayist, and editor, Lehmann embraces both the flexibility and rigorousness of creative writing. She loves to play with the rules of grammar and punctuation, but she also respects form, structure, and poetic traditions. Her poetry been featured in numerous journals and magazines, and she’s published three poetry collections: Between the Crackups; Ringer; and The Sweating Sickness, the last out this year from University of Pittsburgh Press. At Saint Mary’s College, she teaches creative writing—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and even children’s literature—from intro to advanced, helping students find their own voices. In 2020, she embarked on an ambitious pandemic project, the outcome of which is her forthcoming novel, The Beheading Game.
What’s something most people don’t know about your field?
Creative writing, like all the arts, is a bit of an odd fit in academia, and I think people often assume creative writing courses (and poetry writing courses in particular) are either a no-rules/no-learning zone (all crystals and butterflies and feelings, or the notion that “writing can’t be taught, it’s just talent”) or that creative writing is excessively rules bound (in the case of poetry, that it must be written in meter, and must rhyme, for example). Neither of these assumptions is true. In fact, creative writing courses are heavily focused on craft (skills and tools that a writer can use to better tell the story they have in mind) with an emphasis on the idea that writing is a practice (like religion or carpentry or yoga) and that you need to do it regularly to get much out of it. However, creative writing is an art, and it’s hard to predict what will work well for any particular poem, story, novel, or essay or what readers will respond to. That unpredictability—will this piece have the “it” factor?—leads people to think that there are no rules at all or that judging creative writing is purely subjective.
I came to poetry writing because I enjoyed the relative lack of rules in poetry. Punctuation? Optional. Grammar? Can be loose. Commitment to the left margin? Not required. All of that really appealed to me. But, in practice, I find I’m very drawn to musicality and linguistic play in poetry, which is why although I sometimes write poems that bend all the rules, I also write poems that are neo-formal. The Sweating Sickness, my third book of poetry, has a series of interconnected villanelles, for example (written during an online villanelle class taught by Annie Finch during the pandemic), as well as a series of contrapuntal poems that have been broken apart and scattered throughout the book (there’s a key at the end for how to put them back together). I think that because some of my work is very conversational or long or experimental or has a casual-at-best relationship to commas, readers are sometimes surprised to read my more formal poems, but I love playing with formal constraints and seeing what new and surprising language and imagery writing in form or meter can evoke.
What’s the best discovery you’ve made in your research/writing/teaching?
During the pandemic I decided to pursue my long-repressed dream of writing a novel. I had only studied and written poetry, and frankly I lacked the courage to take on a novel, a task that seemed daunting. What if I didn’t have the time? What if I tried and failed? However, being shut in for a year with small children and watching the world change dramatically made me less risk averse, and I decided to take the leap. If not now, then when? I’m so glad I did. I found the time, I didn’t fail, and now, my debut novel, The Beheading Game, is forthcoming from Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in March of 2026.
The Beheading Game is about Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, who was executed in 1536 after being convicted on false charges of adultery, incest, and treason. The novel begins in the hours after Anne’s execution, when she wakes up, beheaded but somehow still alive, escapes from the Tower of London, sews her head back on, and goes on a revenge quest to kill Henry VIII before he can marry Jane Seymour and produce a rival heir, thus securing the immediate ascension of her daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I. Travelling in the guise of a commoner, Anne befriends a street-smart prostitute in Southwark, who becomes her guide, friend, and maybe more, and sets out on an adventure through London and the English countryside that’s shot through with history, magic, and Arthurian legend.
The title of the novel is a reference to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the story of King Arthur’s nephew, who beheads a mysterious Green Knight on New Year’s Day (the supernatural Green Knight picks up his head and walks away) but then has to journey to the Green Knight’s home a year later to receive a return blow. Gawain valiantly shows up for his own beheading, keeping his end of the bargain, and passes the test of chivalry. All’s well that ends well, and he gets to keep his head when the Green Knight turns out to be very forgiving. Gawain is an example of a “beheading game” story, which was a trope of storytelling in the British Isles that involved stories where beheadings were “traded” between characters, one of whom was always supernatural, like the Green Knight. In The Beheading Game, readers get to see if Anne Boleyn, one of the most egregiously wronged women in history, will ultimately get to “swap” blows with the man who had her beheaded: her womanizing, power-hungry husband, Henry VIII.
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I’m so glad that I stretched myself and tried something new. Writing The Beheading Game was the most fun I’ve had writing in a long time, and it was really enjoyable to slip into somebody else’s perspective and imagine the world through their eyes, especially someone like Anne Boleyn, with a background so different from my own and who lived 500 years ago. I also really enjoyed researching for the novel. There’s a bottomless well of Tudor fandom that a person can fall down, and when I was stressed out or overwhelmed by other things in my life, I would pop on a Tudor history podcast, take my dog out for a walk, and listen to smarter people than me discuss this strange, bloody, but very fascinating period in history. If you’re looking for a new thing to be obsessed with so you don’t have to think about your problems, I highly recommend Tudor history.
Do you have a favorite classroom moment?
I often teach our senior thesis class for creative writing students. The students spend the semester writing and polishing a novel excerpt, memoir excerpt, or chapbook length collection of poetry. It’s my favorite class to teach, and I love working with them on their big capstone projects and thinking with them about what comes next after their undergraduate degrees. For some of them, it’s an MFA program. For others, careers in publishing or advertising or arts management. For some, non-adjacent graduate work, like MATs or MLSs or law school. At the end of the semester, there’s a special evening event where all the seniors read from their theses, and this is my absolute favorite moment of the semester. The students dress up, those that are local to Indiana/Chicagoland often have families in attendance, students from across campus attend, and we have snacks and a reception afterwards. They work so hard, and it’s lovely to sit back and watch them shine.
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What’s the next big thing in your field?
Trying to predict the next big thing in creative writing is a little like trying to predict the weather. You can sort of predict the next week or two, but beyond that things get very hazy. Will it snow in January? Probably. How much? Nobody knows. We all know good writing or a gripping story when we read it, but predicting what will go into making a book that’s a hit is impossible, in my opinion. This comes back to creative writing being an art. You can study and practice and hone your skills as a writer, but there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that makes writing sing—call in the muse or the zeitgeist or luck—and writers feel very fortunate when they stumble upon it.
What’s on your bedside table? What’s your next read?
I just read V. E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, a sweeping lesbian vampire cat-and-mouse romance that spans centuries and was very engrossing. That was a great last read of summer. I’ve just dived into Philippa Gregory’s new nonfiction book, Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History, which so far has not disappointed. My next read will probably be R. F. Kuang’s Katabasis.
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