WHISPERING GALLERY: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILL CORDEIRO by Rebecca Gransden
Will Cordeiro’s fiction unfurls a kindly finger and beckons you to follow an uncommon path. As you tramp along seldom visited trails, your mind wanders as much as your feet. You arrive at the peculiar, the disquieting and the mysterious, without a clue how you got there or even if you want to leave. With Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024), Cordeiro invites entry to an off-kilter world, where those who disappear into the mist entrust their steps to the uncertain ground beneath them. I spoke to the author about this curious collection. Rebecca Gransden: Some people claim that time isn’t real, that it’s just a byproduct of our mental processes—as if the mind’s cocoon prevented us from remembering the future, from knowing the past was as much alive as the present moment.What do you think of when you consider time in relation to Whispering Gallery? From when are these pieces taken? What led you to include them in the collection? Will Cordiero: First off, speaking of time, thank you for taking the time to read my book and conduct this interview. It’s always a delight to hear questions and musings from someone who’s given my work such thoughtful consideration. It means a lot, especially given how many other things, I’m sure, compete for your attention on the daily. The manipulation of temporality is one of the storyteller’s oldest tricks: to reshuffle the chronological deck, to stretch out time like a taffy-pull, to quantum leap whole centuries with a paragraph break, or to freeze the scene and rove about with the camera’s eye. But time itself is also a central subject matter of many of the pieces in Whispering Gallery. There’s a kind of time that’s the objective rate of change and then there’s a subjective sense of the onrushing flow of events as they occur in our minds, a sense which is revealed by eddies of memory, or revels in glimmering intuitions of futurity. There’s a cosmological dimension to time, as well, a question of whether time exists independent of our perceptions of it. The paradox of time is one of Kant’s antinomies, not to mention the old (the timeless?) battle between eternity and the transitory things of this world. Then there’re specific cultural senses of time, too, such as the pastoral cycle of seasons, for example. All of which is to say that these pieces often juxtapose different understandings of the temporal order. The flash form affords me brief bursts and ruptures. I try sometimes to pull the rug out from under the reader by suddenly reframing the sense of this elusive dimension. I play with both narratological tricks (how temporality gets represented in a story) and with ontological questions (what’s the nature of temporality itself). We fall in love with the world then it’s gone in a twinkling. How can you capture that mysterious, that heartbreaking flux? Every time you remember something, you change the nature of that memory—you have no access to the past, only elusive rewritings of it. Is the future fixed and fatalistic or can it be changed with our free will? Time is at the heart of so many of our most tantalizing enigmas. I’ve been writing these pieces—and others like them—for over two decades. I assembled most of my favorite oldies together and added a sprinkling of newer work, too. There were many iterations of this book over the years. Even the draft the publisher initially accepted was markedly different than the final version. Along the way, I chopped, stirred, culled, seasoned, tossed in some cayenne, simmered, let it settle. I had overlapping principles of organization. Sometimes I like the contrast between two pieces, in mood or content or style; a short piece next to a longer one, a funny punchline against a somber tale. Other times I want pieces to speak across the book, letting a theme return in a surprising manner. Maybe a piece ironically turns another on its head. There’s an infinite branching network of ways these pieces relate to each other: I didn’t want to be too heavy-handed in imposing the order. I want to allow some breathing room for the reader to find their own connections and leaps. Or even flip around and reassemble the book to their liking, skipping over some, rereading others. Which, honestly, is what many of us do anyway when we return to a collection, isn’t it? RG: Have you ever had a nickname?
(Will Cordeiro / Will Cordeiro in an anime)
WC: Funny you should ask. I’ve had nothing but nicknames. My birth certificate nominated me “Billy Joe Bush.” However, my immediate family called me “BJ” when I was young. I grew up in downstate Delaware, below the Mason-Dixon line. Not at the beach, either, which is the only area downstate anyone’s heard of. As a kid, I came up poor in the rural sticks—a land of swamps and chicken farms and trailer parks. It’s a warp-zone to the armpit of the Deep South. My mom had second thoughts. When she remarried, she had my name officially changed to “William Joseph Cordeiro.” Much fancier sounding. But I often went by “Will.” Later, in high school, that led my buddies on the track team to nickname me “Free Willy.” In college, I was dubbed “Fake” (long story). These days, I live in Mexico, so everyone who knows me here calls me “Memo,” which is the apodo for “Guillermo,” the Spanish equivalent of “William.” Constantly taking on different names probably gave me a more mutable sense of self, as if my many sobriquets were a form of cosplay, embodying different avatars and drag personas. “BJ Bush” and “Dr. Cordeiro” and “Fake” and “Memito” and the trunkful of other monikers I’ve gone by give me a malleable personality composed of aliases and fictional guises. To this day, I’m not keen to identify as any one thing: trying to locate a single locus of so-called “authenticity” seems like a mug’s game. But then, can’t most of us say, with Whitman, “I am large, I contain multitudes”? I’m not someone who’d cling to a stable narrative of self: the story of who I am changes with each retelling. Selfhood is not important. The elemental force of metamorphosis is what’s more vital. RG: Your style displays a relish for language, and an appreciation of word timbre and rhythm when it comes to construction. Do you rewrite a lot? Do you have an approach to drafting that repeats itself?WC: A few pieces—often the small ones—came close to their finished form in the first sitting. I tend to write slowly, weighing the words, waxing poetic, whittling things down even on my initial foray: I double back to adumbrate or embroider before I finish composing each sentence. Pieces emerge gradually, condensing into shape over many drafts. Yes, it is iterative: loops within loops until I’m totally loopy. On occasion, I’ll let a piece incubate in my head for some days: I work out the concept, dwell on a character, or figure out the narrative threads before hunkering down to scribble on the page. No matter, all my pieces go through countless revisions and tweaks. This collection is the fruit—the vinegar—of over two decades. I return to each piece, usually over the course of many years, fussing and fidgeting with syntax and diction, with rhythm and mouthfeel. With the grain of the voice. Even when writing stories, and not poetry, it’s very much like a musical composition where I listen for the overtones, the resonance and timbre as you deftly put it, as much as for the referential sense. Of course, with any piece I must also attend to the workaday plot, the tension, the turning points. I guard against becoming too precious, too self-indulgent, with the prose—the story’s pacing sets the momentum. After all, tempo is a crucial musical element, as well. These pieces may be miniatures, but they’re rarely minimalist in nature. I love textures and layers and lyrical excess. RG: Its antennae blinked like the cursor on a screen.Many of the pieces included in Whispering Gallery address the fundamental forces that constitute existence as we know it. Forces of nature and science that are at work while everyday life moves on. Do you view your work as having a philosophical component?WC: Sure, in the sense that many stories by, say, Calvino or Cortázar have a philosophical component. Professional academics don’t have a monopoly on philosophy. Analytic philosophy frequently has an off-putting, pedantic tone anyway. It often presumptuously arrogates the rules of the game to its own methods. Yet, for me, philosophy can also be the everyday process of reflecting, interpreting, questioning: of reconciling oneself to life. Besides, lockstep, knockdown arguments rarely compel me. Instead, I’m more intrigued by paradoxes and dilemmas. I like it when stories contain an enigma, or as Sebald says somewhere, a spectral trace of a ghost. Stories can act as thought experiments and intuition pumps. They help us deliberate ethical situations; they provoke us to imagine stranger, more far-ranging metaphysical possibilities; they sharpen our epistemic knives, showing us ways our equipment might be limited or faulty. My own thinking is so often unsettled. To dwell on any idea begins to disorient me. The hermeneutical circle’s not a smooth wheel—it’s wobbly and oblong, punctured by disruptions and bafflements and afflictions of doubt. My own elliptical insights can swing from sudden revelations to ignominious defeats. In many cases, it’s this inner adventure that I portray in my characters; that I want to recreate in my readers. I try to use tools like defamiliarization, humor, skepticism, and irony to move my readers, to incite new recognitions, to instigate a playful tension between differing values or perspectives. I don’t aim for any foregone conclusion. I hope my work acts as an invitation to contemplate nuances and ambiguities, at times holding contradictions in abeyance. Perhaps my work can cultivate a richer sense of “reality,” whatever that means. Or perhaps it only impels a reaching-forth amid vast ranges of uncertainty, a bewitchment of one’s curiosity. Stories can cast enduring spells. Don’t most of us want stories that can make the humdrum world thrum once more with the undercurrents of its secret magic? Plato and Aristotle both believed philosophy begins in wonder, which is the same place most of my stories start from, too. RG: Everyone had gone to sleep in the city. I wondered if the buildings might vanish—if they were only the collective apparition of the inhabitants. It was dark out my window. Only pinpoints of glister winkled in doubt: starburst, lamp-glow, hallucinations. The streets were empty. Wherever the people were, they must be dreaming of something else.“Lucid Moment” makes reference to hallucination and dream logic. What part do altered states play in Whispering Gallery?WC: I enjoy those moments when reading can induce a tripped-out and ecstatic wakefulness. Imagining a story is a bit like concocting an illusion: it’s knowingly dwelling within this hallucinatory space you’ve projected. Visionary flashes of perception don’t need to come from a mind on drugs or dreams or yogic navel-gazing or religious epiphany or tantric sex or Neuralink—though all those scenarios can be interesting. Merely thinking can be a kind of drug almost, generating a giddying habitation of umbras and insights; and thinking (one might think) is an activity that’s intrinsic to minds. To talk about “altered states,” you’d need a baseline of what a normal state of consciousness would be, right? To me, consciousness itself has a magical quality to it. If my work appears to explore altered states of consciousness, perhaps it’s a way to goad readers into recognizing the spooky inner workings of their own apprehensions; a method to defamiliarize and thus reenchant the world. If milk is the mildest of liquors, as Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus, maybe meditation—whether lovelorn or logical, lucid or ludicrous—is one of the strongest. RG: “A New Realism” raises some interesting questions on deception, authenticity, artistic practice and the right to privacy. What is your approach to the promotion of your work? How important is privacy to you?WC: I’m not temperamentally a self-promoter. No shyster barking and jiving, I. No desire to be an influencer, a marketeer, a celebrity shilling their own brand. Power, money, fame: none of ‘em’s my bag. Of course, I’ll exercise my power by voting; I want enough money to have the leisure time to read and write, to travel a bit, to afford healthcare; I’m not such a recluse holed up in my room that I won’t saunter out to give a talk once in a blue moon or respond to interview questions such as you’ve been so kind to ask. There’s no real danger of my becoming renowned or popular, in this lifetime anyway—it’s not like I need to disguise myself in sunglasses and a big floppy hat on the street or use assumed names at hotels to avoid the paparazzi. I don’t need to retreat from all media appearances to go plunk myself in a cave in New Hampshire. As if. But maybe I do live in a cave, sort of. And not just a Platonic one, like we all do. I mean—I’m not on any social media. Isn’t that pretty hermitic, hermetic even, in this age? I just find it a huge brain-rotting time-suck which is disastrous for one’s mental health as well as the health of the body politic. So, I’m also not famous to ten people, either, the way a lot of folks are these days. It's not that I’m private per se. But I tend to resist drawing connections between fiction and real life, as your question does here, for example. I doubt there’s some childhood trauma that’s fed my writing or some ghastly secret I’ve been hiding that impels me to tell stories. Whatever tales I spin out about myself probably obfuscate as much as they illuminate anyhow; I spin them out because it’s my nature to unspool these spider-spit writerly threads. One story hides behind another. Looking for the root of a text in an author’s supposed lived experience is an ubiquitous move in literary culture nowadays since audiences want to know about the author, hear anecdotes, feel connected to the source as if they could thereby come into contact with the work’s aura. Or maybe it’s just that authors are reduced to media “personalities” since often audiences haven’t read—don’t want to read the work. I’ve met a fair number of authors, and the majority are just regular Uncle Jim-bobs or Aunt Mays; some are a little dopey or true snoozefests. Others are snooty academics or anxious fusspots or doddering busybodies. They’re a scrapheap’s worth of skipjack jackanapes spooning boondoggerel. Myself perhaps included. (I’m ambivalent—as I am about most things). Authors come in all types. But a literary work distills an author’s ideas into their wittiest and most vivacious expression, if the author’s any good. Why should it surprise us, then, to feel disappointed when the incarnate human being can’t live up to those expectations? “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—too?” as Dickinson said. Who wants to end up “public—like a frog—”? I’d rather be the prince of my own solitary room, voyaging around my head. Sometimes I wonder if writing is a ceremony converting the stuff of our language—what could be more public? common as air—into the fabric of our interiority; and simultaneously airing our most inward-turning thoughts into chirps and croaks. RG: Looking back now, years later, the whole city seems an underworld, an air of cinders, foreshadowing its own downfall. A field of cenotaphs. Long rows of ruins frozen into schlag and marzipan. Pediments like dinosaurs. Everything half buried under the weight of what it once had been.Frequently Whispering Gallery contains a tension between the immediacy of your descriptions and a more contemplative framing. Are there pieces that stand out to you as being a memorable experience to write?WC: In what sense can you say that you will your thoughts? Thoughts, the better ones at any rate, often come unbidden. We do not think our thoughts; our thoughts think us. Writing usually occurs when I’m pinballed around by powers almost outside myself. The sounds entangle their own eerie melodies; ideas stray paths of errant logic; characters chatter in voices not my own. It’s not that I throw my voice—rather, I’m thrown by the voices. They ventriloquize me. Where these thoughts and voices come from remains something of a mystery. You harvest them from reading and experience, perhaps. They are what we vaguely term “imagination.” You can make yourself receptive to them, a quivering electrometer that picks up the subtle variations in magnetic charges that coruscate the atmosphere. But who has the muse on speed dial? No matter how much you plan, there’s always an element of spontaneity. The voices can’t be summoned at will. The best you can do is prepare and practice, listen and long for them to return. Afterward, the editorial and critical parts of your brain apply the scalpel to shape this material into a more handsomely polished, more sure-handed form. My descriptions often try to shed light on earthly flora and fauna, figuring the minutiae of landscapes and the immensity of dreamscapes, thereby gesturing toward how invariably blind we are to the larger cosmos around us. They juxtapose scales and temporalities, points of view and paradigms. Still, we don’t call a stone blind. As Heidegger says, blindness afflicts only those beings who are capable of seeing. To ask whether someone is blind foreshadows—shadows forth—the very possibility of their having the nature of a being with sight. I try to trace the contours of both our perceptions and our presumptions. I attempt to look closer at the things around us while reframing the background concepts that inform how we see those things. It’s this dual, this dialectical unfolding that unveils how the seemingly immediate experiences of our own body and environment are, nevertheless, already mediated by our mental and corporeal equipment. To see anew is to recognize that one has, all along, been blind to the world; and maybe thereby to recognize that this new sight could, upon another disclosure, reveal itself as a type of blindness, too. There may be no end to revelation.RG: For “Sadness” the world you create sees an air of melancholy descend. If eras are defined by a prevailing mood, what do you view as the tone of these times we are living through?WC: Chaos? Malignant asociality? A giddy, trollish nihilism? It’s hard to understand the era we’re living through. These, unfortunately, are interesting times. In my youth, reading history with the aid of hindsight, I’d often wonder how people could be taken in by the Know-Nothing Party or William Jennings Bryant’s “Cross of Gold Speech” or other such flights of demagoguery. Today, living through a tumultuous period of history, I’m equally baffled by how a good chunk of the populace can be hoodwinked by criminals and charlatans. Confidence men worry great pearls of falsehood upon tiny grains of truth. Then again, there’s plenty of born suckers. The broligarchs can manipulate people in nearly clandestine ways: think how innocuously an app might change its terms and conditions, for example, or the way algorithms spread misleading stories much faster than true ones. Lots of folks are upset, at what or whom they’re often not sure, and that very anger is then redirected to their disadvantage. The ethos of “move fast and break things” has become a goal unto itself, writ large. Democracy depends on an infrastructure of news sources, public forums, civic organizations, educational institutions. These are being atomized, privatized, or wiped out so that the robber barons can have unregulated control to exploit and extract wealth. Most people are too preoccupied with their everyday drudgery to pay attention, read, participate in their communities, or make art; this leads to a vicious cycle where the oligarchs can turn the screws on a disengaged and uninformed citizenry, beating you down and fleecing you even more. Everything’s a distraction from something worse on the horizon. Doomscrolling might be a good metaphor for how the system uses our own anxiety against us: we can’t help rubbernecking the wreckage that our tech addiction itself has caused. To bicker about the problem only fuels the flames—and flame wars—higher. We’re too burnt out to care that a handful of folks are burning it all down. Climate change isn’t happening fast enough for some folks, I guess. We’re accelerating toward a corpocratic state, a zombified corpse state, the necrotic triage of vulture capitalism: escalating scarcity for the many, overwhelming plenitude for a vanishingly few. But people just keep going about their business because business is what people do. RG: What was your conceptual framework for “The Lost Gospel of Caiaphas”?WC: I think the initial inspiration was reading excerpts from some of the Gnostic Gospels and chapters from Elaine Pagel’s book of that name. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts were discovered in 1945 and only made readily available to the public in the 1980s. They were Coptic papyri discovered by an Egyptian farmer in a sealed jar with a likely provenance of the 4th century—and their impact was revolutionary, upending the scholarly understanding of the historical foundations of Christianity.Too, rewriting the gospel narrative is a veritable subgenre unto itself—novelistic examples include The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Saramago); The Gospel According to the Son (Mailer); Figuras de la Pasión del Señor (Gabriel Miró); and King Jesus (Graves). Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist is one I recommend. Siddhartha by Hesse or Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra do something similar in other religious traditions. Apocrypha and heretical accounts have their appeal. They are the marginalized and forgotten stories that were refused a place in the church, that is, the dominant version of the church we know now—the one which survived from competing sects and schisms that cropped up as early as St. Paul (or one might claim, as early as the disciples themselves). At a time when revisionary histories (on the left) and “alternative facts” (on the right) are popular, when everyone questions the official version of a tale, when nobody is satisfied with a univocal canon, it makes sense that apocrypha would have its allure. Besides, the canonical gospels themselves are four wildly different stories that vary both in style and substance. There’s already a pluralism built-in to the structure of the gospels. Their gaps and contradictions gesture that no single version is definitive. Co-opting a gospel-like narrative gave me the freedom to appropriate a simple yet vatic tone to write parables, proverbs, and epigrams—to make mystical pronouncements: it’s a type of writing that, while I find it has a uniquely enthralling energy, can be very difficult to pull off in contemporary English without some such framing device. One can’t make oracular, rhapsodic pronouncements in propria persona. Yet, once that framework was established, I felt disinhibited and could make witty underhanded comments against authority, tell stories that took on different significations to different audiences, and challenge the reader’s habitual understanding of traditional values—all things that the gospel narratives (whether apocryphal or not) are often so good at, though we sometimes can’t appreciate their weirdness and originality. RG: There’s an erotic charge around these objects: they’re ghosts leftover from being handled. Things you would find in any mall, swap meet, flea market are transfigured at every turn. A remote control appears moon-beamed in from science fiction. A salad fork looks like a cannibal’s keepsake.The ordinary is given fresh perspective in “The Museum of Ordinary Objects”. As well as raising questions on the meaning attached to such objects, the story invites speculation on the nature of viewing in itself. How do you view this story? If you were curator of your own Museum of Ordinary Objects, what would you exhibit?WC: I went gallery-hopping during ART WKD GDL last Saturday. In one gallery, you couldn’t tell where the curated displays ended and the unfinished work and raw materials of the studio began. There was a Xeroxed paper affixed to the wall with blue painter’s tape next to the painting the image on the paper was of. Was this just the haphazard environment of a working artist’s studio or was it some kind of self-referential meta-conceptual hijinks? I liked not being able to tell. Across town, in a different gallery, I entered an empty room. My partner was looking at a prominent pile of debris exhibited at the center of the floor: multicolored paint flakes and assortments of concrete gobs were framed against the checkerboard tiles. This one was my favorite piece so far, I thought: the paint could be house paint from the wall; the dust could be the crumbling wall itself. It made me feel the transitory nature of the space—the visceral, immolating decadence of ruin porn. The whole site-specific exhibit up to this point had been about repurposing stretched canvas and frames and painterly materials in a sculptural, almost environmental way, that referenced the architecture of the gallery itself (it was a house designed by Luis Barragán). Barragán’s architecture transforms spaces into planes of color; the artist, by contrast, transformed planes of color into spaces. While we were rubbing our chins, shrewdly observing the piece, along comes the gallerist with a broom—sorry, she says, we’re still getting everything settled. In certain frames of mind, I inhabit a world where any object can become a Duchampian readymade. I’m reawakened to its aesthetic dimensions, its anthropological significance, the Barthesian mythologies it extrudes. I observe an item’s singular quiddity; its multivalent symbolism. Every point is the origin of the universe; every node stands at a crux reticulating it into the warp and weft of meaning. Perhaps I’m low-key infected by the disorienting palpitations in the presence of beauty, a condition known as Stendhal syndrome. Art has a way to induce a manic state in me at times. Or maybe it’s the mania of the gorging eye or florid mind that imbues an object, any object really, with the same arresting qualities we seek out when we view great works of art. It’s the opposite of museum fatigue. Looking can become a frenzy that feeds upon itself, rendering the dizzying optics of scopophilia. Any ol’ junk—gum-wrapper, paperclip, tissue box—begins to iffily shimmer and zing with ineffable brindles of import. It’s not the object that matters, it’s one’s susceptibility to cozy to it with a rigorous vulnerability. The process of being whelmed in the sheer presence of something, looking deeply at it, prompts a scatterbrained brainstorming, an ornery—an incorrigible—associational vigor where a thing becomes at once dis-cultured, relieved of its habitual connotations, and yet enwoven into countless symbolic networks. RG: “Masquerade Store” presents an ordinary town caught in the spell of a business that sells masks, identities. A deep sense of unease unfolds as the town’s nature is changed. How do you approach high concept stories? Where does the weird come into play in your fiction?WC: “Masquerade Store” was a later piece I added to the collection. I’m still uncertain if it really captures the full sense of unease I was going for. I’m glad to hear you think it works. During the writing process, there were a few adjustments that helped. I created two turning points in the story. What at first seems like a description from an impersonal third-person narrator about the facts of a garden-variety, deteriorating town (though it is “our town”) emerges as a fulsomely first-person voice about midway in the story, where you realize the narrator is implicated and complicit in the events being described. This shift of perspective, of narratorial vantage, relocates the stakes involved and may also undermine the seeming objectivity of the first part with hints of unreliability. What once appeared to be a sociological description of a town retrospectively turns into a fucked-up person’s defense tactic to distance himself from his problems by using a more clinical, arm’s-length tone. Another turning point occurs near the end, when the narrator suddenly gazes off into the distance, using a collective voice, “we.” The yearning both to watch banal superhero movies and to dress-up as some powerful if exoticized “other” is exposed, at the end, to be predicated upon inchoate heroic longings. A grandeur that’s glimpsed in sunlit oracles and sublime flames but cannot be realized, a longing that ultimately casts each person further adrift in their lonely quest to circumvent the self as much as to find it. Yet such drift, we might say, is what unites the citizens of the town as a civic body, too. Who one is must be projected and absorbed from those around one in a hall of mirrors; yet, doing so requires a motive power of self-transformation. Heck, rereading the story now, I realize that the third-person voice quite quickly begins ventriloquizing in the second person, using “you” in a way that is ambiguous between meaning an anonymous, impersonal “one,” calling out the real reader, or addressing a particular person offstage. This is even before the first-person voice fully emerges. These peculiar gear-shifts between points-of-view and subtle changes in tone help convey the breakdown of coherent identities the town is undergoing, whether these devices are explicitly noticed or not when you’re reading. Still, each story is different: a lot of my writing is a search not only for a compelling plotline, but for the adequate technical means to have a story express some conceptual dilemma, oftentimes one that’s a bit abstruse, so that it’s uncanny, disquieting, and affecting for the reader. RG: The collection was released by DUMBO Press on 31st October 2024—Halloween. For stories where the veil between worlds of strangeness is thin, this is a wildly appropriate date to present the book to the world. How have you found the experience of releasing the book? What is next for you?WC: Yes, Halloween felt like the perfect release date for this collection! These are eerie, metaphysical tales influenced by the likes of magical realism and Gothic and absurdism and offbeat speculative fiction. I’m happy to see Whispering Gallery launched into the world. To hold the tangible book validates the years of effort—the writing feels more real than when it consisted of dozens of little stories trapped on my computer or floating around online lit journals, many of which are now defunct. It’s gratifying when I gain readers. I’m very thankful DUMBO picked it up. At the end of the day, though, this book’s an odd duckling published by a small press. It won’t be everybody’s jam. That’s ok. My hope is that a handful of readers will really crush on it. Maybe a book goes in search of its true readers. Whatever others think, I write because I enjoy the process. The grind of sitting down to peck at my keyboard can feel ecstatic and ravishing. I’ll give two-three readings or talks, a couple interviews (like this one), maybe get a review or two if I’m lucky. That’s the nature of small press publishing. Small presses provide a space for such queer birds to take flight or just waddle around—for books to pursue their own ideals, and authors their own evolution, largely outside the pressures of the mainstream marketplace. I have several other projects on tap in different stages of completion. I’m currently sending out my second poetry manuscript while tidying up poems for another. I’ve been slowly accumulating essays for a nonfiction book, mostly dealing with art and travel, which has also taken decades to compose. And I just started a notebook to jot down plot points and outlines as I ideate my first novel. I write plays and operas on the side, too: I just wrapped up a new three-act opera that was produced last year, which could use a few rewrites maybe. But my most concerted task currently is completing a textbook, The New Foundations of Creative Writing, which I’m writing with my long-time collaborator, Lawrence Lenhart. Our pitch just got a contract offer from Bloomsbury. We started this project from all the material we couldn’t fit in the first textbook we wrote together, Experimental Writing, which came out from Bloomsbury last year. Most introductory textbooks in the discipline feel twenty years out of date. It’s a very contentious time in the field—there’s a lot of debates and changes taking place in the discourse, both within academia and the industry; that will make this book quite a challenge. Or maybe that’s why we’re the only ones foolish enough to attempt such a preposterous errand?