An Interview with Will Cordeiro

The 21st century artist faces a balancing act between integrating with society and all that this entails— email notifications, insurance payments, twitter addictions, and so on— while simultaneously aspiring towards creative freedom.  Personally, I’ve faced this struggle. I dropped out of graduate school in a STEM field to write novels, then returned to school upon realizing the harsh reality of needing to make money. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I’d gone full “van Gogh mode” and devoted myself entirely to an artist’s lifestyle.

Will Cordeiro had the huevos to make that choice. While he’s still connected enough to email me (his publisher), he’s living as close to fully "off-the-grid" as one can imagine in 2024 while still publishing a book: no cell phone, no car, living in Mexico, spending his time traveling, reading, and writing. And he has chosen all of this after earning an Ivy League PhD and years of teaching as a professor. 

I can’t claim to know Will very well. We’ve had one Zoom call, I’ve read his book twice, and we’ve exchanged about 100 emails, mostly logistical. But through his writing and this interview, he’s left a deep impression on me. Like a fifth-grader looking up to a sixth-grader, I find myself wanting to know everything about him—who, what, where, when, why, and how—because I have a feeling that he has figured some stuff out that I haven't yet.

This interview offers a glimpse into Will’s world, and I encourage you to read his responses carefully. In this interview, Will touches on his perspectives on literature, the writing process, and his life choices. He offers deeply considered, philosophical reflections on what literature can be— more than a medium for communication, but a space where meaning is constructed through each reader’s unique interaction with the text. He also speaks candidly about the sacrifices and tensions inherent in devoting oneself fully to the craft of writing. 

I hope you enjoy reading this interview as much as I did. I had to throw in one selfish question, asking for his top five favorite films, because I want to watch them.


What would be the pinnacle reading experience of Whispering Gallery that you'd hope a reader might have? Would it be a professor in tweed, sipping tea while deconstructing your prose, or someone so moved they ugly-cry on public transit and have to explain it to a concerned stranger? Or something else entirely?

Those are both valid ways to read. This summer I read Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard for the first time and ended up crying at the end I was so moved. Another tearjerker I read this summer was Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom. I’m not one to prescribe intellectual approaches over emotional ones or vice versa. Once a work leaves the author’s hands and enters into cultural circulation, it takes on a life of its own. Each reader responds to a text with their own insights and preoccupations. The richer a text is, the more it affords—the more it calls out for—a variety of interpretations and responses. In fact, who am I to object if someone uses my book to line the bottom of their birdcage? I have a bird, as well, and like to hear its songs. There are many uses for a text, many valid ways of reading, or consuming, a book. 

So, on the one hand, I guess I’m deeply agnostic about the fate of anything I write. It’s up to you what you want to do with a story; how it affects you—how you let it affect you. A piece of literature shouldn’t need the author to stand over its readers’ shoulders instructing them how to feel or think or understand. The nature of reading is that it offers us a provisional kind of freedom: it’s a medium through which we can imagine unforeseen perspectives and experience a world different from our own. And thus, there’s a certain xenophilia in the act of reading, an attraction to the strange and unfamiliar. The ambiguity within a literary text provides leeway for its readers to co-create. The reader actively constructs its meanings in a way that’s always open to reexamination. Each meaning is tentative, yet somehow more meaningful for being so.

Now, most of the writing we encounter every day is not literature, but rhetoric: advertisements, social media, news, emails, traffic signs, nutrition facts, Ikea instructions for assembling a chair. All these have designs upon us. Literature, by contrast, invites us to question and contemplate; it circumvents any singular purpose. It offers us an occasion to interpret—a text that requires interpretation is necessarily ambiguous. By wrestling with the language of a piece of literature, one also wrestles with one’s own beliefs, emotions, and values; and, by extension, with the entire complex of culture and history that one’s beliefs, emotions, and values transpire within or against.

On the other hand, I wonder if I’m dodging your question. As an author, I’m not here to tell you what to do. That ship has sailed. Whatever tides and winds my little book finds will determine its course from here. As a mere fellow reader, sure, I have plenty of opinions. I prefer texts that entreat me to reread them, texts that have some enigmatic crux which both seduces and resists me. This “playing-hard-to-get” feels important to my favorite moments of reading. The joy and shock and pain the text gives induces me to reread the line over and over. Perhaps some would liken it to repeating a trauma; I like to think of it as the thrill of the chase. But the chase isn’t necessarily immediate. I enjoy texts that slowly reveal themselves, so that when I revisit them years or decades later, I am astonished by how different they seem—how different I seem. At every juncture of interpretation, the reader transforms the text, and the text, in turn, transforms the reader. It’s not that I pursue this interpretive chase in hopes that the text would somehow give up its essential bafflement, either. The chase is its own reward. Ultimately, the only answer for the questions a literary text presents might be producing another artwork with its own indelible mysteries.  

Do you write as a form of therapy for yourself, or more to communicate with others?

Neither. 

I don’t think writing is therapy, exactly—at least, not for me. Of course, human flourishing requires us to exercise our creative impulses, I wouldn’t dispute that. And the freedom we experience when writing or interpreting a thorny text can be taken as an idealized analogue for the freedom of creating and contending within a political sphere, to some degree. 

But there is also another side to writing, I’d venture. Poetry could well act as a destructive force. Maybe writing is my addiction. Perhaps literature tears me apart and rends me more lovelorn, febrile, or useless for common tasks. I’d surmise that spending hours each day reading and writing probably makes me more of an oddball, perhaps unsuits me for the unthinkingly go-along-to-get-along habits that more functional and productive members of society possess. I’m not that interested in being well-adjusted. I’ll clutch my pen like others clutch their cigarette. I live for the next sweet hit, knowing full well it’s slowly killing me.

Pebble by pebble, day after day, Ferdinand Cheval, a nineteenth-century French postman, built up a hallucinatory castle, the Palais Ideal, from the stones he collected on his daily rounds. I imagine him gradually ground down by their weight, sinking under the labor of fortifying the walls of his imaginative folly. He hoped to be buried within it. To construct his ideal, he had to endure the travails that sucked the life from him, that wore away at the humdrum reality of delivering his missives.

Therapeutic uses of art seem reductive to me. Or, to put it another way: I doubt you’re going to alleviate your suffering and anxiety by becoming an artist. If you read biographies of artists and writers, you’ll find most of them are a little off-kilter if not seriously deranged if not actually suicidal. A lot of problems might stem with a society that is ill or dysfunctional, and, by adjusting to it, we’d be capitulating to or exacerbating its problems. To give an example, a friend who’s also a therapist wanted to teach me to drive because, I suppose, she thought it’d make me better adjusted—but driving abets this terrible car-centric culture that harms the environment and our own health. I still don’t drive.

To address the other part of your question, I also certainly don’t write literature to communicate. Frankly, I’m not sure what is meant by “communication.” We conventionally think of communication involving a “message” one is trying to convey from one mind to another. That model of communication befits rhetoric, polemic, instruction manuals. Often that type of writing is trying to persuade or manipulate its reader, and I’m not interested in producing propaganda. Literature also isn’t an academic paper where you want a clear thesis that you convey to your audience. I’m not seeking some tablet of truth to readily hold up as the law nor some slick tablet I can get people to swallow.

The type of stories I write contain gaps, elisions, aporias—spaces where the reader is invited to fill in and animate. Readers electrify the text through the voltage of their own affective concerns. They ionize it with their own ideas and perspectives. Most writing probably operates above or below the level of any so-called “message.” It communicates closer to the manner a disease is communicated, by vectors of contagion. Poetry, as John Stuart Mill famously said, is what is overheard; or perhaps literature is heard at a distance, more like rumor, gossip, or a game of telephone. My title Whispering Gallery hints as much—a title, by the way, which John Ashbery rejected for the book that became As Umbrellas Follow Rain. Anywho, I like it when there’s always other whispers and murmurations to listen for, overtones and subvocalizations from a room over.  

That said, in all likelihood, the binary I’ve set up between “rhetoric” and “literature” doesn’t hold much water. These are two polarities. Most texts are not pure literature, if there could be such a thing, neither are they crass salesmanship nor some other rhetoric to induce a predetermined action. They’re mixtures and muddles. They’re riddled, skewbald, plural. 

For example, the dull accounting of Sumerian livestock trades, once it has eroded into a rune scriven on rubble, suddenly holds more literary interest for us, due to its inscrutability and the difficulty of ascertaining the meaning of its historical record. So, something completely mundane and rhetorical also holds literary potential; and literature, conversely, can be repackaged and harnessed for decidedly partisan aims, obviously. I wonder if interpretation itself puts literature in the service of some rhetorical strategy, cashing it out into circumscribed tokens and scrips, and thus the most unalloyed and intransigent forms of literature countermand any interpretation. At any rate, I like texts that hint any interpretation or translation is inadequate.               

Your writing style is unlike anything I’ve read. It’s rich with advanced vocabulary, yet you avoid sounding overly academic or pretentious, staying grounded in sensory details—how a situation looks, tastes, smells, sounds, etc. Where did you learn to write like that?

Thank you. I’m happy you enjoy my writing.

I try to read widely, across cultures, historical periods, and genres. I like out-of-the-way words, sure, but I don’t want to employ them simply to sound fancy or more erudite. I try to marshal the full range of English diction in my work, scavenging from different registers and discourses; at the same time, I try to remain conscious of the weight and impact each word has on the whole. English is glutinous—a gluttonous agglomeration of both Germanic and Romance language roots, among many other bits and bobs. This hybridity has allowed it to sweep up all sorts of strange words into its maw. I think the Oxford English Dictionary is larger than that of any other dictionary in the world, in fact. This heterogeneity makes English anguished, a fraught lather of divergent idioms, an omnigatherum of many-headed versions, a huddle mass of endless variations.   

Slang, jargon, archaisms, colloquial phrases, onomatopoeia, neologisms, portmanteau, macaronics, and nifty terms that are tucked away or underutilized—all these provide a rich texture and mouthfeel for cooking up my witch’s brew. It’s no mistake, my work tends to be more “cooked” than “raw.” Still, I delight in lowbrow expressions and sleazy locutions more than academic ones. I particularly enjoy the frisson when incongruent discourses bump up against each other, rub together, and spit out little sparks. Whereas minimalism has its appeal, too frequently many contemporary writers can default to a listless, dishwatery middle register, failing to take advantage of the more vimsome and impish resources that English offers. Put another way, I try to give my English a little “english,” some backspin and zing to ricochet its magic 8-ball into the corner pocket.   

I’m happy to strike out on my own, mostly ignoring the au courant fashions and the literary mode du jour. I completely ignore considerations of audience and market when I’m writing. I like trying out different styles. I want to please myself foremost. I seek that sense of pieces snapping into place. I’m predisposed to the “lyric,” but that doesn’t mean my writing’s all ratchet sonorities and oracular excess. I like dissonant wolf tones and blue notes as much as Mozartian harmonies, strafing belly-growls as much as a steady ground bass. Counterpoint and rounded twang, feedback static and reedy timbres, catgut grating on Zildjians and some skitter-scratching skip-scat-scuzz on a set of turntables: you want to have ’em all in your bag when you’re poking about with a composition. 

As for the way I approach imagery, these pieces are rooted in sinuous, sensuous details. There is often a dialectic between what is seen and what is known. And there’s frequently a hint—a risk—that perception may prove ultimately deceptive.

In most contemporary fiction, on the contrary, description plays the role of simply nominating the dramatis personae and setting, suggesting “inner” characterizations from “outer” appearances. We read the surface of a scene or personage to locate certain telling qualities that reveal the corresponding, essential reality which lurks below. Within the wrought construction of the fictive world, particular markers of material existence—shape of a mustache, cut of a dress, gait of a walk—are transformed into spiritual symbols of a character, for example. Eventually, there’s little that needs to be fully conjured and looked at since things become synonymous with their symbolic import, and the plot moves briskly forward. A few symbols stand-in as shorthand for the thing itself. 

Contrariwise to this dominant mode of fiction, I often invoke description in a “painterly” way, portraying the shimmery distortion on flowing water or the refracting glints that discompose, say, a metal napkin ring. Like in certain paintings, the viewer can discern the object, the brushwork, and the raw impressions of qualia, depending on emphasis or focal distance. Stand far enough back, you see the landscape. Step closer, and it dissolves into transient flecks of light and pointillistic phosphorescence. Readjust your eyes again, and the canvas reveals the strokes, daubs, dabs, drips, and streaks of its making, the texture of its medium. Such description tends to be what I’d deem phenomenological, holding in abeyance the presuppositions one has about existence, instead working to reconstitute an understanding of any X by burrowing backward into the minutiae of our perceptions of it. Sometimes, this effort quite dissolves any notion of object, fact, or essence into a lustrous if not illusory order. Indeed, at times our taken-for-granted concepts such as time, space, or personhood can be subverted or reexamined. In a similar manner, many painterly effects—foreshortening, chiaroscuro, eccentric color palettes—not only present what we see but also represent how we see it. My fiction attempts to do likewise.   

Do you consider the prose in Whispering Gallery to be a significant departure from your previous work, Trap Street, or more of a fluid evolution?

I’d say I’ve worked on the two books in parallel for many years. Trap Street is a collection of poems, many of which use meter, rhyme, and traditional forms. I worked on Trap Street for close to fifteen years, and it came out in 2021. I’ve been writing Whispering Gallery—a collection of weird flash pieces—for well over a decade. I tend to write lots of individual pieces over a long period of time. I keep revising old pieces while creating new pieces; eventually, some semblance of a book takes shape, a sensibility congeals, a coherence of themes and approaches converge. 

One of my writing heroes is Fernando Pessoa, who created a whole literary universe of heteronyms. I, too, feel that I write in diverse modes—sometimes, almost, with divergent personalities—that manifest most acutely when undertaking works in different genres or styles. I’ve written stage plays and textbooks, creative nonfiction, longer fiction works, and opera librettos, as well. Each work conjures a new side of me, whether of the voices I’m throwing or that I’m thrown by. In fact, it’s possible some of my work has more unity than my embodied authorial “self,” whatever that is. 

Flash pieces simply don’t have much room for character development. And my plots, such as they are, may have one or two twists, but these are as likely to be turning points in narrative structure as they are conceptual voltas, as in a sonnet, or the overlaps that connect braids in a lyric essay. The brevity of flash forms of prose means I’m not tethered to narrative development as much, to the conventions of open or closed endings, for example. Or domestic marriage plots. Dreary themes of adultery. Or archetypes of the hero’s journey. I do love plots—don’t get me wrong. But the conventionalism of most plot mechanisms and the rigidified elements of genre often make many novels a bit fraught and overdetermined for me. Flash is a way to work outside of—or, maybe beside, at one remove from—those constraints, adopting only so much of conventional plots and narrative archetypes as I wish.   

What I find flash forms can do quite well, however, is immerse us within a fictive world, crystallizing the experience of swimming in a unique sensorium. I am attracted to fiction that invents metaphysical possibilities, but that grounds such an investigation in the weltering ectoplasm of perceptual impressions, affects, and intuitions by which its characters try to make sense of what reality might lie within or beyond their minds. Everyone, including the solipsists among us, project some workaday fiction to fill in the gaps about the unknown beyond: we live half on the ground, half in the air of our own conjectures, especially about the motives and emotions of other people. Where can truth be found when we’re all unreliable narrators? Such moments of imbalance—leaps of perception, pivots of worldview, boomeranging aperçus, and false epiphanies—can be captured in the quick click of recognition, that flash of insight, which the form offers.  

What are your top five favorite films? 

Making lists of one's favorites is hard. Ask me again in a week, and I'm sure to have changed my mind. So, off the top of my head, I'll list five films I really enjoy in no particular order:

1. Satan's Brew (1976) directed by Rainer Maria Fassbinder
2. Trouble in Paradise (1932) directed by Ernst Lubitsch
3. The Visitor (2024) directed by Bruce LaBruce (a "remake" of Pasolini's Teorema) 
4. Spring Breakers (2012) directed by Harmony Korine
5. Schizopolis (1996) directed by Steven Soderbergh

A couple more that come to mind are the body horror film Sick of Myself (2022) directed by Kristoffer Borgli and the Soviet avant-documentary Man with a Movie Camera (1929) directed by Dziga Vertov. Speaking of Soviet films, there's the sci-fi film Stalker (1979) directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and the Soviet-Armenian film The Color of Pomegranates (1969) directed by Sergei Parajanov that are mind-blowing, too. I also saw a wonderful new Cuban film, Fenómenos Naturales (2024) directed by Marcos Díaz Sosa, at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Guadalajara a few months ago. I'll use this question as an excuse to add that I'm largely disheartened by the consolidation of corporate subscription platforms like Netflix and Amazon, which balkanize and constrain the availability of filmic archives. In Tucson, where I lived for a couple years, there is a local institution, Casa Video, a two-story video rental palace which remains a cinephile's mecca. I'm so glad there's a few places like that still around, as well as independent, art house, and university cinemas and film festivals where I can catch more out-of-the-way fare.   

When we began discussions about publishing Whispering Gallery, you mentioned you’d be without WiFi in the Australian outback for several weeks. What'd you see there?

Well, I think I said I’d be in the Australia bush—not outback. Americans often confuse those two terrains. The bush is the hinterland forest or jungle, along the country’s East Coast. The outback is a vast, sparsely populated desert region in the interior and toward the West. After living for over a decade in Arizona, I was more interested in exploring the rainforest and coasts than another desert. 

When my partner and I finally arrived near dusk at the remote Green Cape Lighthouse near Disaster Bay, after many hours of driving and finally trundling 20 kilometers over a muddy washboard road at the end of our day’s journey, we found a wombat digging up the yard on one side and a wallaby munching on tufts of grass on our other side. In the shimmering seaside distance, past the waves dashing across a rocky promontory, whales fluked and spouted. On our hike the next morning, we discovered the dwarf forests surrounding us held all manner of neon-colored mushrooms among the deadwood and stumps. 

Raymond Island was another magical spot. After taking a brief ferry ride across a jetty, you walk among a nature sanctuary with untold numbers of kangaroos and koalas. In Narooma, we saw fur seals cavorting in the inlet and a fever of giant rays gliding along the shore below the dockside boardwalk. Near both Gold Coast and Cairnes, we saw fruit bats and flying foxes. Giant clams and sea turtles abounded at the Great Barrier Reef. Birds galore, too, all over—we spotted rainbow lorikeets, cockatoos, galas, kookaburras; and even a rare lyrebird in the rainforest in Bournda National Park, where we also beachcombed through tidepools while troops of kangaroos hopped about the sandflats. The only echidna I saw, unfortunately, was roadkill. They eat ants, so they’re not as common to spot in the colder months, apparently. We didn’t see any snakes either, thankfully, since it was winter there: Australia has many poisonous snakes. But we saw plenty of “bin chickens,” the nickname Aussies give their ubiquitous white ibis.

We also dipped our toes in the three big cities: Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney. Brisbane’s situated along the elbows and crooks of its river, a booming metropolis that still retains plenty of its lush semi-tropical gardens and Queenslander houses. It was perfect for long strolls and ferry-rides in winter, and a quick journey by rail from the Gold Coast. Melbourne is the country’s big cultural capital with a patchwork of cute, funky low-rise neighborhoods with their distinctive bakeries, cafes, vintage stores, and record shops. There’s quite a bit of Gothic Revival architecture in the Central Business District of Melbourne. And the six-story-high, domed octagonal reading room in the State Library of Victoria built in 1914 was impressive, an icon to rival the Opera House in Sydney. As for Sydney, it’s an international city oriented around its enormous harbor. It had a vibrant pan-Asian culture, despite immigration under the “White Australia” policy officially barring non-white foreigners from settling until as late as 1973.             

Was that the craziest trip you’ve had? If not, what was?

My Australia trip ranks decidedly “mid” on my list of crazy trips. One of the most venturesome trips I took was to Nepal. My partner and I hiked for over a week in the Himalayas with a sherpa through remote, mountainous regions. I also took a walking tour of the jungle near the Indian border, where I saw hippos, gharials, rhinos, and elephants. There, my guide was a professional tiger tracker. There is only one tiger per 40-square-miles: they require a big range. Truthfully, I was only convinced to go on the jungle walking tour because the chances of encountering a tiger were almost nonexistent. The fact the guide could only bring a bamboo pole for deterrence because the area was a nature sanctuary was not reassuring. The tiger in that area had been known to eat people before—and it was, at this time, a mother with a young cub, which is the most dangerous tiger there is. Let’s just say, I really hoped that the tracker’s sales pitch wouldn’t live up to his billing.

We canoed out on a river and then meandered through the jungle. When we saw claw marks high atop a tree and heard the monkeys and birds signaling with raucous squawks to each other that a tiger was nearby, I was ready to make a business decision and head back. Then we saw fresh, plate-size paw tracks. I tried to reason with my companions, but the tracker and my partner had only become more excited to find the tiger. And find the tiger we did. It was a majestic and sublime sight. The tiger was drinking at a watering spot, about thirty-five feet away. It looked right at us, pointblank, for what felt like either five seconds or five centuries, and then it decided to dash back into the brush instead of attack. It could have pounced on us in one leap. Lucky us, it fled. My partner and the tiger tracker wanted to chase it, but better judgment prevailed. Afterward, when we asked the tracker’s assistant, who trailed behind us the whole time, how many tigers he’d encountered before, he held up a single finger with chagrin.

It's a delicate balance between being dauntless and foolhardy. Still, it’s often the trials and mishaps and estrangement that make a travel narrative compelling. Another project I’ve been working on in parallel is a nonfiction collection that’s mostly travel essays. Though I have a full-length manuscript already, I still haven’t written essays on Nepal or Cuba or the Galapagos or Brazil or many other places I’ve been, including Australia. This winter, I’m planning a visit to Morocco. There are always more places to explore, more adventures to have, more stories to tell. 

Describe the journey from getting your Ph.D. at Cornell to traveling the world and living in Guadalajara.

I lived in Brooklyn for five years before I moved upstate for grad school, working as a theater critic and teacher while writing on the side. My first year, I hustled odd jobs, lived on a shoestring, and depended on the kindness of strangers. In fact, my first month in the city was when 9/11 occurred, and I was working downtown when planes struck the Twin Towers. Smoke from ground zero was visible from my rooftop in South Williamsburg for weeks after. My next year, I found a position with the all-girls Brearley School on the Upper East Side. Then I became a NYC Teaching Fellow, where I worked at a high school in Brownsville as a special education teacher. The aughts were a wilder time to live in Brooklyn, when a twenty-two-year-old from the sticks could just show up with no money and not only make do somehow, but have enough energy left over to make art.

Originally, I moved upstate for my MFA in poetry, then I stuck around a few more years for my Ph.D. in which I focused on eighteenth-century British literature: I studied gothic and sentimental novels, pastoral poetry, heroic drama, Menippean satire. Sort of antiquated genres. My dissertation focused on self-parody and the way that—since the eighteenth-century was also a very polarized time—texts could speak from and to multiple perspectives. Many eighteenth-century texts thread the needle with their ironic ambiguities and even parody both sides. 

One highlight from my time in Ithaca was working as the artist-in-residence in the Risley Dorms for two years, where I put on many programs and wrote, directed, and produced several plays. I had been a playwright in New York City, and cofounded the Brooklyn Playwrights Collective with a friend, so this was just an extension of what I had already been doing for some time. But it was a great opportunity for me. I could walk to the in-house black box theater in my pajamas. My approach to grad school was just to read and write and explore whatever interested me; I enjoyed it. School was an intellectual playground. Folks who take a more careerist approach to academia, however, often find grad school gloomy and anxious-making. I learn best when I’m excited, carefree, frolicking; focused on the thing itself as its own end. 

I moved to Tucson when I was working on my dissertation. Ithaca has a permanent gray cloudbank hovering over it, which blocks out the least filament of sunlight for the three-quarters of the year that correspond with the academic semesters. I yearned for a diametrically different environment. Once I had my Ph.D., I became a faculty member in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where I taught a wide variety of creative writing and interdisciplinary courses. It was a good position for me—I taught classes like Performance Art, Anarchy, Dystopias, Transgender Studies, Critical Geography, and Breaking Bad in addition to courses in all the different genres of creative writing. Much as I genuinely delight in reading and rereading Jane Austen novels, I’m not someone who dreams of teaching an Austen seminar decade after decade. The Honors College allowed me the freedom to create a new interdisciplinary course or two every year. I kept myself busy learning new subjects and approaches to teaching.

The year of the pandemic, I had already moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, for a one-year leave. I decided to transition away from my job at NAU. Now, I have more time to focus on my own pursuits, and I enjoy being in a very dynamic, large city again. The energy here is like Brooklyn was twenty-some years ago. These days, I adjunct and freelance. This semester, I help teach sections of Business Communication at Johns Hopkins’ graduate school online, for example. Perhaps that’s a little ironic, given my feelings about both “business” and “communication.” But the day-to-day work—a lot of detail-oriented comments on documents—suits my temperament alright, and it allows me more liberty to write and pursue my passions.

What's a day in Will Cordeiro's life like these days?

Besides my online job, I’m currently, co-editor for Eggtooth Editions, a small press I started a decade ago, as well as on the boards of the Northern Arizona Book Festival—where I write many grants and help with programming—as well as a community center here in Guadalajara, where I coordinate a monthly speaker series and other events. Those volunteer gigs keep me plenty busy. 

Plus, I have lots of smaller tasks and chores that fill my days: for example, I shop for fresh produce at this wonderful mercado a few blocks from my place about twice a week. I go to a hippy panadería in the neighborhood, too, for bread and pastries. 

I walk my dog two or three times a day, I play with my bird, I go to the gym regularly. On Sundays, I take a big bike ride all morning since the city opens miles and miles of streets without cars for Via Recreativa. I think we have the most extensive ciclovia in the world here in Guadalajara.  

I enjoy checking out a new café or restaurant once in a while. There are so many spots popping up around town all the time.     

Of course, I’m always reading and writing; that’s a given. Usually, I’m reading a few books at a time; at least a novel, a poetry book, probably nonfiction, maybe a play. Each day I write something, even if it’s just engaging in revisions. Although I don’t have a specific time carved out, it’s an engrained habit, a necessary routine for me.

I take private Spanish lessons once a week, and try to read Spanish every day, both the newspaper and something more literary. I go to conversation club once a week, too, for more extended speaking interactions than I usually have with folks in the street. My friends here are a mix of Mexicans and fellow expats. I also take part in a book club as well as occasionally go to a philosophy tertulia, where I’ve occasionally delivered PowerPoint presentations in Spanish on topics such as Kohei Saito’s Eco-Marxism or John Dupré’s theories about “ontological promiscuity” in the biological sciences.       

I go to quite a few shows, one or two a week on average: dance, theater, circus arts, opera, music. A few recent highlights include seeing Les Grandes Ballets Canadiens perform Edward Clug’s new choreography to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, which was performed by a full orchestra and chorus. Another recent dance piece I thoroughly enjoyed was Bordo Poniente, about humans treated as waste products, which included acrobatics, butoh, and other styles of dance. One scene portrayed organ harvesting while in another a pig’s head got dunked into a bucket of black muck, a postapocalyptic Lord-of-the-Flies moment.   

Two weeks ago, I caught the Met’s broadcast of Les Contes d’Hoffmann and last weekend my partner and I traveled to Guanajuato for the international Festival Cervantino. In Guanajuato, we saw a South Korean contemporary dance troupe, a Kagura ensemble from Hiroshima (which performed the myth “Yamata no Orochi” in which a samurai battles an eight-headed serpent), and a toy theater and finger-puppet show called Baby Tyler from Canadian artist Ingrid Hansen. Yesterday, I saw a wonderful performance art piece, Perennial, by Jade Zerón in which she walked on teacups and played with a whole menagerie of fake body parts, including several breasts that dangled off her.

A couple Sundays ago, I watched the charrería (Mexican rodeo) in Tlaquepaque then wandered the Expo Ganadera (the state fair basically) where humongous Limousin and Bramin cattle were shown. It was an immersion into ranchero culture. I’m always game to check out something different. I want to live as variously as possible.

How was Whispering Gallery written? Can you pull back the curtain and describe your writing schedule, environment, and method?

Well, the everyday grind of writing tends only to be exciting if you’re inside it, focused on the minutiae of sounding out each word, searching for the next plot point, and playing with the shapeliness of a sentence. From the outside, it’s just someone staring at a screen—lots of fiddling, lots of futzing around. You put in a comma, you grimace; you take out a comma, you sigh. You jot down a note. You crumple it up. You eek out a line then tweak it two, three times. Then you seek the next sentence before doubling back; you walk around a bit daydreamy with some vague concept, go read for a bit or eat lunch, return to your seat and try again. You look through your notes. Indulge in research. Surface for air. Think about why it’s not working. Plunge in once again, tinkering and mumbling the whole time. And this goes on and on. And when you keep on keeping on, it accretes. Then you sand it all down again. Revision can take years, decades even. You let the proteins coagulate and the cake set. 

You cultivate this little world, almost through terraforming. All the elements of its ecosystem need to reach a dynamic balance, a homeostasis, as the yeast thickens from the ooze. Nevertheless, the whole process can be supremely enthralling for me. I like those moments when I’m in a rhythm—when the writing itself falls into a rhythm. Spark ignites spark until it’s all a raging prairie fire. There are times when you gallop along, as if heedlessly taking dictation from the muse; there are other times when nothing happens, the story goes flat, your work’s structure feels as gormless as a cow plop, your mind goes blank, and the language turns against you, inert and opaque. 

In terms of schedule and environment and method, I don’t think you should be too precious about scribbling with an Aurora Ipsilon fountain pen or cranking out copy on an Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter or whatever. I don’t need to put on my velvet surcoat or take the elevator down with the business jocks and lock myself in the basement at 5:00 a.m. to write. Those types of confessions in Paris Review interviews always struck me as put-ons. You can cultivate habits that help sustain you, but ultimately you need to be resilient. You write with whatever’s around, whenever you can. Or rather, you write with blood and innards and that’s why every word counts. 

The bulk of stuff you toss out. It isn’t a loss, though, because the excised work helps hone whatever’s left. The things you cut enhalo the remains. By the time a book comes out, it does seem like remains. The corpus is a corpse, and a book launch is a little funeral service. You set it afire and launch the raft off with its smoldering sovereign and his treasure horde. To quote Beowulf:

gold on grēote,				þær hit nū gēn lifað
eldum swā unnyt,			swā hit ǣror wæs.   

Or, in my own loose translation: 

gold in the grit-dirt			where its life’s gainsaid
for old men as worthless		same as it ever was.

This moment in Beowulf provides, like the Talking Heads song I filched the last hemistich from, an apt image for how our days, our lifetimes go by. You stand back a little zonked out and punch-drunk seeing everything womble along. The little flashes of gold you’ve resurrected from the dust must pass, like rubbish, back at last into the earth.