"walk[ing] you through the truth of what the speaker sees": Esteban Rodríguez on The Lost Nostalgias

The Lost Nostalgias by Esteban Rodríguez | $18.00 | CavanKerry Press | 96 pages | May 2025

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Laura Villareal (LV): In opening your latest, The Lost Nostalgias, there’s a list of your previous publications. You’ve published about two books a year since 2020. What’s the secret to your ability to be so prolific? What does your writing practice look like?

Esteban Rodriguez (ER): I try to write every day. It’s an incredibly difficult task to achieve, especially now that my wife and I opened a coffee shop (we still have our full-time jobs as well, so it’s quite busy to say the least). But I’m adamant that I have to write, and if I’m not writing, then I’m reading. If anything, I think my consistency with reading makes the task of putting pen to paper easier. I’m not sure if I’d consider myself prolific in the way other writers are (think of William T. Vollmann and how much he has produced), but I have had some success and with each work, I hope to create something better.

In terms of practice, I try to write whenever there’s time, whether it’s a few minutes right before bed or in between sips of coffee in the morning. I find that when I’m writing prose, I write in a notebook first and then transfer the draft onto the computer, editing along the way. With poetry, which I’ve unfortunately been writing less and less of nowadays, it’s always on my phone. When I have an idea for a poem, I get obsessed with it, and it’s always good to write on the Notes app when the creative spirit demands it.

LV: Aside from being prolific as a writer, you’re an outstanding literary citizen. You hold several editorial roles such as: Interviews Editor at EcoTheo Review, Senior Book Reviews Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and Associate Poetry Editor at AGNI. You’re also a consistent book critic and interviewer. These are vital roles in the literary ecosystem, especially the smaller poetry landscape, but require a substantial amount of labor. I’m resisting the urge to ask how you balance it all, because I think you are well suited and have a unique vantage point to address a bigger question. What kinds of literary citizenship do you think we need more of?

ER: That is a great question because there are so many great titles out there that others may not have heard of. I think the best way to become a good literary citizen is by sharing your knowledge/enthusiasm/recommendations for someone else’s work through whatever platform is available to you. In my editorial roles, that is obviously through reading poems, conducting/sharing interviews, and featuring reviews of other people’s newest books. I definitely want to give a voice to everyone who might not have had an opportunity to get the attention their work deserves. For others, however, that might be sharing on social media. There are plenty of accounts I follow on Instagram (@ghost_of_yoknapatawpha, @wastemailinglist) that showcase neglected works, and I love discovering novels or poetry collections that not many people have read.

LV: I love that suggestion. Posting on social media is a quick way to support books.

The Lost Nostalgias covers a range of topics, but specifically hones in on stories about the speaker’s mother and father, but expands to the larger community in the book. Silence seems to be a recurrent gesture in the poems. A few examples: in “Rome” you write, “hoping he’ll find motivation in her silence” and in “Biweekly” you write, “And I understand / from their silence that even if there’s mutual respect.” What is your relationship to silence? 

ER: As a child, I was always told I was “quiet,” and it wasn’t uncommon for me to hear from my aunts that it was the “silent ones” that everyone should watch out for (perhaps they thought I was scheming against them, that I was trying to do something they weren’t aware of, but more than likely, I was probably thinking about Legos or some toy I didn’t have yet). I was shy in large groups, and that silence defined a lot of my childhood. At the same time, however, it allowed me to view the world as more of a spectator rather than a participant, and I think that shows in a lot of my poetry. The speaker will encounter a situation with his mother or father, and he tries to tease out exactly what it means to him as an individual, as a son of immigrants, as a boy who feels he will be expected to fulfill a role he’s unsure if he can fulfill.

LV: Many of your poem titles in The Lost Nostalgias are a single word. If I’m remembering correctly, throughout your poetry oeuvre you tend to favor direct titles or single word titles. Writers often struggle to title their work since there’s a multitude of approaches. Can you talk about your approach to titling? What advice can you impart?

ER: I don’t think I’m clever enough to come up with long titles like other poets are, so I stuck with the one-word title early on in my career and kept with it. But I do find power in how a single word can shape a poem. I think of “Fence” (from my first book, Dusk & Dust), a poem centered on crossing the bridge so a mother could get dental work in Mexico. The word, at least for me, automatically brings to mind an image of a white-picket fence, but the poem doesn’t portray that suburban scene when it’s at the border. It’s much more somber and dire and it shows the cultural divide between the speaker and his mother and those who share a similar last name to them. Nevertheless, the one-title poems do carry with them a bit of ambiguity, and I like that the reader has to explore the poem before they get a true sense of what the title means to it.

LV: Your work seems comfortable in the narrative mode and has a distinct cadence in how it unravels a story. It meanders and winds, revealing small details or impressions. Could you describe your relationship with narrative writing? Since you write in other genres, what does poetry allow you to do versus prose and how do you decide what form best fits a project you’re working on?

ER: So, Faulkner said that all novelists were failed poets. I like to believe that I was a failed novelist who turned to poetry. I didn’t actually try writing a novel in my earlier days, but I did write a lot of short stories that didn’t really go anywhere. Poetry was an avenue where I could practice my poetic sensibilities while also telling a story. I wasn’t sure if what I was writing were actually poems, and then I read the work of B.H. Fairchild and realized that maybe I was doing something correctly.

Over the past few years, however, I find myself gravitating toward writing prose more. I feel like I finally have the language, skill, and knowledge to create short stories that are entertaining and that aren’t bogged down with trying too hard to do too much within the span of a few pages. Currently, I’m working on stories about sign spinners, leprechauns, and nursing homes, and I cannot wait for my debut short story collection, This is Supposed to Happen to Other People, to come out next year with Texas Review Press. Hopefully, I can continue on the prose trajectory, and we’ll see what else my writing morphs into a few years down the road.

LV: What great news to hear about your debut short story collection!

Getting a little deeper into the topical elements of your work, your poetry’s focus on working-class people and immigrants reminds me of Gary Soto and Phillip Levine. For example, in “Home Depot” you describe the speaker’s father waiting in the store’s parking lot to be picked up for work. In depicting familiar stories and scenes like this how do you negotiate the line between voyeurism and fact?

ER: I really love this question because I definitely dive into my past personal life quite a bit. I do take liberties with the way the “mother” and “father” figures are depicted on the page in my poetry. So there are certain things I feel comfortable writing down because I know that they didn’t happen, at least not the way they are written. However, there are others that I am careful about. For example, before my mother passed, she had some dental issues. One of her front teeth had fallen out and she had some cavities that were eating away her molars. I suggested that she go to a dentist, get a consultation at least, but she never wanted to. And it wasn’t because she didn’t have the financial means to. She did. She just didn’t want to fix what she felt didn’t need to be fixed, and I was incredibly fascinated with this mentality. I couldn’t quite understand it because I myself used to have a recurring dream about my teeth falling off. I began writing about my mother’s teeth to try to comprehend everything about her more, and that resulted in the first poem of the book, “Teeth” (which is perhaps my favorite poem I’ve ever written). I knew I had to be delicate about the subject matter because I didn’t want my speaker to come off as cruel; rather, I wanted him to be a curious spectator, one who empathizes with his mother as much as he does feel wary toward her.

LV: I like hearing about your intentionality with regard to that poem. It seems awfully difficult to strike the right balance, especially since the details and images in your poems tend to be a little gritty. A good example is how you deftly remove all notions of glamour in “Quinceañera.” You write: “beads of expired hairspray fade / down her neck, seep through the cracked / and clay-colored pores of blush curdled sweat.” The word choices are unsettling and distinct. What’s the impulse towards that kind of detail?

ER: I think this stems from my literary influences and what I love to see on the page. I like images that are true, unapologetic, and make the reader feel unsettled in some type of way. Cormac McCarthy’s work was instrumental in my early years as a writer, and I’ve sought to read literature similar to his and emulate it, while also developing my own style. So detail is important, and I work quite a bit on developing descriptions that not only show what’s not the most visually appealing, but that drives the narrative (of the poem or story) forward. If, for example, I am describing someone’s sweaty face (as you mention above), I want to make sure that the word choice is precise and that the rhythm of the line or sentence has a cadence that matches the description. I want to walk you through the truth of what the speaker sees as he sees it.

LV: If it’s okay, I’d like to shift away from your book to talk about another exciting project you’ve undertaken recently which is the opening of a coffee shop called Love Letter. I always love to hear about writer’s interests and passions outside of the page, could you talk a bit about your coffee shop? When did you get the idea, what was the process like of opening it, etc…

ER: Yes! We have been incredibly busy since we opened! My wife and I had the idea for a coffee shop for a few years now (she had developed the name for the shop years prior), and we’d spend our weekends driving around McAllen (where we live) trying to find the right spot. There were a lot of plaza spaces available, but we didn’t want to settle on a plaza because we felt we wouldn’t stand out, at least not in the way we were hoping to. Finally, we found this building at the corner of a rather busy intersection, only a few minutes from our house, and we loved it. But unfortunately, we took too long to secure it and a roofing company moved in. We were devastated, but a few weeks later, we saw a sign on the building next to it stating that they were moving to a new location down the road. It was a daycare in an older house, and when we got the opportunity to check it out (it was owned by the same company that owned the original building we wanted), we immediately said yes. 

We spent about six months renovating it and let me say that those were incredibly difficult months. Late nights painting the walls, long days patching up holes, the floor… oh man, to get the right person to sand and polish the floor took forever. Every obstacle presented a new one, but we kept on working toward the idea that we had, and we were beyond the moon to open this past Valentine’s Day. The place is amazing, and I’m so glad that we have the opportunity to host pug parties, poetry nights, and paint and sips every month. We want to be a part of the community in every way possible. 

LV: Any forthcoming books that readers should have on their radar—yours or ones you’re eager to read?

ER: Oh gosh, there are so many. I have a stack of books on my nightstand that I’m currently reading, but here are a few: Fury by Clyo Mendoza, Freedom is a Feast by Alejandro Puyana, The Border is Burning by Ito Romero, The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, The Collected Poems by Derek Walcott, Made for Love by Alissa Nutting, Harvest by Jim Crace, How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters by Saúl Hernández, Ulverton by Adam Thorpe, Caterva by Juan Filloy, Sons and Daughters by Chaim Grade, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates by Richard Yates, and The Way of Florida by Russell Persson.

To bring up Faulkner again, “Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”

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Esteban Rodríguez is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently The Lost Nostalgias (CavanKerry Press, 2025), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press, 2021). His work has appeared in New England Review, Seneca Review, Colorado Review, Adroit Journal, Poetry Daily, and American Life in Poetry. He is the interviews editor at the EcoTheo Review, senior book reviews editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and associate poetry editor at AGNI. With Jennifer De Leon and Ben Black, he coedited To Never Have Risked Our Lives: An AGNI Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing. He and his wife own and operate Love Letter Coffee in McAllen, Texas.

Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving, (University of Wisconsin Press 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters' John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Sho Poetry Journal, AGNI, among others.