Writers Respond: An Interview with Andrew Zornoza

Andrew Zornoza is the author of the photo-prose novel, Where I Stay. Born in Houston, Texas, his fiction and essays have appeared in magazines such as Gastronomica, Sleepingfish, Confrontation, Porcupine Literary Arts, CapGun, and Matter Magazine, among others. He has taught at The New School University, Gotham Writers' Workshop, and the ASA Institute.

The following interview was conducted using Google docs between September 17, 2009 and November 14, 2009. The photos and captions that appear here were cut from the final draft of Where I Stay, but are no less exemplary.

1.
On Book Reviews

I can't believe someone wanted $500 for this! This old Volkswagen looks filled with sheetrock and plywood, but it isn't empty. A child is sleeping inside it. There's actually a cleared space on the left-hand side floor. He left behind a box of crayons, a ratty old pillow, a rainbow colored crocheted blanket with leaves stuck in the stitches, some Power Rangers.

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Andrew. Thanks for agreeing to be a part of the Writers Respond family. Your book, Where I Stay, has earned some impressive praise. At HTMLGiant, Blake Butler calls this a "refreshing" and "unforgettable" work. Cynthia Reeser at NewPages invokes the grad-school holy trinity when she says, "The movement of people and lives; chance meetings between strangers destined never to cross paths again; moments that can never be recreated; the uncertainty of people, place, relationships—all collide across culture and class, gender, and race to form an anthem of displacement." Marc Shuster at Small Press Reviews calls it "a hybrid of textual and visual arts." And I could go on and on. Tell us, though, is there anything that the critics haven't quite nailed? Something they've missed? Anything you'd like to share about Where I Stay right off the bat?

ANDREW ZORNOZA: Yes, the reviews have been good, and I'm glad to hear it. Though (and I've been clearly and heavily advised to not say this), I wouldn't mind a bad one or two. It seems as if there is a rule in much of the new criticism: you don't give bad reviews, you just review books you like. I'm not a critic, but this seems a disservice to the literary community. Reviewers should not be promoters, that's the publisher's job. I appreciate where it's coming from; there's so little money going around, why would you want to hurt another starving writer? Critics shape and paint the literary landscape surrounding the monuments. Right now there's a lot of pastels and petunias and sunrises in that landscape, there's a lot of gushing praise and summarizing. It's usually one or the other. I can't count how many New York Times reviews I've read where I've come away thinking: the book sounded good in the beginning but now I feel no need to read it. The reviewer has rewritten it for me and I've taken the journey already. Pretentious drivel. That's how I'd like to see a review of my book start.

MG: Have you ever purchased a book as a result of reading a fantastic review? If so, did it live up to the hype?

AZ: I bought Robert Lowell's "Collected Poems" because of William Pritchard's review. It's a very large book—I use it to prop open the sliding back door. What I learned there . . . is never to buy the collected works of anybody. Those books are impossible to take around town and have covers you don't want to be seen with, even inside the house. "Collected Poems" is significantly less sexy than "Lord Weary's Castle."

MG: When it comes to book reviewers, who do you love (or love to hate)?

AZ: I liked David Itzkoff's old "Across The Universe" Column in the NY Times. I miss that very much. I try to read whatever Michael Wood puts out, he had a great essay recently on meandering, broken, interminable books. The Last Night of All The Unfinishable Work as a Genre was the title of that one. Newsweek's David Gates does what I like best, he gets to the heart of why you might read a book, what pleasure is in it. He wrote a superb piece on re-reading recently and I appreciated his pessimism with Salman Rushdie's new book (a snippet from that: And sure enough, that’s where he began to lose me. . . . ). Out on the internet, my favorite critic, by far, is Joanne McNeil of "Tomorrow Museum." And Will Schofield. He's not a critic, more of a curator, but Will's "Journey Around My Skull," is the other website I check frequently. I hope someone is archiving his work.

2.
On Labels

It may not look like it, but there's a space between the bottom second and third haystacks. Everyone should sleep on a haystack before they grow up. Or after, it doesn't matter much.

MG: How would you classify Where I Stay? I saw online that someone called it a "photo-prose novel." Do you agree with such a label, or do you resist labeling?

AZ: It's as good a label as any. I took the photographs and wrote the prose. Some of the photographs we had to pull because of copyright issues. Some of the subjects were unhappy, desperate, potentially litigious people, so I had to remove their images. Some, I couldn't muster up the courage to call on the telephone.

MG: Are you a trained photographer? Did you develop the film yourself? Why photographs?

AZ: I developed some of the film and printed most of the black and white shots. Those, on old Ilford fiber based paper that is now curling and decomposing. A few are scans from contact sheets because the negatives were lost or irreparably damaged. I am not a trained photographer. I did spend some time, long ago, with Emmet Gowin. I learned a tremendous amount from him. At his level, photography is a craft, a process, and a relationship with a very tactile (not visual) world. Capturing a moment in time is only a small part of the story he tells. There is always an element of voyeurism in photography, but Emmet was so intimately connected to the complicated relationship between chemicals and fiber, light and silver, shade and tinting, that his technical aesthetics broke through to a higher level of empathy. It's difficult to explain, but once you put a frame around something it creates a conflict—an exploitative and, ultimately, prosaic, fictive wall. Even if that frame is simply the front and back covers of a book. Emmet taught me you can fight the perils of this by just caring more than anyone else.

Gabriele Basilico and Robert Polidori, Bryan Schutmaat (who did my cover) and Gregory Crewdson are the photographers I follow. And Hiroshi Sugimoto. Sugimoto takes these large-format photos of anonymous swaths of seas and oceans. They are very moving to me. Sugimoto has said that a lo-fi aesthetic is essential to art. I don't know if there's such a thing as hi-fi writing (or lo-fi) but I understand what he's saying when I look at his photographs.

MG: Tell us about the process of writing (maybe even first just conceiving of) this book.

AZ: It took me several years to think of the book in a way that didn't make me cringe. Early on, I had scrubbed out, erased, the narrator from the story. Losing yourself, that's part of his piece in time, that's also part of the story I'm trying to create for the reader. Hitchhiking, language, imagination and reality, memory, past and present and future, heroin: all these shapes were dancing behind me in the service of dissolution of self and a certain rhythm. 1, 2 and 3. 1, 2 and 3. Sort of the old synthesis/antithesis=thesis. Or, more accurately, image/symbol=meaning. Do you know Schrödinger's cat? I just put a human being in Schrödinger's box and called the box Wyoming. But then the story was too cold, collapsed, 2-dimensional. Too unobserved. I began working with the photographs. And, mentally, it was like pulling up the top of this collapsible box, instantly it became a three dimensional space again and I was able to work with feelings, real life.

I've been obsessed for a while now, stuck . . . the question we've all been asking for quite some time is, "Who am I?" I'm not sure that the more appropriate question now isn't, "Where am I?"

MG: That's a really good question, actually. Where are you?

AZ: I'm in a basement under West 13th Street in New York City. There is a power outlet down here.


MG: Wow, I was completely unprepared for this answer. What's it like down there? Or, why are you there?

AZ: I am hiding from Ras the Destroyer.

MG: Does this mean you live in NY?

AZ: Brooklyn and Paris are where I feel the most at home. Also certain parts of Wyoming. I try to avoid venturing north of 14th street in any of those places.

MG: Do you lead a transient lifestyle?

AZ: Well, now I am in Newport News, Virginia, sitting on the seat of a discarded Soloflex. So, I suppose, yes, I do.

MG: What does travel mean to you?

AZ: The only time I don't feel that I am traveling is when I am with the ones I love. Have you read Wayne Koestenbaum's Hotel Theory? I feel the same way about travel as he thinks about hotels. . . .

3.
On Tarpaulin Sky Press

It's amazing how much Americana is leaning slightly to one side. Old bicycles, barns, coca-cola signs--they're never quite straight. Anyway, I wasn't planning on sleeping in this one at all. It's outside a very nice house in rural Virginia. My in-laws house, actually.

MG: Tell us a little about Tarpaulin Sky Press and how you came to publish this book with them. I should add that they've done an amazing job with the design, and the photographs look great. My understanding, when it comes to photographs, especially black and white, is that they are very difficult to reproduce. How did you submit this manuscript?

AZ: Yes, Christian Peet, the editor over at Tarpaulin Sky, did miraculous things to get this book in shape. He's an incredible designer and if I had a wish, I'd wish that any and all of my author friends would get a chance to work with him. I submitted the manuscript in a very similar form to what was printed, just exponentially more primitively—if you took the book now, photocopied it eight times, put some pages in the wrong way, left out some pertinent sections. . . .

MG: How long did it take to transform Where I Stay from a manuscript into the object that is available for purchase now?

AZ: About a year and a half.

MG: Why did you submit to TSP?

AZ: A friend of mine, Alex Carnevale, suggested I do so. Also, I had read Jenny Boully's work the year before. I was more than happy to share space in a catalog with her.

MG: Jenny Boully is the reason I keep working on a ms. for Essay Press. It's not much now, but maybe one day I'll be ready to send them something. What about you? What other writers have made you notice a particular press?

AZ: Matthew Derby and Back Bay Books. When I finished Super Flat Times I thought, "Who would publish this?" It was along the lines of how I wanted to work, it was broken, very matte in tone, but punctuated with very visceral ribbons of emotions, and it was a new thing. I don't know Matt, but when my book came out, I snooped around to find his address and sent him a copy. I did the same for Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, Eddie Vedder and Jim Carroll. Well, I didn't hear from the rest. But Matt wrote me a very nice blurb; I still feel very good about that, it means a lot to me.

MG: If TSP had passed, what other presses might you have tried?

AZ: I'm not sure. I took it back from a few places once TSP signed me up. I don't tend to think of the presses, more of the authors. The only press I follow loyally is Archipelago and most of their work is in translation.

4.
On Literary Influences

This is Centralia, an entire town that has caught on fire. The coal that used to run the town's economy has combusted under the surface. It's worth pulling off the main roads. Though, you have to be careful, the residents realized they had a problem when 12 year old Todd Domboski suddenly fell into a sinkhole that opened up in his backyard. The hole went down about 120 feet, but his cousin pulled Todd out just before he plummeted. Great peanut butter shakes at Brennen's Big Chill up the road.

MG: What about Sebald's influence?

AZ: Sebald is one of my favorite authors. But I've never really thought of him as an influence. Hello, My Name Is Erica Jong, by Kathy Acker, was a real influence. Also, The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard, Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries, Pier Pasolini's Roman Nights,. All those authors are gone now, sadly. And then there's Wittgenstein's Mistress. I guess David Markson has been hinting that he'll be gone any day now. . . .

MG: Really? Sebald, with his images and text, wasn't an influence? As I read, I kept thinking: Which came first, the photographs, the captions, or the text? It was a dizzying experience, which took me straight to Sebald.

AZ: Yes, but it wasn't in my head at all. Sometimes, as an author, I think you have to shut certain voices out. Hemingway, for example. I only read Hemingway when I'm not writing, otherwise it's like having a long-lasting flu of short declarative sentences. "Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, and then read all of the Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system." That's what John Gardner said to a young Raymond Carver. I stick with motorcycle magazines and nonfiction when I'm in the middle of something.

MG: Are you at all familiar with the work of John Baldessari? One of my housemates, a video-text artist, brought him up after flipping through Where I Stay.

AZ: Wow. Well, I guess he's got the text/image thing going on. Or did have it going on. And he always seems to leave big blanks spaces for the viewer to put themselves in. He's sillier though, or silly to the point of being extremely interesting. I'm not sure I have a funny bone anywhere in here. Also, I've never been in the Whitney Biennial.

MG: What, or who, are you reading now?

AZ: I'm reading Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx. I saw Shelley Jackson reading it late one night on the F train, so the next day I went out and bought it.

MG: What? Are you serious? What other famous literary types have you spotted? And were they all reading?

AZ: I've seen Haruki Murakami in the NYC marathon, but he wasn't reading. He was jogging. There was some joker in a giant green frog costume trying to hand him some water from behind the lines.

5.
On Craft

MG: I read that you have a BA from Princeton and an MFA in Fiction from the New School. Education is clearly important to you. What would you like to say about formal education?

AZ: I was never a good student. I missed far more classes than I attended. I regret that now. I left college for a bit, but managed to graduate in three and a half years. I've been blessed and spoiled by people sticking by me despite myself. There's a scene in Billy Madison when a third grader tells Adam Sandler that he can't wait to get to high school. And Adam Sandler becomes unhinged: "Don't you say that. Don't you ever say that. Stay here. Stay here as long as you can. For the love of God, cherish it. You have to cherish it. . . ." That's how I feel about it, too.

MG: What can you tell us about the New School?

AZ: I teach some in the MFA program at Parson's—in the design and technology program. Parson's is the art and fashion division of the New School. And these kids are fantastic. There is no place I'd rather be. They are courageous, forward-thinking, open, practical. They make me wish I hadn't quit math when I was 14. The combination of living in New York and being caught between being an artist and a designer . . . it's hard to put my finger on, but the New School is very good for people who are between ideals, people mixing forms, technologies, systems of thoughts. . . .

MG: What is the best piece of craft-related advice you ever received? How often do you follow it?

AZ: "Don't let anyone tell you how to write." Cynthia Heimel told me that. She was a columnist for Playboy for seventeen years. I wouldn't want to live with her, but she's a very good advice giver.

MG: Worst craft-related advice?

AZ: "You've got to know all the rules before you can break them."

MG: How do you think you were able, in Where I Stay, to combine so many different narrative threads and make them work in one overall narrative?

AZ: I'm not so sure that I did. Or rather, if they are threads, they are sort of like a ball of yarn with the cardboard center removed. So it might be fun to play with for a bit. But if you wanted, say, to play tennis, you'd be unhappy.

MG: Are you an experimental writer? What do you think about the possible overuse of the term "innovative"?

AZ: I like the word innovative. I don't like the word experimental. To me, the word conjures up failure and the white humped backs of balding scientists. All writing is experimental if you insist on having a reader. Even Judy Blume. But I'm not experimenting. I'm not trying anything new. New has nothing to do with it. I'm just putting the words the way I want to hear them. You may be experimenting by reading it, but me, I'm just trying to make it feel right.

This must be Kansas City, but at that age I should have been living in Houston--we moved a couple times back then. This is me, though I have no way of proving it. I don't have blonde hair anymore. Diagonal shoulder stripes and matching cuffs, look at the quality of that shirt fabric. Where is this jacket now? Is it slowly molding away in New Jersey or spinning away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Is it torn at the sleeve still? Is someone else wearing it? What is he or she like? There is a science to the study of lost things, but it's impenetrable. Call your mother. That's the solution I've found. Call your mother.