I met Andrew Zornoza a few years back in New York’s West Village at a little watering hole called Spain. The drinks were cheap and plentiful, the tapas were greasy but free, and the bartender, Luis, had been there longer than either of us had been alive. Zornoza was a quiet man, reserved and thoughtful, and when he would speak it was always insightful, always provocative. You might think him shy if he didn’t consistently knock you on the head with enlightenment, if he wasn’t always pushing you to that “ah ha!” moment.

Zornoza has just seen the release of his first novel, Where I Stay, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press out of Grafton, Vermont. I knew it had been put out into the wild, and was reminding myself to get my hands on it, when Zornoza got in touch with me and offered that he “would be very sad if I did not have a copy of his book on my bookshelf.” A few letters back and forth and I found myself with a copy of the novel and an opportunity to interview a good friend and a great writer.

Zornoza isn’t an ordinary writer and Where I Stay isn’t an ordinary novel. Told in photographs and in characters, with a hazy plot about an unnamed narrator finding his way, Where I Stay takes us through the American mountain west, through Texas and Mexico, presenting us with sudden snapshots of tramps, prostitutes, migrant workers, the so-called undesirables of society. Zornoza conjures images that would make Tom Waits proud. There are no page numbers throughout Where I Stay, only dates. It is a road-tripper’s diary, a recollection of homelessness, it is a body searching for a soul.

BOOKISH US: Each entry throughout the book includes an accompanying photograph. Were the entries inspired by the photos or were the photos inspired by the entries? Similarly, I found myself sometimes looking at the photos first and other times reading the entries first. What is your preferred way of reading Where I Stay?

ANDREW ZORNOZA: When I was a kid, there was a choose-your-own adventure book that I loved, it was called The Cave of Time.  And like many readers of those books, I made my own choices at first, following the rules.  And, I ended up dead. The second time, I rethought certain decisions, but again, I ended up dead. The third, I leafed through the book, found the cool parts and started from there. That was less satisfying.  Ten years old, I still had the book, and I was all alone, so this is the fourth time now . . . I remember shaking it upside down, I was looking for a plane ticket stub—I’d been left alone at the Madrid airport, there was some miscommunication, my relatives were missing—and when I shook this book, there was a page I began reading that seemed new . . .  it was fantastically new, I read about a darkened cave, the silhouette of a woman in the distance, a mazy ever-changing cloud of colors.  There was a suit of armor, an arrow and a map.  I walked across a still pool of water reflective as mercury.  Well, then my aunt Pilar showed up and I never found that page again.  I still leaf through the book sometimes looking for it.

I wanted my own book to encapsulate all four of those broad possibilities.

BU: The book is classified as fiction but has a distinctly non-fiction, diary-like entry quality to it; that is, much of it feels so close that calling it fiction almost seems like an insult. One of the blurbs on the back of the book by Lance Olsen addresses the fact/fiction dichotomy the story presents. And, ultimately, the story is told in such vivid detail that it feels like a true road trip diary. Considering all this, how close are you to the story and from where did this road trip/itinerant wandering come?

AZ: Writers have been bending fact and fiction for quite a while.  I’m not quite sure where this mania to discover the exact point the ride starts and stops comes from. . .

I’ve spent some time living in a van, sure.  Who hasn’t?  Living in your car seemed déclassé at one point.  Now that we’ve learned that Raymond Carver and Vladimir Nabakov preferred to write while sitting in parked cars, it’s less of a trespass.

BU: Do you see this book as fitting into the road trip genre? Or do you feel Where I Stay addresses something different entirely?

AZ: As a writer, I never embraced or stayed clear of the pitfalls of the road novel. Genre-wise, I thought more of the epithalamium.  And, outside of that, and probably more pertinent, of Robert Frank’s The Americans, of TS Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” of  Pier Pasolini’s Roman Nights. . . .

BU: This is your first book. Can you tell us a little about how it came to be published, the steps you took, and about the people who helped you along the way? How long, would you estimate, did it take you from inception to publication? Did you have a literary agent involved?

AZ: I had come back to New York to go to school.  And when I finished there, two years later, I took a look at what I had done and realized I had a suitcase full of diagrams for installations, stories with no protagonist, stories with photographs, stories whose main characters were houses, essays about imaginary chefs — in short, a tremendous amount of unpublishable material.  A wonderful writer, Shelley Jackson, she encouraged me, but I was upset at myself, at the devastating toll my writing was having on my family’s life.  I decided to take a month, find a new job, and send my work out to anyone who might be interested.  And, right away, people were interested. As of yesterday, in fact, everything I did then has found a home in print someplace. A few publishers had the book on the top of their heap, and it had already been taken by one press, but without a signed contract.  When Tarpaulin Sky took it, I was very happy and I pulled it from everywhere else.  I had read Jenny Boully, who’s in Tarpaulin Sky’s catalog, alongside many other great writers. I don’t have an agent.  What am I going to show them? A tool shed by Barajas airport that has a story written on the inside of an accordion’s innards hanging from the ceiling? I don’t have those people’s phone numbers.  That may change, as after the birth of my son, time has become precious and my writing more normal. . . .

BU: Let’s talk about the design of the book itself. Did you have any say or was everything laid out by Tarpaulin Sky? How was the size of the book (landscape) decided upon? Why the lack of page numbers?

AZ: Christian Peet, my editor, involved me from the beginning.  He was wonderful to work with.  He did the layout, but the manuscript had been in landscape format forever.  The page numbers, I’m not sure of.  I got the final galleys, we were behind schedule and Christian was twitchy about some things.  He was like Bruce turning in the final reels of “Born to Run.”  Christian asked me “How many things do you see wrong?”  All I could find was that the page numbers were missing.  But we went with it anyway, there are some deeper reasons to take the page numbers out.

BU: The story is told in a linear fashion, as each page moves us forward in time, but often the excerpt that accompanies the photo on the right side of the page tells of the past or predicts the future. For example, in the entry “Nov. 22, Fort Collins, Colorado,” the photo’s excerpt starts with “I began this story before the story in Dubois.” The very next entry is “Nov. 23, Dubois, Wyoming.” But also, the second entry at the beginning of the book is in Dubois. The story begins in Cheyenne, Wyoming and ends in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Early on in the book at “Aug. 17, Tijuana, Mexico,” the excerpt with the photo states, “I have systematically and selectively removed myself from the past. The past does not fit my present tense. I do not fit in myself.” How did you consider time in this novel and what does time, or a hazy perception of time, mean to the narrator? How did you decide to convey this to the reader?

AZ: There’s a Stones song, number two on Sticky Fingers.  It’s called “Sway.”

Did you ever wake up to find/A day that broke up your mind/Destroyed your notion of circular time/It’s just that demon life has got you in its sway/It’s just that demon life has got you in its sway. . . /Ain’t flinging tears out on the dusty ground/For all my friends out on the burial ground/Can’t stand the feeling getting so brought down/It’s just that demon life has got me in its sway/It’s just that demon life has got me in its sway. . . .

That’s one of the few songs that Mick Taylor supposedly helped pen. That, and “Midnight Mile.” I listened to both many times while writing the book.

BU: Seeing as the book ends where it begins, Cheyenne to Cheyenne, the narrator having gone on a trip and returned to where he started (after about four months of traveling), what do you see as the purpose of his trip? Was he trying to escape something, only to learn that what he had was better (or just more known) than what was out there? Or was this just supposed to be a respite from the norm?

AZ: That’s all up to the reader, but, again, it has to do with that notion of destroying circular time by reinstating it.  It’s difficult for me to see, to get outside myself, but a large piece of me is aware that I am working with an alternative mode of perception, trying to change, or at least shift everyday perception: not facts, not history. If you like Thin Red Line more than Saving Private Ryan, if you like Donnie Darko more than She’s All That, you will like my books.

BU: Although we become close with the narrator of Where I Stay, we never learn his name. There are a few named characters who pop up a handful of times, but mostly this book seems to be about the various characters the narrator meets along the way. How did you decide to handle characterization the way you did and what was your intention in this?

AZ: I do some teaching now—and it seems to me that there are two camps of students in writing workshops.  One camp staunchly defends the traditional story and bristles at anything unconventional.  They roll their collective eyes at any story that attempts to move the reader through any of the advances in thought since the advent of modernism. The second group embraces the unconventional, and within it are writers of quite different sorts but they all seem to rally around one thing, the death of plot: plot is artificial, fake, an intrusion of the author on the territory of circumstance.  It gets so tiresome mediating the perpetual war (S&M tinged) between these two types of writers. Anyway, the point being: why plot? Why not character, theme, metaphor?  You’re not exactly looking forward if you haven’t moved past Barthelme, whose 3200 cubit long carcass we’ve been dragging around for fifty years now.  Kathy Acker once walked into workshop (anecdotally), swept all the stories on the floor, and said “You are all horrible, you haven’t learned anything, what did I tell you, destroy everything, destroy-destroy-destroy-destroy-destroy-destroy-destroy.”  I’m a shade more positive than that, but I did want to obliterate character: to reach the sublime through subtraction of the self.

BU: You’ve dedicated the book “To all those I’ve lied to.” After reading the book, it feels as though this inscription could very well be the narrator’s voice instead of Andrew Zornoza’s. While we see very little distinct action on the narrator’s part, he is mostly a reactive character, it seems possible that he may have had to lie to many of these people at times to get as close as he did. Did this idea, lie vs truth, play a role in how you told the story as the inscription might suggest? How do you view the idea of honesty in Where I Stay in reference to the narrator/author/reader relationship?

AZ: Most of my thoughts on history come from fiction. Libra by Don Delillo, for example, constitutes most of my information about the JFK assassination and the 1960’s. I picture Rome through Pier Pasolini’s eyes, my art history comes from David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. My ideas of the English from Jane Austen; the French, Stendahl; Japan, Mishima and Tanizaki. My entire conception of the Vietnam War comes from Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green. Without my wife around I spend a tremendous amount of time crying.  I have a tenuous grasp on reality.  I live in a landscape of emotional narrative—it’s very real to me, but to others, less so.  You don’t live a life like mine without lying to some people.  The truth is sitting by the bedside of your mother while she’s dying from cancer.  The truth is not in a book.  It’s not in my book.  It’s not in a memoir.  That fiction uncovers greater truths through exaggeration, time warping and metaphor is a harmful and self-serving hoax perpetuated by university English departments.

BU: Now that it’s over and done, the book is published and in our hands, is there anything you look at and feel should have been different? Did it come out the way you planned or was there something else you wanted to do? How will these insights affect your next publication?

AZ: The only major thing I want to change is to write a completely different book.  “Where I Stay” is something that I would like everyone to read, to piece together, to make their own, to talk to me about how it felt to them—but for myself, I just want to clean the chalkboard and start over.  I would like to be able to hand someone another story the moment they have finished the first.  Then they can scurry off to their own sleeping bag.

A minor thing: I’m hoping one day there will be a large format Phaidon-like version.  It was hard seeing the photographs shrunk down and turned black and white.  But the publisher was right, they couldn’t make the book unaffordable to the very people I wrote it for.  One day I hope to see those pictures in full color.

BU: Care to tell us what you’re working on currently?

AZ: The main thing is taking care of my son, Rafael.  He just turned one today.  I’m trying to give him the best life I can. So, I teach a lot to try to do that.  But when he naps,  I’m working on a love story.  It’s very sad, it’s very difficult to work on.  But there’s good in everyone, in every story.  Even in this one.

Where I Stay by Andrew Zornoza can be purchased online at the Tarpaulin Sky Press website as well as at Amazon.