“I think it’s an excellent example of a beginning,” Gotham Fiction teacher Andrew Zornoza told his advanced class of 20- to 70-somethings.

He had just played the first five minutes of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

Playing a movie in a fiction class is nothing new for Andrew. In a past first day, he offered the opening of Fight Club, and when he thought his students needed a push, he screened Jorge Furtado’s thirteen-minute documentary “Ilha das Flores” to illustrate how everything in their short stories can be tied together.

“Students keep me honest and young,” says Andrew. “I used to think you could build a class and then go ahead and repeat it every term. But the material becomes stale. What I’m trying to do now is to keep it as new as possible – to use whatever is floating in the ether of the moment.” 

Andrew may have picked up his distinct teaching style from his mother. “I would sit at the kitchen table, my pajama footies not reaching the floor, and write school papers with my mother. She would dictate to me and then I would write down what she said. Occasionally, she would ask me what I meant to say, but really, I just wrote down what she said.”

This introduction to writing does not bother Andrew at all. “I think it’s the best training a writer can have. Despite the immorality. You learn to write by reading – but in what sport do you learn to play by watching?”

Andrew had a very mobile childhood, moving a number of times between Houston and Kansas City and then to Connecticut, followed by a very mobile adulthood. After graduating Princeton he went through a period of “peripatetic restlessness,” during which he lived in Colorado, Wyoming, North Carolina, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. He was working as a slush-pile reader for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope magazine and coaching little league, then he moved to New York to pursue his MFA at the New School.

Although Andrew has explored America’s terrain first-hand, what he doesn’t know about the rest of the world he discovers through various art forms. “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, Stendhal; Japan, Mishima and Tanizaki.”

Despite the “overwhelming odds against publication, depression, small apartments, and financial instability,” Andrew stuck with fiction and has published his work in numerous literary magazines, and his photo-prose novel, Where I Stay, which he worked on for fourteen years, was recently published by Tarpaulin Sky. The story starts in Cheyenne, Wyoming and travels across a number of the landscapes Andrew has lived and worked in and photographed.

While Andrew ties in visual elements in his own writing, he doesn’t think that’s the reason he integrates film into his classes. “Sometimes dissecting our reading, dissecting others writing in workshop, and dissecting our own writing, can be like saying the word ‘tree’ over and over again. It loses its meaning. So I like to look at different art forms: underneath the hood they’re all the same to me.”