Zak Smith paints, writes, and performs in adult films. His new book is at the center of that venn diagram. The book is available now, both in paperback and limited-edition hardcover, and next month, it will be available in the UK from Beautiful Books. For those of you in Seattle, Zak will reading Sunday at 5:45 at the Bumbershoot Festival. Stop by and say hello. Zak was kind enough to answer some questions from Tin House Books associate editor Meg Storey. Without further ado:

Meg Storey: In your memoir, We Did Porn, you critique the art world and the alt-porn world. What’s your take on the publishing world?

Zak Smith: I still don’t know much about it. I do feel like the standard “canon” of which books are good is more accurate than the “canon” of what artworks are good. Probably because in literature, authors opinions count for more than critics’ opinions, whereas in art it’s the other way around. I mean, people are going to trust a John Updike blurb on that back of your book way more than the opinion of some guy at Kirkus Review. Another factor might be that it takes a long time to read a book—it’s hard to tell yourself you liked Ulysses if you put in something like twenty hours of sitting quietly and reading and weren’t actually having fun—so if you say to yourself you like it, it means you probably actually did like it. On the other hand, in order to tell yourself you like some stupid Franz Hals or Andy Warhol painting you only have to look at it for like three seconds. There it is, you saw it. So it’s easier for art people to just be posers who just say they like shit for some non-actual-enjoyment-related-reason.

MS: How did this book come about? Which came first, the drawings or the words? At what point did you realize you were writing a book?

ZS: The pictures came first. I usually just draw whatever’s going on around me anyway. I started writing things down long before I realized it was a book. When I did that first movie I just thought, “Every time something strange happens I’ll write it down and write down what I was thinking.” Pretty soon I realized I had three hundred pages.

MS: Are there any memoirs or other books that influenced your writing of We Did Porn?

ZS: I mean, obviously I like Pynchon. I really like Martin Amis. But there were two people I was looking at specifically with We Did Porn: the first one I was looking at was this surrealist or science fiction writer. His name is Michael John Harrison. He wrote a book called Viriconium, in the seventies. It’s just full of this amazing language, and I realized when I was reading it that he refers offhand to the elements of his science fiction world in such a way that it feels lived in. He doesn’t explain them, he doesn’t go, “This is why there’s a man with three heads.” It’s just there, just happens to be off to the side, and that seems to me a really effective way to talk about porn. Because I don’t know that much about the business compared to people who have been in it for years, and I don’t have more information than, say, Jenna Jamison does—and she already wrote a book. But I can communicate what it’s like to be in that atmosphere. Like it’s all real, all that stuff that happens here is true, but at the same time there’s all these details which are surreal, which are sort of just in the margins, they just establish that the porn world’s rules aren’t like the rules in everyday life.

The other book I was looking at was Hunter Thompson’s Generation of Swine, which is just his columns he wrote for some newspaper during the eighties. So every week he would have to find something to write about. And you could tell that mostly what he did is he sat and he watched TV. And he’s trying to write these articles based on nothing. Nothing would happen and he would write a great, unbelievably readable wonderful prose thing for one, two, three pages about nothing. That’s kind of what I do a lot in the book, try to find ways to write about nothing. Nothing’s really going on, and so trying to find a language that . . . where that means something. It was really interesting to get in there technically and say, “How do you write about nothing and still make it seem like it’s something?”

MS: There are many points in the book in which you reflect upon the absurdity of a situation you found yourself in. Did those moments seem humorous to you at the time, or was it only in retrospect, writing about them, that you were able to see the humor or the irony?

ZS: I think the sense of the strangeness of the situation is always there. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m able to get through a lot of the more depressing moments. I have a sense that, yeah, this is fucked up, but at least it’s also funny. Like when we go to Vegas for the AVN awards, Mandy just hates it, because it’s all so stupid, and I feel the same way, but on top of that I know it’s something I can write down later and that makes it ok, somehow.

MS: How does your family feel about your doing porn?

ZS: Opinions are decidedly mixed.

MS: Throughout the book you describe interactions, people, and situations that were completely outside of your previous experience. Do you feel that writing We Did Porn allowed you to overcome any outsider status and fully enter the world you describe or did it deepen your position as an observer and witness?

ZS: With nearly everyone I know in porn there’s some backstory or niche or role that they play that isn’t quite what anybody else does—like she’s the girl who runs this company, he’s the guy who does this fetish, she’s the girl who also models for so-and-so. I’m a guy who paints painting and wrote a book.

MS: Do you think that alt porn will continue to exist outside of mainstream porn or is there an inevitability that it will eventually become absorbed by it?

ZS: There’s always overlap. Performers in “alt porn” almost always do mainstream porn too. I think the more interesting question is just whether the really ambitious “alt”y directors will ever get the money together to make totally new and different movies or whether they’ll always just sort of be in a catch-as-catch-can situation and you have to sort of make a compromise with a big studio to get anything major made.

MS: What was the greatest challenge to writing this book?

ZS: Figuring out what was and wasn’t strange. Example: There was this thing that happened to an actor I know—he was between scenes on a movie, on a couch. He was stroking his dick to try to keep it hard for the next scene—then this girl walks in—total stranger, working on some other scene—she sits on his cock, takes one stroke. Like: one. Down, up. Then gets up and walks away, doesn’t say a word. That’s totally bizarre, but he didn’t say a word—he doesn’t go, “Uh, hey—who are you?”—because he’s working in porn and so he’s got a serious case of novelty fatigue and doesn’t know when something’s weird or not anymore. I mean, you spend ten minutes on the Internet and you’ll find things a thousand times more bizarre than anything in my book, so it was difficult to decide which things I saw were worth telling non-porn people about and which things they’d heard a million times on Howard Stern. In the end I figured if I just wrote whatever I could as thoroughly as I could then I was doing my job.

It’s also hard to gauge the kinkiness of the audience—a huge chunk of the people reading probably can’t imagine a woman ever wanting to be DP’ed, another chunk are women who desperately want to be DP’ed and blog about it all day and don’t need the desire to be DP’ed explained to them, and another chunk doesn’t know what DP stands for. So when double penetration comes up in the book, do you bother to explain that, yes, this is a practice that some women actually fantasize about? Or is that pointlessly quaint and a waste of the reader’s time?

MS: What was the easiest thing about writing this book?

ZS: Finding material.

MS: What are you working on now?

ZS: Fiction. And, as usual, making paintings.