Interview with Mary Sojourner: How a Short-Story Collection Became My Travel Compass

🌧️ The Rain That Didn’t Stop the Talker

I sat on a damp concrete step outside the Tucson Public Library’s west entrance, rain drumming steadily on the metal awning above me, clutching a library copy of Talker—Mary Sojourner’s 2007 short-story collection—and underlining the line that would anchor my next six weeks: ‘The road doesn’t care if you’re broke. It only asks if you’re listening.’ That sentence wasn’t metaphorical. It was instruction. I’d arrived in southern Arizona with $387, a duffel bag, no return ticket, and the quiet, stubborn conviction that traveling without a plan—or rather, with only a literary one—wasn’t reckless. It was how to read a place slowly, deliberately, like Sojourner does in every story set across the Sonoran Desert, the Mojave, and the high desert mesas of northern New Mexico. This wasn’t a book tour. It was a literary pilgrimage guided by voice, not itinerary—and it began not at a landmark, but at a bus stop where the wind smelled of creosote and wet dust.

��️ The Setup: Why I Carried a Book Instead of a Guidebook

It started in late October, after three years of working remote copy jobs that paid just enough to cover rent in Portland—but never enough to feel like I owned my time. I’d read Sojourner’s essays in High Desert Journal, then her memoir Going Through Ghosts, then Talker. Her characters weren’t tourists. They were waitresses in Silver City diners, retired geologists tracing fault lines on back roads, women hitchhiking between Taos and Flagstaff with notebooks full of half-formed questions. Their journeys weren’t about destinations—they were about duration, about what happens when you stay long enough for the light to shift twice a day and for strangers to start using your name without being told.

I booked a Greyhound ticket to Tucson—not because it was ‘on the way’ to anything, but because Sojourner lived there, taught writing workshops at the University of Arizona, and had written two stories in Talker set explicitly in its barrio neighborhoods and saguaro-dotted foothills. My plan was simple: read each story before visiting its setting; record observations in the margins; talk to people who recognized the names of streets, cafes, or washes she’d named. No Airbnb bookings. No museum passes. Just library cards, bus passes, and a notebook bound in recycled denim. I carried a sleeping bag, a titanium pot, and a solar charger rated for 12W—enough to keep my phone alive for maps and voice memos, nothing more. I didn’t call it ‘budget travel.’ I called it unleveraged travel: moving without financial or emotional leverage over the place I entered.

🚌 The Turning Point: When the Bus Didn’t Arrive (and What Happened Next)

The first disruption came on Day 3. I’d taken the Sun Tran Route 11 south toward the Santa Cruz River Valley, aiming for the stretch of riverbed Sojourner describes in ‘The Water Line,’ where a character buries a letter she’ll never send. But the bus never pulled up. Not at the scheduled 10:14 a.m., not at 10:28, not even at 10:47, when the digital sign flickered ‘OUT OF SERVICE’ and went dark. I stood under the shelter’s peeling blue paint, listening to cicadas pulse in the heat, sweat pooling at my temples, my notebook open to page 42—where Sojourner writes, ‘Waiting is not passive. It’s the first act of witness.’

I closed the book. Walked. Not toward the riverbed, but toward the nearest cluster of adobe houses I could see beyond the chain-link fence. A woman sweeping her front porch paused, leaned on her broom, watched me. I raised my hand—not in greeting, but in quiet acknowledgment. She nodded once. I kept walking. Twenty minutes later, I found myself at La Cocina, a family-run comedor tucked behind a rusted gate. No sign. Just a chalkboard nailed to a post: Menú del Día: Enchiladas verdes, arroz, frijoles, agua fresca—$8. I sat at a plastic table under a faded awning. The owner, Marta, brought water in a mason jar, asked where I was from, listened as I explained—not that I was ‘touring,’ but that I was following sentences. She laughed softly, wiped her hands on her apron, and said, ‘Mary comes here sometimes. Orders the same thing. Sits by that window.’ She pointed to a corner booth where sunlight fell across a chipped Formica table. I ordered. Ate slowly. Watched dust motes move in the slanting light. And realized: the bus delay hadn’t derailed the trip—it had initiated it. Sojourner’s stories didn’t map geography. They mapped attention.

📝 The Discovery: Listening Is a Muscle You Build on Foot

Over the next three weeks, I stopped trying to ‘cover ground.’ Instead, I practiced what Sojourner calls talker listening—a term she uses in interviews to describe the kind of attention that doesn’t seek answers but holds space for resonance. In Bisbee, I spent an afternoon at the Copper Queen Library, cross-referencing street names in ‘Copper Light’ with 1940s Sanborn maps digitized on their public terminals. The librarian, Rosa, noticed me squinting at a faded aerial photo. She pulled out a box of oral histories recorded by local teens in 2012—stories about working the mines, about dances held in the old union hall, about how the monsoon rains changed the color of the cliffs. None of it was in Talker. But all of it echoed its rhythms.

In Silver City, I waited outside the Gila Community College writing center, hoping to catch Sojourner after a workshop. She arrived carrying a canvas tote with frayed straps, wearing hiking boots and a faded bandana. I introduced myself honestly: not as a journalist, not as a fan, but as someone who’d walked seven miles that morning retracing the path her character takes in ‘The Last Goodbye’—past the abandoned assay office, past the juniper grove where the protagonist stops to tie her bootlace, past the dry creek bed where she drops a stone into the sand and watches it disappear.

She didn’t invite me inside. She gestured toward a bench under a cottonwood tree. ‘You’re doing it right,’ she said. ‘Most people come asking how to write like me. You’re asking how to be in the places I wrote from. That’s harder. And more useful.’ We talked for forty-three minutes—about bus schedules in rural New Mexico (‘Always assume they’re optimistic’), about which libraries lend interlibrary loans across state lines (‘Tucson and Las Cruces do; Santa Fe doesn’t unless you have a city ID’), about how to tell if a café owner will let you sit for hours without ordering again (‘Watch where they hang their apron—if it’s on the hook behind the counter, you’re welcome. If it’s draped over a chair, they’re waiting for you to leave’). She gave me no contact info. No promises. Just one piece of advice: ‘Don’t collect experiences. Collect thresholds—the moments where your assumptions thin enough to let something real slip through.’

🌄 The Journey Continues: From Page to Place, Then Back Again

I spent the final two weeks in Taos—not at the historic plaza, but in the low-slung neighborhood east of Paseo del Pueblo Norte, where Sojourner sets ‘The Talker’s Daughter.’ I rented a room in a shared adobe compound ($32/night, paid weekly in cash) with a woman named Elena who grew chile peppers on her roof and taught English to migrant farmworkers. Every morning, I walked the dirt road she described—the one lined with yucca and crumbling stone walls—reading aloud passages from the story while matching cadence to pace. I learned to recognize the difference between the sound of wind through cottonwoods (low, shushing) and through pinon pines (dry, rattling)—a distinction Sojourner notes in three separate stories, always tied to shifts in a character’s mood.

One afternoon, I joined a free community storytelling circle at the Taos Library. No theme. No agenda. Just chairs in a circle, paper cups of weak coffee, and a rule: no phones, no notes, no interrupting. An elder named Joe told a story about teaching his grandson to track deer by reading scat and shadow—how the shape of droppings changes with diet, how light bends differently over north-facing slopes. Another woman spoke about losing her job at the ski resort and spending winter nights transcribing old WPA interviews with Hispano sheepherders. I didn’t speak. I listened—not for takeaways, but for texture. For the pauses between words. For the way voices softened when naming places: Rito de los Pinos, Cañada de los Alamos, El Valle del Sol. These weren’t locations on Google Maps. They were sonic landmarks—phrases that anchored memory in breath.

💡 Reflection: What ‘Talker’ Taught Me About Travel—and Silence

I used to think budget travel meant cutting costs: cheaper hostels, bus instead of train, cooking instead of eating out. But Sojourner’s work revealed a different economy—one where the currency isn’t dollars but duration, attention, and reciprocity. Staying six weeks in one region cost less than a seven-day package tour to Europe—not because I skimped, but because I slowed down enough to notice what was already offered: shared meals, impromptu directions, invitations to sit awhile. I didn’t need Wi-Fi passwords—I needed to learn how to ask, ‘What’s the best way to get to the acequia?’ instead of ‘Where’s the nearest Starbucks?’

The biggest surprise wasn’t the kindness I received. It was how my own internal noise quieted. Without the pressure to ‘see everything,’ I noticed how light moved across adobe walls at 4:17 p.m. I memorized the scent of rain on hot pavement—an ozone-and-dust smell Sojourner names ‘the desert’s first exhale’ in ‘Monsoon Line.’ I stopped photographing sunsets and started sketching cloud formations in my notebook: cumulus fractus, altocumulus castellanus, the rare mammatus that rolled in one evening over the Rio Grande gorge. Photography had been my default mode of possession. Sketching was an act of surrender—to time, to imperfection, to the fact that some things resist capture.

🔍 Practical Takeaways: Lessons Embedded in the Journey

None of this required special permissions, visas, or gear. It required only willingness to adjust pace and posture. Here’s what translated directly:

• 📚 Start with text, not terrain. Choose one deeply rooted book—fiction or nonfiction—set in a place you want to visit. Read it before you go. Underline places, phrases, sensory details. Let those become your first landmarks.
• 🚌 Treat transit delays as fieldwork. When buses don’t run or ferries are canceled, walk toward the nearest residential area—not the tourist zone. Sit on a bench. Watch how people move, how they greet each other, how they handle heat or rain. Carry a small notebook. Write three observed details before checking your phone.
• ☕ Order the menú del día, then stay. In small towns, cafés and comedores often operate on trust-based time. Pay, eat, then ask, ‘Is it alright if I sit a little longer? I’m writing something.’ Most will say yes—if you’ve already paid and haven’t asked for refills.
• 📖 Visit local libraries—not for Wi-Fi, but for archives. Many rural and university libraries hold oral history collections, historical society bulletins, and digitized maps unavailable online. Ask librarians what stories locals bring in. Listen for recurring names, places, or grievances.
• 🌄 Track light, not landmarks. Note sunrise/sunset times. Observe how shadows fall on buildings at different hours. Photographing light patterns teaches you to read a place spatially and temporally—more reliably than any GPS pin.

⭐ Conclusion: The Road Doesn’t Care If You’re Broke—But It Does Notice How You Listen

I left Taos on a Greyhound bus heading north—not toward another destination, but toward reintegration. My duffel weighed slightly more: two new notebooks filled with sketches and marginalia, a bundle of dried chiles Elena gave me, and a folded map annotated in Sojourner’s handwriting (she’d signed a copy of Talker for me at the library, adding, ‘Pace is political. Keep yours.’). I hadn’t ‘seen’ Arizona or New Mexico in the conventional sense. I’d felt their grammar—the syntax of wind, the punctuation of washes, the cadence of bilingual conversation drifting from open windows.

Budget travel, I now understand, isn’t about how little you spend. It’s about how much you’re willing to receive without paying. It’s the difference between arriving with an itinerary and arriving with a question. Sojourner’s Talker didn’t give me directions. It gave me permission to wander without purpose—and in doing so, to arrive, finally, at attention.