An Interview, by Richard Powers  |  Conjunctions — The forum for innovative writing

Conjunctions:70 — Sanctuary: The Preservation Issue, Spring 2018, Edited by Bradford Morrow

Source: An Interview, by Richard Powers  |  Conjunctions — The forum for innovative writing

An Interview

Richard Powers
Interview by Bradford MorrowHis novels have explored a varied, broad range of themes over the years—from science to music, from war to commerce, from computer technology to the enigmatic nature of the mind—but when he told me last fall that his new novel, The Overstory, was “about trees,” I was a little surprised and a lot intrigued. Nature had often been a presence in his writings, but we’d never to my recollection discussed trees, at least not in any depth. Three decades of friendship and conversation should have prepared me never to be surprised by developments in Rick’s polymathic interests, and when I received and read a galley of The Overstory, I recognized that most of those earlier themes were ever present, with the additional, crucial subject of our forests’—and therefore our planet’s—survival. Here was a resurrection of what had come before, newly charged with an essential story about ominous directions in which we are headed while greedily, ignorantly, even blithely destroying our only home, earth.

     In a turn-of-the-millennium dialogue the two of us did that was published in Conjunctions:34, American Fiction: States of the Art, Rick memorably stated that “Art is a way of saying what it means to be alive, and the most salient feature of existence is the unthinkable odds against it. For every way that there is of being here, there are an infinity of ways of not being here.” It was a worldview embraced once more in his latest novel. One of those infinite ways of not being here can be assured, quite simply, by failing to preserve our complex, remarkably sentient forests.