Richard Powers, Conversation, 27 February 2019

[Applause] shall we start you got to do all the heavy lifting here well I want to say I'm going to ask you the question people always ask writers I know that you have moved to the Smoky Mountains and you more or less live in a forest so when I was reading the overstory I had to ask are any of these trees real people it was a great start well what do we say when they say it about characters well some composite there come these these trees are hybrids let's go it's funny I mean I do like you know - for instance is a kind of recreation of my of my Methuselah tree upon a Bond skyline that I talked about in the intro and then there are others you know the the chestnut tree that's planted way out the native range in Iowa and grows up with this native family that's based on on an experience and on a on a cultivated tree way out of its range that actually survives the chestnut bite because it's so so far out you know I don't know if I mentioned this to you and you know we when we were first when I was first starting out of mine you were first out down on american marriage about the same time right and then they came out about the same time so i on you know it was like how do i make them into characters you know and how do i give them that same degree of palpability that the humans are gonna have so when you did that I mean you do anthropomorphic eyes the trees yeah and and I I don't I don't apologize for that in a way because in some ways that prohibition against anthropomorphizing natural things that science uses to kind of keep itself objective and independent it's it it's almost gone too far it there are there ways in which that prohibition against anthropomorphizing has made it very difficult for us to see that we are continuous genetically with the rest I mean it's just I mean think of this when I was when I was in school I I remember sitting in psychology class and and and the professor saying no you know chimpanzees and great apes they're not conscious and that was that was a status I wasn't this one outlier guy I mean that's that was kind of consensual wisdom at the time that prohibition against anthropomorphizing saying look they look like they're for having emotions they look like they're you know planning things why why is that so hard for us to get it there's something about this human exceptionalism thing that's made it really really tough for you know for us to say there's a there's a story there that's right next to our story I mean it's true I mean this is random but my the vet told me that I that my cat is not jealous and my cat is jealous no you know and my cat plots revenge the overstory I was thinking that perhaps you know that I perhaps I do feel my cat her name is Cannella maybe I feel like Cannella is exceptional but it made me think that you know you're doing kind of the same thing yeah with yeah with vegetation with wildlife yeah and interestingly that same scientific prohibition against seeing complex agency or volitional behavior or surprise collaborative or social behavior on the part of plants made these discoveries that have been unfurling over the last 30 or 40 years so belated I mean there was nothing that and that a botanist in 1850 couldn't have you know well I guess there there were some things but - in the last 40 years for these people to come out and say as what as one of my characters does and is persecuted for it that for instance an acacia tree that's being nibbled on by an herbivore in West Africa you know we know that it starts you know after after after a while it starts to put out chemicals to make itself unpalatable to that or before in the ER before he has to push on but now when the researcher says it's also putting out distress signals over the air and the nearby occasions are getting that signal and starting to preemptively produce those same chemicals to make them unpalatable Wow you mean they're sharing an immune system only to those who are willing to you know to anthropomorphize just a little bit in order to see what's happening out there well don't you think this also allows you to use the novel as a forum to to talk about this because you know people like to read novels about people or yeah and in this case a novel about trees that seem kind of is there where people eat people there is no I mean but why do you think I mean this is your twelfth novel and this novel has enjoyed a lot of when I guess I'll call you know mainstream readership why what do you think about this moment has caused this book of all your books that I think that you know like when I said it's a book about trees it makes people chuckle yeah this is your most popular work yeah to what do you attribute that I think you just have to live to 60 to have your breakout what you you beat this by a couple decades but and no so let me go back to this original question so the first part of the question and remind me why this book why here why now yeah no I mean there was something before that most people like looks about yeah it's a mealy tree literary the literary bias toward things that look like us not even literary I think just stuff yeah day to day bias I mean like when people describe someone as a tree hugger for example it's a joke it's a sense people feel that is something that is detached from what we think is important they've they've somehow ridiculously extended their powers of empathy into a place where it shouldn't exist right like it when people say that people are into trees yeah it makes it sound like they're not into people or they're not that they don't have other things to think about it seems like they're making something urgent then isn't urgent is that because trees are so slow to grow like what is that there's a there's a moment in this book where the the bottom the woman who grows up to be this kind of transgressive botanist tender ologist he's being schooled by her father and she's a little girl she had a kind of belatedly diagnosed hearing deficit and as a result her speech was also difficult to understand and she's ostracized by her classmates and so forth and and she finds in the plant world a kind of affinity that she can't find in the human world it helps that her father is also an extension agent and and takes her on his trips with her and starts to teach her all these things and she says you know at school dad you know it's like my classmates can't tell the difference between a shagbark and a pignut hickory what's up with the head so and he says you know it's funny but we we only perk up when the thing looks like us and that has a lot to do with long adaptation right the reason we have big brains is we're social creatures and we need to keep track of each other and we need to know who owes this favorite and who we owe favors to who's up who's down who's in who's out the the the things that attract us move it about the speed that we do they're about the size that we are other adaptations you know we learn to look for predators and so forth and what's good to eat but this thing that unfolds on mind-boggling timeframes on a scale that we just can't put together how do we how it's a it's amazing that anybody gets the empathy enough to take them seriously yeah I think about this moment we're in where where the climate is under siege the earth is under siege and it makes a story like this seem more urgent but also we're in a particular political moment where a lot of people are under siege you know at the same time you see T word don't you go ahead well no and that's you know what I mean like I feel but I do feel like we're in this in this political climate where you know the the EPA is is done right like it's just it's open season on the environment and it does seem like the book a book like yours is more urgent than ever but then there's also the sense that with all the other things we're seeing politically that it sometimes when I've talked to people about the premise of this book before they've read it was just hearing about it they feel like we we are not in a tree moment right now yeah I'm not into trees yeah okay so yeah this is an interesting thing so back in the day when I when I did used to teach my poor undergraduates had to hear this taxonomy about conflict so and you and you know we talked about related things to the the kite flies against the wind doesn't fly with the wind you have to you have to stack the deck against what your characters want right there has to be some kind of conflict so where connect conflict come from and it's a very simple taxonomy but I think it includes most possibilities whenever we have an internal value it immediately sets up a inverse value that's gonna that's gonna cause problems for that person so if I say you know I you know I love you dearly and I'm going to be loyal to you for the rest of my life and you know the the novelist starts to say okay what's what's the problem gonna be and the problem is that someday rick is going to have to choose between honesty and loyalty really so there's you know that to think of Oh think of how many books are set up on this thing you know where it's like do I tell them now and risk the friendship or do I you know do I look the other way and then they're gonna find out later and say why the hell didn't you tell me so so that's interior conflict this is our bread and butter right I mean that's eight tenths of literary fiction now the lack next level is I have completely defensible and and honorable and sympathetic values and the the readers are looking you know are seeing me go to town and they say there's a good guy and he's doing the best he can more or less more or less and and you are doing the same right and I you know whatever my set of values is and you can you can set it up you have great there's an incredible moment in American marriage and could in the full context maybe we don't need the whole thing but you know Celeste you know trying to work this out Celestia one way and you know she's saying you know I'm out here and you have no idea how come he's saying I'm in here and you know and she's saying there's a you know what what do you want me to do and he says I'm innocent and she says I'm innocent - I'm an innocent - that is a chilling moment and it's the it's the perfect example of this kind of dialogical morally distributed you know novel with you know your readers probably come up to you sometimes and say well who's right and you're saying that problem is left up to the reader as an exercise right I mean the the reality is both of those positions are deeply sympathetic and and true so that's what I mean the thing that powers that book is that it now graduates from the private psychological drama to a political drama she's in there because his country's messed up and she has to pay the price for him who's asking her to do why should she so that's the perfect example of incommensurable values between decent people right so you have you have a person against his or her self and you have a good person against another person there is a third level of drama and it used to be all over literature in fact most world literature for most of the history literature knew about this third level of drama which is that the living world sees things differently than Homo Sapien sees that there are conditions for living here that aren't palatable to us and we're struggling to figure out how to stay here and I think what happened to literary fiction is you know around about 3/4 of the way through the the 19th century that battle was over or so we thought you know that that somehow the the the battle between people and the beyond people or you know the the non people that we there was a that it was over and there was only one species standing and we were in charge and everybody else was there as the Bible says you know to have dominion over and and and so that third kind of conflict you know psychological political or social socio-political now environmental that disappears and becomes kind of archaic you could do it as a kind of fake Jack London II thing you know in a nostalgic way but see now your question about what's happening now we now know that we did not win that battle and not only didn't we win it but we're losing it spectacularly but now that it's got to come back into our stories I mean I I think we all understand that if there if there is no earth if the planet is not hospitable to life then all these other questions are just luxuries but there is a sense that the question of environment feels why does it feel so luxurious I guess because I understand that you see what I mean like it's a thing that emotionally registers the opposite of what the reality is because I think we are still by and large colonized by this idea that in fact we can manage the planet and these other things are just kind of inconveniences and maybe there's a sense that the problem the the consequence is so far off yeah that will just kick it down the road a few generations but I feel like that problem is now well that yeah increasingly but that goes back to this sense of how difficult it is for for humans who have this legacy hardware that isn't really great at picking out slow background changes you know so wait there's something moving over here something's on Facebook you know or whatever right I mean on Facebook well yeah I mean right I mean the the the reality is even if we were especially adept at being luxurious in our interpersonal relationships it would still be hard for us to take seriously things that can only be seen through mathematical modeling that are unfolding over long periods of time yet you managed to create urgency with this novel now I'm going to ask you speaking of things to unfold slowly you said this novel took you five and a half years to write can you tell us a little bit about the process by which you write a novel like I know at one point you were using voice recognition software yeah yeah do you still do it I still didn't for this book why not because there were nine different people and because there were so many narrative molds you know as you move through this book from the from the root section to the trunk section to the branches section the mix of dramatization - narration the mix of you know clothes focalization to more distant vocalization of changing all the time and I couldn't I couldn't hear it out loud so how did to do it at you did you write it at you yeah actually a fair I mean it's just trading one kind of technological luxury for another but I actually did a fair amount of it longhand on to a touchscreen and had it converted into text in that there's something about that tactile that's a very nineteenth-century thing well you you aren't I mean you're not state of the art either right I use typewriters which I mean to me a typewriter is harder than in longhand I mean because you know once I do belong in I've got my revisable day after day yeah but the typewriter makes so much noise you feel like you're getting something done and a little ding every time you end of every line that little reward ding and you dramatically slap it back I love it I'm all about the typewriter I should get in my purse why don't you say Mary that's what I want now here's something so you wrote this novel over five years when you turned it when you submitted it did you have any idea the impact the book was going to have I I knew something and it's hard to answer the question because it sounds sounds fulsome but or foolish but that topic exalted me I just love living there and and it was so it it changed me so profoundly I mean you mentioned where I live now I mean two years into the research of the book I kept you know the stunning figure that that there's almost no old-growth left that to see what a forest look like you have to travel to fairly obscure places that only 2% of uncut forests still existed and I kept reading that if you want to see what an Eastern broadleaf deciduous old-growth look like you had to go to Smokies because it's one of the largest contiguous extent original forests left and four years ago I just went on a research mission and I just said I'm gonna go have a look and walking up the side of those mountains in southern Appalachia from the regrowth forests into the old-growth forests I mean it wasn't I didn't even know a quarter of what I knew now but you don't have to when you pass from what's grown back in a century to what was there as it was 10,000 years ago everything changes it looks different it sounds different smells different the species count goes way up you know they're the the quality of the light you know the the variability of the sizes of the trees you know seeing these these tulip poplars that were 27 feet in circumference I just couldn't get enough of it you know and I and for the first time I thought you know what we're not a happy people anyway I you know and I left there and worked this out over the period of eight or nine or ten months the reason that we're writing all these stories about how hard it is to find happiness and meaning is because we've been told through our arts and through our society and through our economy that meaning is a privately made subjective individual humanists Exceptionalist commodity mediated the thing how rewarding can that be how many stories can you tell to make that seem palatable and I'm thinking you know we used to know something else we used to know that meaning was out there and that you can't tell the story of us without telling the story of the place you know in your novelist of place I mean it's there they're often socially constructed places in urban places and so forth but you know you can't understand your characters without understanding where they are right and I'm sitting there suddenly saying you know word were it would be like writing about an animal you know writing about a tiger or a lion by going to the zoo and seeing them in their cages we've made a cage for ourselves that you know we we've talked ourselves into thinking that were the only game in town were the only interesting thing that there is and and and that's worked us and nine or ten months after this excursion thinking I had a little glimpse of what it would mean to belong to a place to actually think of myself as part of a situation that was mostly not me since I was still thinking of the ten months later I thought that's got to tell me something I went back and bought a house and I've been living there ever since the last three years the books out I've been on the road for a year I don't see myself moving out anytime soon you know I think of you often there because I do feel like you're having just many more kind of close encounters with bears yeah they were bear she she only lives four hours away now and she's promised many times to come but she doesn't like this four foot thing I'm an urban person I live in the city of Atlanta but like even though when you were explaining the phenomenon of the Eclipse out there I mean I was in New York City when the Eclipse happen and I was like looking at it through my kitchen colander you know I felt like on ER that you could see the Eclipse with your colander and when he told me about what he saw I realized that I did not see any clips I saw a kitchen collar about your moment with the Eclipse please [Laughter] so it passed it passed over my deck and where where I live you know I I don't have a lot of property but it's contiguous with the park with the width of largest terrestrial park in the u.s. 800 square miles of a forest in my backyard so I look out and I see I see it as if my house goes right into it and the the eeriness of the experience had something to do with the quality of light and something to do with the air the quality of the air as urban people would have reported but it had a lot to do with the quality of the sound and the the sense and the anxiety in the woods around me they didn't know what was happening and and I could hear that and there's and and then you know after after full you know in those first few seconds there was an eerie silence in the middle of the day if that was to me that was being out there where this has happened so many times you know in the end the the lifespan of a creature and the lifespan of a tree and the lifespan of this astronomical event intersected in the weirdest way and and I was there in the middle of that moment and in hearing the bewilderment which is beautiful word if you think about it etymologically right though the rewilding of this moment what do you suggest what like what with the overstory and so many people have read it you know hundreds of thousands of people have read it but we all still you know we live our urban lives we live our or you say you were tree blind yeah and now you're not I feel like everyone who's read this book is no longer tree blind but it could amazing graces know what I was blind to know I can see yes we were lost now we're found but now what yeah well that's a good and as you know - I mean the question is complicated just by the anxiety of following up something that that had an intention that the rest of our body of work hasn't had and I could ask you that same question to you do you really think there was something qualitatively different about this one over your previous books and there is and there isn't I mean I I knew when I read your galley but I I thought that on previous galley - and there's something simply about being in the right place at the right time and things coming together for you well once they do come together that now the question is okay what have you done lately and how do you how do you follow up on that and for me it's complicated because now I'm really committed to this idea that literary fiction it can't be just the one off oh you remember 20 years ago that book about trees it you know it I want to see it now as part of something you know part of a moment where literary fiction says yes the nonhumans are are any story that we tell about ourselves they need to be in there as as we knew always it's all myth and legend knew how do you continue you know in a way I feel like I got lucky like I created characters who were quirky or eccentric or vivid enough to seduce the reader who only wants the human deep enough into the book for them to have happen what happened to my humans which is this realization of you know we're not here alone but how do you do it again without actually repeating that same formula and I'm at work on it but it's not trivial I have another question you know you're saying about this tree blindness I like the term in in the overstory there are so many family sagas and so many people have had familial relationship with trees trees that have been with families for generations and in the overstory the characters are aware that this was my grandfather's tree my father's tree but when I read it I realized that like I said you as I said before I'm from Atlanta and Atlanta is a city with a lot of trees but all my life there was a hickory tree in my yard it was very and had branches and leaves and things I know it was a hickory tree I knew what kind of tree it was but it was always there throughout my childhood and I knew it and my dad built like a little bent little round bench around it and when I read the over story I thought oh that bench was kind of my the tree that was a gift to my family although we don't live live in that house anymore someone else lives there hope the tree is still there but I was wondering if as you were writing this even though you had been up to that point tree blind did you look back and realize that maybe you had a relationship with trees that you didn't know you had no absolutely absolutely and one similar to the one that you described I think it's hard to be on this human you know to be a human on this earth without without having some moment like that and I wrote that into the story of Adam in his relationship to the maple in his backyard and the trees that were planted for each child and the the sort of horrific correspondence that happens between the trees and the kids so that became fodder for the book as well but I'll tell you one of the most satisfying things about the book is the number of people who just after reading it wanna say you reminded me of something I haven't thought about for 40 years or 50 years this thing that was important to me and you know I think when we when we when we start out all of us are our natural ists you know every kid is a little scientist and then we lose it and and in a sense you can say thing the same thing about this historical process that we were talking about at large humans on this earth you know there was a time when it was essential for us to be natural scientists to understand the rhythms and the limitation you know as Thoreau says you know in this beautiful phrase he says doing breathe the air drink the drink taste the fruit live in each season as it passes resign yourself to the influence of the earth when we were young we knew that when we were young as a culture as a species we knew that when we were young as individuals we knew that so now the question is how do we get it back we have five more minutes so I'm going to ask you two questions because I feel that anyone who Risa over story makes you want to do two things it makes you one want to do something to help preserve the planet so I want to know what you think every day people can do but it also makes you want to write a book so what advice do you have on those two it's lovely well let me start with the second I haven't I I do get that question as you do in over the course of your career you know people and people of all experience levels in all ages actually want want to know and I you know you could do better than the Joseph Campbell follow your bliss I mean I feel like I really came into something on this one number twelve because I gave myself entirely to the to the nerdy delights of complete immersion in the thing that gave me daily joy and you can build your story around that and it can still be a sad story in a heart-rending story but you have to want to live in that world day after day for five years you know to make it happen until you write every day not anymore you know back in the day I used to you know if I didn't get my thousand words I'm gonna forget how to do this I'm not a real writer you know it's when I go back and it's not gonna be there anymore and now it's like if I don't get my four and a half miles in you know under those under those woods of course what's nice about walking is you get about a mile and a half in and it's like I got to go back because I got like 15 things I have to write down so so it's not like that's going away and just have a different relationship to the compulsion and where it starts and I'll make it happen so that's the advice on writing a book you know and I guess you could you know even if you were gonna write a book much more clearly in that tradition of 100 percent psychological or even venturing into the socio-political you know love your characters the way you love yourself you know and you know if you're not going to do it your audience isn't gonna do it and you're not gonna want to work every day what can we do at this dire moment yes and and you know a lot of people who read the book can say I don't know whether to be hopeful or destroyed by this I mean you you you people went out there and then they went over the line and they put everything they had and it went catastrophic ly wrong and they paid a big price for it and then years later you know they had to look back and and say you know was this just a catastrophic wrong turn and you know there's some value in not resolving that morally for every reader but to me whatever this question of efficacy I mean I don't think we're gonna get out of this what we've done by making small negotiations within the basic sense of individualist capitalists inhuman exceptional you know small negotiations aren't going to do it there has to be a change in the way that we look at everything that's not us and what I tell my readers is look if you're telling me that you're walking down that Street in Brooklyn that you've walked down to the last twelve or fourteen or fifteen years and and you're excitedly reporting to me that there's something halfway down there that's doing an amazing thing that you didn't see for a dozen years I'm saying you the revolutions of revolutions already started you know and and there will be a trigger point when sufficient number of people say it's not just about us the things that that it will it won't see like a sacrifice it won't statement in time well that I can't time for who see here's an interesting question well just and that's a good send-off I mean here we are one hundred two hundred thousand years into this experiment and the futures looking a little dicey right those guys been around for 400 million years and they've lived through many mass extinctions all I can say is you know we're not going through the way we are now if we want to stick around for a long time we got to make friends with them we got to figure out what they're doing you you

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Length: 35min 19sec (2119 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 02 2019