Indigo

June 1, 2021

A National Book Award finalist and James Tait Black Prize winner, Powell offers his first collection of nonfiction. Pieces written over the last three decades range from attending the World Armwrestling Federation Championships in Sweden to seeking out the rare indigo snake to growing up in the segregated, then newly integrated South. Writers from Flannery O'Connor to William Trevor also get their due, and let's not forget Powell's cherished pit bull.

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September 13, 2021
Novelist Powell (The Interrogative Mood) makes his nonfiction debut with this winning collection of essays published between 1987 and 2018. With infectious curiosity and sympathy, Powell covers literature, sports, and the American South. “Cleve Dean” tells the story of an arm-wrestling icon from Pavo, Ga., as he’s en route to Sweden to try to regain his world championship title after nearly a decade; Powell anticipates the event as “a clear and possibly heroic moment.” “Saving the Indigo” captures Powell’s fascination with and search for the endangered indigo snake. Calling himself “a fool for the Indigo,” he first encountered the “giant, purple, friendly snake” as a 12-year-old, and his obsession has endured for five decades. There’s a slew of essays on his friendships with other artists as well as writers he admires: “Don Barthelme” pinpoints the writer’s specific brand of wordplay-based humor, and “Grace Paley” recounts her insistence that “men will be boys.” Powell’s prose is razor-sharp, and locales such as New Orleans and Bermuda come alive through his shrewd eye and distinctive storytelling. His insightful observations on the craft and teaching of writing (“All novels are frauds”) are a bonus. This will delight Powell’s fans and should gain him some new ones, too.

November 1, 2021
Containing essays from 1987 to 2018, this collection opens with an unusual but fascinating foreword from Pete Dexter that situates Powell's largely unheralded writing and teaching in context. The opening essay (and also the strongest) focuses on an arm wrestler from Georgia, Cleve Dean, and his one last hurrah at a world title. The second essay, "Hitting Back," builds from a series of fascinating photos from Powell's Florida childhood. His profiles of the painters C. Ford Riley and Bill Wegman are short but excellent, as are his profiles of writers he admires and often knew: Flannery O'Connor, Donald Barthelme, Peter Taylor, Grace Paley, and Denis Johnson. Powell is also a gifted travel writer, as captured in "New Orleans" and "Bermuda," with the former really getting across his love of gumbo, which reappears in the essays "Squirrel" and, unsurprisingly, "Gumbo." While oddly sequenced, this collection captures Powell's literary gifts, and his generous appreciation of both his Southern roots and the world around him.

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Starred review from August 1, 2021
After six novels and three story collections, Powell gathers his magazine articles and other short works in his first book of nonfiction. In 2018, Powell, a professor emeritus of creative writing at the University of Florida, said that he had quit writing, and this book suggests he meant it--all of the pieces were written before 2019 and all but one previously published or delivered at literary events. Yet if this volume collects exhumed work, it has no air of mothballs about it. In a generous foreword, Pete Dexter rightly says of the entries: "They move like stories, carry the same expectations, they end like stories." Powell's intersecting preoccupations are the South--its art, music, food, wildlife, and literature--and the demands of writing fiction. Befitting those interests, he includes appreciations of his teacher Donald Barthelme and others he's known or admired from afar: artist William Wegman; writers Grace Paley, Peter Taylor, Denis Johnson, William Trevor, and Flannery O'Connor; and Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Allen Collins, with whom he attended junior high in Jacksonville. Standout articles describe Powell's visits to a world arm-wrestling championship in Sweden and his quest to see "one of the free world's last indigo snakes" in the wild amid the longleaf pines of Florida and southern Georgia. Elsewhere, he derides "craft books" full of "bloviations" on literary grails such as "round characters and flat characters; backstory; rising action, climax, denouement," and "the bastardizing of telling versus the apotheosis of showing, hands down the largest bogosity of them all; and the existence of the necessary inevitable, which nessarily cannot be anticipated before its inevitability becomes apparent." Some writers will see those words as blasphemous, but others will cheer the rare full-frontal assault on MFA program orthodoxies. Either way, if Powell has stopped writing, he's going out swinging with a fine left hook. Memorable reflections on writing and life from an author who pulls no punches.

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