Richard Powers on Catching Up with the Unconscious

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Richard Powers about his new novel, Playground.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: You write a lot about the ocean and the explorer and marine biologist Evelyne Beaulieu and also about a profound friendship between these two young men. Did you always think or know that you wanted these to be side by side in some way?

Richard Powers: I think I must have known that I wanted them side by side.  Again, so much of writing is the act of catching up with what your unconscious has already planned for you. There were some false starts with the book, but once I figured out what I was doing, it was the closest thing that I’ve had to a gift in 40 years of writing novels. It is my fourteenth novel, and I’ve never had one that felt so much like just taking dictation and that felt so much like playing the game. That was just a joy to wake up to and go to every morning. But did I know how this design was going to work from the beginning?  Some part of me must have, because it sure came together pretty cleanly. But I consciously, you know, the working writer had to figure it out by feeling my way forward.  So, I could see the friendship, and I could see the island, and I could see Evelyne. The braid that wove them all together must have been much older than the book itself.  A reader listening to the podcast might be asking What does a book about the ocean gain by throwing in artificial intelligence or vice versa? What does a book about this constant accelerating digital revolution have to gain by throwing in the ocean? And the answer is multifold. One is this is the world of 2024. We are rapidly adding new and unprecedented, powerful agents into the equation of life, while at the same time rapidly diminishing or destroying huge biological richness and diversity in the living world. If you want to tell a story of what it means to be alive right now, both of those elements have to be in that story. But I think more specifically, there’s an interesting link that you could also see having antecedents in Bewilderment and in The Overstory, the novel that I wrote before Bewilderment, which is that all three of these books have to do with stories that question human exceptionalism, that question the idea that we are somehow unique and autonomous and that the rest of the world, whether it’s non-human plants and animals or non-human inventions, that the rest of the world is simply there to further the human project. These last three novels are basically saying the picture is a lot more complicated. We are not the central story with all these other little bits and pieces hanging off us, we are just a very small story that’s hanging off of a very large one that’s been around for a long time. And you know, one of the great discoveries that I made emotionally while working on this book is we’re living on a planet where 99% of the available space for life can’t be inhabited by us. That that the world we know is a late comer, that the oceans had been brewing and percolating life, evolving it for billions of years before life ever came up on land. And we are at best very transient visitors to this enormous and unknown place that is the real world. And so, that too had to be at the very heart of a book saying, what does it mean to be a human being at the earliest moments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

***

Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including Bewilderment, The Overstory, and Orfeo.  He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award.  He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.