REBROADCAST: Author Richard Powers on his novel “Bewilderment”

Richard Powers’ last novel, “The Overstory,” was a 600-page deep-dive into the science of forests, and the relationships between trees and human beings. His newest, “Bewilderment,” is less than half that length, but both vaster and more intimate in scope. It is the story of an astrobiologist who looks for life on other planets, while he navigates a complex relationship with his young son. Powers joins us in front of an audience at Parkrose High School.

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Note: The following transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We are coming to you today in front of an audience at Parkrose High School in East Portland. It is a conversation with the novelist Richard Powers. Richard Powers’ last novel, “The Overstory’' was a 600-page deep dive into the science of forests and the tangled relationships among trees and between trees and humans. His newest novel, “Bewilderment,” came out in the fall. It’s shorter, less than half that length, but it’s at least as vast in scope and arguably more intimate. “Bewilderment” tells the story of a widowed astrobiologist who looks for life on other planets while navigating a complex relationship with his extraordinary, but troubled, son. If “Overstory’' gave us new ways of thinking about ancient giants in our forests, this new book forces us to confront our own brains and our own place in the universe. Richard Powers, it’s a true pleasure to have you back on our show.

Richard Powers: Thanks so much, Dave. It’s great to be back.

Miller: I wonder if we could start by having you read just a page and a half from the very beginning of the book, because I think it’s a good way to get to know your two main characters.

Powers: It is, indeed. So as, you said in your introduction, the book is primarily concerned with Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist in his late 30′s and his son, Robin, a nine year old of exceptional abilities and also exceptional turmoil at the moment. His mother has died about two years before the book starts. Theo is having increasing trouble keeping Robin happy and well in his school and with his classmates. He has brought the boy to various doctors. He knows his son is unusual, but he’s also not sure how much of the behavioral challenges are caused by losing his mother in the context of that grief. And in this passage, the entire book is narrated by Theo, so this is a two person … this is a duet from start to finish between father and son. And in this passage, Theo is lamenting the fact that medicine has given him very little to work with with regard to understanding and helping his son, as his son’s behavior becomes more and more difficult.

I never believed the diagnosis the doctors settled on my son. When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, when it requires two subcategories to account for completely contradictory symptoms, when it goes from nonexistent to the country’s most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in the course of one generation, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there’s something wrong.

My Robin didn’t always sleep well. He wet the bed a few times a season, and it hunched him over with shame. Noises unsettled him; he liked to turn the sound way down on the television, too low for me to hear. He hated when the cloth monkey wasn’t on its perch in the laundry room above the washing machine. He poured every dollar of allowance into a trading card game—Collect them all!—but he kept the untouched cards in numeric order in plastic sleeves in a special binder.

He could smell a fart from across a crowded movie theater. He’d focus for hours on Minerals of Nevada or the Kings and Queens of England—anything in tables. He sketched constantly and well, laboring over fine details lost on me. Intricate buildings and machines for a year. Then animals and plants.

His pronouncements were off-the-wall mysteries to everyone except me. He could quote whole scenes from movies, even after a single viewing. He rehearsed memories endlessly, and every repetition of the details made him happier. When he finished a book he liked, he’d start it again immediately, from page one. He melted down and exploded over nothing. But he could just as easily be overcome by joy.

On rough nights when Robin retreated to my bed, he wanted to be on the side farthest from the endless terrors outside the window. (His mother had always wanted the safe side, too.) He day-dreamed, had trouble with deadlines, and yes, he refused to focus on things that didn’t interest him. But he never fidgeted or dashed around or talked without stopping. And he could hold still for hours with things he loved. Tell me what deficit matched up with all that? What disorder explained him?

The suggestions were plentiful, including syndromes linked to the billion pounds of toxins sprayed on the country’s food supply each year. His second pediatrician was keen to put Robin “on the spectrum.” I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow. Then I wanted to punch him. I suppose there’s a name for that, too.

Miller: That’s my guest, Richard Powers, reading from, I think the fourth page of his new novel “Bewilderment”. How much do you remember about being nine years old?

Powers: A lot more having finished writing this book than before I started writing.

Miller: It unearthed memories?

Powers: Oh, goodness, yes. Yeah. It took me a while as I was creating this father and the son and I had modeled the nine year old troubled Robin on younger kids who I had known as an adult, who I had special relationships with and who I thought were the primary basis for Robin. It took me a while to realize that I was actually recreating the strangeness of my own nine year old self.

Miller: What are examples of that?

Powers: Well, this passionate obsessions that he would get for certain kinds of topics. Like, he would become … Robin becomes driven to find out everything about a particular species. And then he’ll draw it again and again. Those kinds of things were very familiar to me as a child. I would become absolutely obsessed with a certain topic. There’s a throwaway line in the book, the father is describing how Robin confuses his friends, and gives us an example. He says his favorite animal is the nudibranch, right, which is a fancy name for sea slug. He says the nudibranch is an under-appreciated animal. Well, the nudibranch was my favorite animal when I was young. So a lot of the book was a strange kind of self therapy, going back and just remembering how poorly I did fit in as a child.

Miller: Do you have a sense for how much those qualities have helped you as a writer?

Powers: I think they’re the backbone of being a writer. I, it’s interesting to be in high school and be thinking about myself at the age of 16 and 17, so somewhat older than Robin is in this book. When I grew up on the north side of Chicago and spent my first 11 years there and then I moved to Bangkok, Thailand and spent my teenage years and then I came back to finish high school in the States, and that’s where I first became interested in writing because I was coming back to a country that I thought had been mine, but in the years that I was away, growing differently in a Buddhist country in Southeast Asia and my friends had been growing in a different direction in this country. I realized I didn’t fit in anymore. And I already had a good head start to being something of an outsider when I was Robin’s age, as I was saying earlier, so that strange combination of being an insider outsider, being an observer of your own life, sort of sitting on your own shoulder and saying, ‘I see all these things happening, but I’m not 100% participating in them.’ I think that’s the definition of a writer’s sensibility, to be an observer of your own self in your own life.

Miller: It seems like, in addition to that observer sensibility, there’s also kind of focused attention that you bring once you get interested in something, at least this is where you were as a nine year old you were saying, and certainly your character, Robin, that you want to stick with that and really, if not get mastery, then really deeply understand it.

Powers: Yeah, and that’s the other thing that I was thinking about, with all of you out in the group, you are, those of you who are graduating this year or next year are starting to think of that horrible adult question, you know what comes next? And I hated that because my obsessions changed from month to month. And I really didn’t want to close any doors. I wanted to have that freedom to keep looking into things that interested me. And I knew that the next step was going to be a specialization step, choosing a major or, whatever it was, choosing a career or a job. And I really felt anxious about that. It was a weekly panic for me. And the way that I kept that open was to discover writing, because in this career, writing, I’ve been able to reinvent myself every couple of years, to choose a subject matter that I would have liked to study or to engage professionally and to make myself as expert as I could, over the course of the writing a book, to feel what that world would have felt like, had I pursued that path, that road not taken.

Miller: Let’s take a question from the audience. What’s your name, please?

Cora Lee: Cora Lee. During your early college process, how did you deal with that, before you felt … before you learned you wanted to become a writer? How did you deal with that feeling of, like, changing from interest to interest?

Powers: Not very well, honestly. And I can remember showing up at the university health clinic more than once to a doctor and saying, well, just, I have a constant stomach ache and the doctor would say, ‘You know, you’re a freshman in college. You know, we will look at everything and make sure that it’s nothing serious, but it may just be stress.’ So, the reality was, I stressed out and I did it for a couple of years. And it really was only this belated discovery that there was a way of being in the world where I could continue to be a generalist that solved the problem for me.

Miller: And the stress, it wasn’t, ‘will I succeed?’ and ‘are my grades gonna be good enough?’ It was, ‘windows of opportunity are closing for me.’?

Powers: It was the sound of doors closing. Just every step forward was foreclosing on other possibilities.

Miller: Let’s turn to the title of the book because I feel like, in its own way, it’s not unrelated to what you’re talking about, the world of possibility. What does bewilderment mean to you?

Powers: Well, the most common sense of the word, the one that most people are going to feel spontaneously is confusion or disorientation. When you say ‘I’m bewildered’, you’re saying ‘I am baffled’. However, I think there’s a slightly positive … more positive sense of the word too, which is, ‘you bewilder me’, right? It’s almost like ‘you astonish me. You changed the way that I’m thinking about things. You’ve put me back in an uncertain but not unpleasant state of mind’. There’s a deeper sense of the word that I was also going for when I chose it for the novel’s title, which is the etymological sense of the word, bewilder means to become wild again, to go back into the wilderness. And to have your certainties taken away and just be put in an unmediated way with the rest of the living world.

Miller: As I noted this, your new book came out about three years after the Pulitzer prize winning novel, “The Overstory”, which is about a lot of things, but at base maybe the interconnectedness of trees and fungus and us and everything. Do you see a through line between “The Overstory’' and “Bewilderment”?

Powers: I absolutely do. “Bewilderment” was my 12th novel. I’ve been publishing since 1985, so almost four decades, and I’ve been pursuing this trajectory that I was talking about earlier ‒ namely using the books as a way of becoming better versed in different worlds, different ways of thinking about the world. “Overstory” was the first time that I wrote a book where, when I got to the end, I just wanted to keep exploring those same questions ‒ the interdependence of existence into being this kind of vast ramifying branching symbiotic experiment that we’re becoming part of, that we’ve always been a part of, and and wanting to tell stories that break down the difference between humans and the more than human world. And I continue those themes in “Bewilderment” but just in a very different way, as you mentioned in a shorter form, far fewer characters, a simpler prose style, but all of these questions: Who are we? How do we live here on earth among the neighbors? Who we have ceased to see and ceased to take seriously? So “Bewilderment” and “Overstory” are in a way connected, underground as it were, by fungal filaments that make them, in a sense, the same story, pursued in very different ways.

Miller: Before we turn to our connections to our neighbors on earth, let’s start with extraterrestrial neighbors. Because I noted that Theo, your narrator, Robby’s father, he’s an astrobiologist. What does that job entail?

Powers: It’s a new profession actually that’s just come about in the last several years and it’s a field that attempts to think in the broadest possible ways about life; what life requires to get started, whether it can get started in radically different ways, whether it can be based on different kinds of chemistry, what its potentials and affordances are, and yes, it does explore the possibility of life on other planets, what that envelope of of environments that might be conducive to the origin of life may be and how different life might look if it evolved in very different conditions.

Miller: At one point, Robby asks his father early on how many stars there are in the universe. And I cannot wrap my head around the answer that you have his father give him: multiply the number of grains of sand on earth by the number of trees.

Powers: That’s a big number.

Miller: How do you process that information?

Powers: I don’t know that we are built to grasp a number that size, but we can do it with analogy. We can do it one small step at a time. But that’s the question that drives this nine year old kid. His father is telling him that there are 100 billion galaxies, something on the order of 100 billion galaxies, that each of those galaxies has something on the order of 100 billion stars. Each of those stars may have several planets, even more than our stars. So what Robby wants to know is the question of astrobiology, which is where is everybody?

Miller: OK, let’s take another question from the audience. What’s your name? Please go ahead.

Kennedy: Good afternoon, my name is Kennedy. My question is, how would you describe the transition from STEM academics to literature and what are the parallels between them that you see, because you seem to have found some kind of balance between both of your passions?

Powers: So you mean, personally, how did I operate as a writer inside a university or or how did I move from being a student to being a writer?

Miller: Did you, did you say STEM?

Kennedy: Yeah.

Miller: So the connection between, science, technology and literature, to writing?

Powers: Right, so, this classic question of whether or not there really are two radically different ways of knowing the world, of being in the world: that which comes from the science and technology side and that which comes from the arts and humanities side. My feeling personally is, I’ve never felt that difference. I feel like we are all working towards speculating about who we are or how we fit in, where we come from and where we’re going, and that we may be doing it in very different ways. But the idea of writing stories, narratives about scientists, about technologists, about engineers seemed to me the most natural thing in the world, did not seem separate from writing stories about adventurers or writers or people who pursue ways of understanding the world that have nothing at all to do with science and technology. I believe that you can’t really tell stories about humans in the 21st century without putting science and technology at the center of that story because those things have so profoundly changed what we can do in our individual lives. Who we are and what we think being human is has changed with all of the rapid expansion of change in science and technology. So of course that’s going to be the subject of novels for me.

But it’s interesting because that question is there something that is a common thread between science and technology, on the one hand, and literature and the arts on the other has driven my subject matter of the books from the beginning, all the way back to my first novel. But it’s also the source of the title of this novel. Because there was an essay many years ago by a man who happened to be a physician, a clinical physician, but also a medical researcher who wrote beautiful lyrical essays. His name was Lewis Thomas and in an essay on the two cultures divide, he says, ‘I think I have found the common theme, the commonality between astronomy, genetics, poetry, theater, you name it, everything that we human beings do on this earth has one thing in common,’ he says, ‘that’s bewilderment’.

Miller: Can I ask, since you asked that question, are you yourself interested in both of these realms, in writing and literature and in science and technology?

Kennedy: I’m unsure actually. I just happened to be semi-good at both.

Powers: You know, it’s a great question. And happily, I think when I was your age, the world was pretty profoundly split into two cultures and I, at that time, I would have had to choose between being a scientist and being an artist and I think now there are many people and many institutions who are becoming more savvy about the need to form a common vocabulary. And there are programs that are actually designed to soften that sense of binary, of dichotomy. I mean, medical scholar programs are quite common now. If you want to go and study and get an MD, but also at the same time get an academic degree in the humanities, that’s all possible now.

Miller: Thanks very much for that question. I wonder if I could have you read one more passage, sort of chapterlet from this book. And this is one of many examples in the book where your narrator, Theo, is essentially telling his son stories or imagining that they are exploring potential planets together, about to explore possible versions of life. Could you read us one of them?

Powers: So, Theo finds that one of the very few things that will calm Robin down and give them a common, relaxed and and joyful place to be together is to take his son together with him on a voyage across the universe, stopping at various planets that are similar to the planets that are based on the kinds of planets that astronomers, that planetary hunters have been turning up and that astrobiologists have been contemplating in their discipline. And he’ll do this with with Robin almost like a bedtime story. The two of them will get together and Theo will take Robin to new places that are radically different than the one place in the universe that we know.

The planet Pelagos had many times more surface than Earth. It was covered in water—a single ocean that made the Pacific look like the Great Lakes. One sparse chain of tiny volcanic islands ran through that immensity, bits of punctuation sprinkled through an empty book hundreds of pages long.

The endless ocean was shallow in places, kilometers deep in others. Life spread through its latitudes from steamy to frozen. Hosts of creatures turned the ocean bottoms into underwater forests. Giant blimps migrated from pole to pole, never stopping, each half of their brains taking turns to sleep. Intelligent kelp hundreds of meters long spelled messages in colors that rippled up the length of their stalks. Annelids practiced agriculture and crustaceans built high-rise cities. Clades of fish evolved communal rituals indistinguishable from religion. But nothing could use fire or smelt ores or build any but the simplest tools. So Pelagos diversified and invented new forms, each stranger than the last.

Over the eons, the few scattered islands radiated life as if each were its own planet. None of them was large enough to incubate large predators. Each pinprick of land was a sealed terrarium sporting enough species for a small Earth.

Dozens of dispersed intelligent species spoke millions of languages. Even the pidgins numbered in the hundreds. No town was bigger than a hamlet. Every few miles we came across a speaking thing whose shape and color and form were wholly new. The most universally useful adaptation seemed to be humility.

The two of us swam along veins of shallow reef down into underwater forests. We scrambled up onto islands whose complex communities were threaded into immense trading networks with islands far away. Caravans took years, even generations, to complete a deal.

No telescopes, Dad. No rocket ships. No computers. No radios.

“Only amazement.” It didn’t seem like an outrageous trade.

How many planets are like this one?

“There might be none. They might be everywhere.”

Well, we’ll never hear from any of them.

Miller: How did spending a lot of your own time imagining these worlds and life in these different forms affect the way you think about life on earth?

Powers: Well, this was a pandemic book. I wrote it in isolation in the Great Smoky Mountains in Eastern Tennessee. And throughout the course of writing this book, which was practically a two year experience, I saw almost no one. For a long time, the national park in my backyard was closed, and actually people weren’t allowed to come into it at all. And even after that opened back up, I live in a pretty remote part of that country and I didn’t have a lot of occasion to run into other people. So, Theo and Robin were my real companions. So, I was traveling around the universe with the two of them. But you probably noticed in that chapter, when Theo creates an imaginary world, he’s actually drawing on the alien intelligences that are all around us and in a sense, to voyage to these other planets is actually a way of landing back on earth. And for me while writing this book, traveling into the forests of Southern Appalachia, it was a daily, a weekly and monthly process of discovering just how intelligent and diversified the life around me was, the ways that all of the more than human creatures find to communicate, to cooperate, to navigate the challenges of their changing environment. That’s what travel to other planets was for me.

Miller: Let’s take some questions from the audience. Go ahead.

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Fernie. Going back to “Overstory”, while you were writing it, did you feel that examining relationships through the lens of the connection of trees in the forest in any way affected the way that you’ve viewed your personal relationships?

Powers: Okay, I have to say it changed pretty much everything about me researching the book. [It] moved me from California to the Smokies. I went there to research the old growth forest and I kept reading that if you wanted to see what old growth looks like in the east, broadly for old growth forest, that the Smokies was the place to go. I went there, and the old growth was so dramatically different then all of the things that I had thought were healthy eastern forest that I was still thinking about it months and months later, and I ended up moving there and I’ve been living there ever since, five or six years.

I also think it changed my daily rhythm, the way that I work. I used to think that my job was to stay put and sit tight until I had 1,000 words that I was happy with, and then I was free to go out and spend whatever remained of the day on other activities. Writing “Overstory” made me realize that my main job was living where I live, understanding the place where I was, what the earth was trying to do, what the neighbors were trying to do. And so when I wake up in the morning now, instead of saying, I have to get my 1,000 words first, I say, what season is it? What’s the weather? What are the creatures doing at what altitudes? And I’ll go out and I’ll see them first and I’ll spend time outside, feeling the vitality and the interactions of life around me before I come back in and do my work. And to me that’s a much healthier relationship of product and process.

Miller: Let’s have another question from the audience now. Go ahead.

Hayden: My name is Hayden, and I’m curious about what the process of writing a book is like in terms of how do you take a couple ideas of inspiration and turn them into a book with hundreds of pages?

Powers: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I wish I had a better answer because I think I’d be better and more efficient. I mean, my books take me sometimes four or five years, or more, to write. “Overstory” took me close to six years to to write. And part of that is because I can only figure out what I’m writing by writing. So there’s a lot of blundering forward. There’s a lot of course correction along the way. And there are a lot of pages that get thrown out. I think it was E.L. Doctorow, the novelist and author of the novel “Ragtime”, who once compared writing a novel to driving across the country in the dark with headlights. He says you can only see 15ft in front of you, but somehow it’s enough to get you 2000 miles, right? It’s that constant resetting of the navigation beacons as you work. I think that constitutes working in a long form. So, you can’t get discouraged. You have to have a great appetite for revision. And my, I love revision. I think it’s my most favorite part of the whole writing process.

Miller: Why?

Powers: Because you can’t get any worse than the draft that’s in front of you. If you start to meddle around with it and discover new things, that’s fabulous. If you start to push things around and say, ‘I’m breaking it, I’m messing it up,’ well, you just go back to the draft that you have. So, it’s a little bit like rock climbing. You pound your python into the rock and if you slip and fall, it’s there to catch you. But it gives you the courage and the ability to reach for a ledge that might be out of reach otherwise. So to me that’s for long form. It’s absolutely essential. Nobody is good enough to know what they’re doing when they start out, right? There might be a top-down conception, but you’re only going to get there by a lot of bottom-up experimentation.

Which also, for the writers in the room, reminds me to say, aside from the ability to be by yourself for long periods of time, the best thing that you can give yourself as a writer, the best quality that will predispose you towards success in writing in the long form, is self forgiveness. Just let yourself do goofy things and to be wrong. It’s like evolution actually. There’s a lot of stumbling, there’s a lot of extinction in order to create a few viable solutions.

Miller: What are you looking for when you’re editing? I mean, what is your internal guide for what’s working and what’s not? Because in evolution it’s something makes babies before it dies. But you don’t. The book doesn’t work that way.

Powers: Yeah, but interestingly, no, both “Overstory” and “Bewilderment” have explored this idea that we may not be understanding, we the general public may not be understanding evolution in the most robust and appropriate way. When we say survival of the fittest, some of us think, ‘wow strongest, most competitive, most able to dominate.’ Fittest means best suited for the environment, and the environment is other living things. So when I look at a passage or a sentence or a character or a scene and I ask that question, ‘is it fit? How might it be fitter?’ I’m asking that same relational question, does it succeed among all the other living things in the book? Does that work with the other scenes? Are the characters seeing or failing to see each other in robust and interesting ways? Is that character inconsistent in a useful way, in a fit and productive way? All of those questions have to do with the general fitness of those words, today’s words for the rest of the story. And that’s an experiment there. You develop an intuition, you develop a sense of resonance. It sounds kind of mystical, a little spiritual, but there are moments where you say that’s it because I now see a connection between page 10 and page 20, you know, 210 that I didn’t see earlier.

To give you an example, I didn’t know what the ending of “Bewilderment” was until I got there. And then when I realized what was happening to this father and this son, on their back country camping trip, in that cold river and when I realized what was going to happen to Robin, I gasped and I went back to look at the book and it’s there in the first chapter. I had … my unconscious had already laid the foundation for those final scenes. I just didn’t know it yet. I had to work my way to it. I had to blunder my way forward until I saw what the resonance of that book was.

Miller: You said in answer to the second last question that we just got about how writing “Overstory” and thinking deeply about the lives of trees, how that, if that changed, you said it changed just about everything about me. I was wondering about that when I when I read “Bewilderment” because over and over in the book, in addition to all these themes that we’ve been talking about, the brain science which we may not have time to get to in this conversation and ecology and empathy, which we can get to in just a second, the overriding feeling I got was one of tenderness and love, deep love between the father and his son and from the son to all living things, a painful, intense love that he can’t handle at times. I guess what I’m wondering is if the sense of change that you were talking about, if it affected the way you write, which you said it does, but if it also affected what you even want to write about, if you are more interested in writing about love now than you were 20 years ago?

Powers: The answer is an emphatic yes. And maybe that comes with age, too. You know when when you’re a young man of 20 as I was when I wrote my first book, there is a sense of ambition and wanting to reach for big things and impress people and come up with novelty and connection and innovation. All of that over the course of 13 books and 40 years has just subsided. All I want to do now is find the things that move me and might move other readers and connect us in that common state of vulnerability and humility where we all live.

Miller: Does it make you feel differently about the earlier books you wrote?

Powers: A little bit, but when I when I go back to them and I cringe a little bit and I say, ‘wow, that was made by a young guy.’ I also want to extend myself that same forgiveness that we were talking about in the earlier question, which is I’m glad I wrote them when I’m young because I couldn’t write them now, right? So that sense of, as the bible says, there is a season for all things, a time for every purpose. It’s okay, it’s okay to be out there.

Miller: Your narrator, Theo, he tells us that his late wife used to say that if some small but critical mass of people recovered a sense of kinship, economics would become ecology. What does she mean? What do you mean by kinship in this sense?

Powers: Well, kinship in the most literal sense, we are kin with everything alive on the earth and we are interdependent. We could not do what we do we do except by virtue of all of these other creatures who are doing what they do, and who are themselves branches on this same massive experiment. You know, all life on earth shares the same genetic code. They share the same common ancestor, right? It is a single integrated experiment that we’re running and we are all of us dependent on all the other branches of the experiment that are running concurrently with us. And this idea of ecology and economics, see, that’s the problem.

You see, we all live in this capitalist, commodity mediated individualist culture that insists that human beings are somehow separate and autonomous and that they can go it alone. That’s a sick culture. And we are all seeing the consequences of the sickness of that culture, right? We all know it. I would be willing to bet that this room full of people who are not yet 20, the majority of you are probably deeply eco-traumatized by your awareness of the wall that we’re heading towards, right? But see that the change in consciousness that we need is the one that remembers in Gaylord Nelson’s phrase, that ecology, that economics, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, and not the other way around. When people tell you, ‘well, we’d like to do that, implement that environmental policy, but it’s not economically sound’, ask them, ‘how sound can economics be if it’s destroying the capital that we need to live?’ Right? I always remember that what we call economics can only work in the long run if it is also ecological.

Miller: So let’s talk about the other possibility. What would the practice of a much more widely understood sensibility of a kinship look like?

Powers: And that’s what I am trying to write stories about now. How do we find kinship and things that look and operate so very differently than we do? But remember that that’s not a new process, right. That process of finding kinship in the more than human, it’s only Western culture in the last couple of centuries that has become so estranged that their stories have forgotten that kinship. In most indigenous cultures, in most places in the world, for most of human history, you couldn’t tell a story about human beings without bringing the neighbors on the stage.

Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience.

Ron: Good afternoon, my name is Ron. If I can be provoking, what do you think are the most disturbing things about the publishing industry?

Powers: It’s a fabulous question and one that I speak often and freely about when I’m not live on the air.

Miller: But so let me just say before we went live, not sure of your exact words, but I think when you were encouraging our awesome audience here to ask questions, you said let’s take risks and get some great rewards. So this is what you were encouraged to do. And so the worst question is: what are the most troubling, the most disturbing things about the publishing industry?

Powers: Well, the publishing industry, to be fair, isn’t a single monolithic thing. There are lots of publishers as with every biome, there are lots of different solutions and lots of different niches that publishers are attempting to fill. And not all publishers are commercial publishers, right? There are not for profit presses.

There are university presses, there are presses that can publish because they have backers, someone who wants to support a publisher whose purpose is not to make money, but to get the most useful and powerful and beautiful and essential books out there. So it does pay to distinguish those things.

But part of my anxiety about publishing right now is related to a larger anxiety that I have about the way that information, style, fashion, get passed around in the culture at large, in the broader culture at large that, when I was your age and a little bit later and started to see the beginnings of the computer revolution, I thought ‘finally, let 1,000 flowers bloom.’ These machines and the way that they hook up will allow all kinds of people to find all kinds of different art and literature. And they will be able to make and inform vibrant new communities of diversity [and] will become greatly enhanced by virtue of these new technologies.

I despair that as the technologies have matured, the opposite has happened, and that a lot of technology has produced kinds of echo chambers and leverages that force people together into more and more monoculture kinds of consumption, right? So, it’s unhealthy for the publishing industry to be driven by a very small number of books that are getting a very large portion of the attention of people at large, because that’s not how we work. I mean, look around, how diverse are we in this room, right? How many ways of reading are there just among us in this room? But you see our culture is pushing us to only pay attention to the things that already have a lot of attention being given to them. There is that kind of runaway feedback that I would love to see broken down. I’m not sure how to do it.

Miller: It strikes me that you started by saying that you would get stomach aches as a freshman in college because of the anxiety about being forced to specialize, being forced to close doors and and go in one direction. You also said that, only when you were finishing “Overstory” for the first time, that was your 12th novel, did you want to stick with those themes. You found something you wanted to keep mining, right? Now you’ve done it for another book. It seems like you’re still not done with these themes of interconnectedness and love and empathy and tenderness.

Powers: And kinship.

Miller: And kinship. So ,where do you go from here?

Powers: Well, of course, it is a good commodity culture question to ask what your next product is, right?

Miller: Yeah, fair point. But I guess I’m thinking, but I wasn’t thinking about this in terms of necessarily the next cultural product you’re going to give us if you choose to, but more how you’re thinking about these issues going forward in terms of what you want to do with it, whether or not that’s a book.

Powers: Well, I’ll tell you it in a nutshell. When I was writing “Bewilderment” and reading about astrobiology and and following the latest in astronomy and how much we know about other stars and other planets, this amazing fact that we’ve been able to detect planets billions of miles away by the tiny bit of dimming that happens when they pass in front of their stars, all these astonishing facts are then came across discussions saying we may know less about life in our own oceans than we know about some of these things that are going on in outer space. And I started to think about that seriously. And I came across this statistic that 96% or more of the biosphere on earth is water. And I thought, that’s where I’m going next. So the oceans have my attention now and that’s the story that I’m creating.

Miller: You’ve gotten a ton of critical and commercial success over the years. I’m curious now what kind of feedback means the most to you?

Powers: Oh, I don’t know, something like this conversation. It’s just hearing other people who have very different kinds of needs, who … speaking of class…

Miller: Go to class, if you’re listening to me right now.

Powers: Yes. No, what I want is to connect with, to find, to discover, to explore other sorts of passions, ways of being in the world that lie outside my experience and to feel a kinship with them. And to me, that’s the glory of writing. It’s also the glory of reading just the great, great luxury of for a while being something other than who you are, someone else.

Miller: Less fancy than the brain feedback machine in your book. It doesn’t need electricity.

Powers: That’s right.

Miller: Richard Powers, thanks very much.

Powers: My great pleasure. And thanks to all of you.

Miller: Thanks so much to Richard Powers, to our whole awesome audience of students here at Parkrose and to the folks at Literary Arts and at this high school who made today’s conversation possible.