INDIGO

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 necessarily 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.