Catapult Launches Padgett Powell (and Itself) at Housing Works

By Drew Ciccolo
Housing Works Bookstore Café
New York, NY, Sept. 10, 2015

Padget Powell signing books

If Padgett Powell’s life has been anywhere near as unconventional as his fiction, it follows that he’s probably had his share of outlandish experiences. Elissa Schappell, a fellow author and friend of Powell’s, claims, for instance, that he once wrestled a bear on a dark street in the Russian city of St. Petersburg. Whether this is true or not, Powell, whose career has suffered the vicissitudes that tend to accompany substantial deviation from normality, has accomplished more than most writers could hope for in his thirty-plus years as a literary man. Oddly enough, though, it took the publication of Powell’s ninth book, a story collection called Cries for Help, Various, released this September by Catapult, a new publishing start-up, to occasion his first-ever launch party.

Accordingly, the Cries for Help, Various launch at Housing Works Bookstore Café on Sept. 10 proved to be a special evening for Powell, and like night-wrestling a bear in St. Petersburg, it was anything but dull. A standing-room-only crowd congregated from out of the lower Manhattan drizzle to hear Roy Blount Jr., Rick Moody, Schappell, and Justin Taylor, authors who each know Powell personally, read from his body of work. All things considered, the event turned out to be as much a tribute to Powell and his distinctive talent as it was a book launch. Most people in attendance, including the authors, stayed well into the night, enjoying snacks, wine, and beer, along with each other’s company. Housing Works Bookstore and Café is staffed almost entirely by volunteers, and 100% of its profits go to Housing Works, an organization that advocates and provides services for people affected by homelessness and HIV/AIDS. The event also served as a formal launch for Powell’s publisher, Catapult, co-founded by Elizabeth Koch and Andy Hunter (who is also co-founder of the literary website Electric Literature).

Roy Blount, Jr.

The authors, aside from Powell, read in alphabetical order, so the first to read was Roy Blount, Jr., who had a hard time mounting the stage due to sciatica, which, he said as he got settled in at the microphone, “sounds like an old man’s complaint but hurts like a son-of-a-bitch.” In a thick and somewhat drawling voice, not unlike a more-animated-than-usual Tommy Lee Jones, Blount, Jr. read the last three pages of Powell’s short story “Scarliotti and the Sinkhole.” Collected in Aliens of Affection (1998), the story finds Rod, who calls himself Scarliotti, reluctantly convalescing in his trailer home after having been “clipped in the head by a mirror on a truck pulling a horse trailer” while riding his now-in-need-of-repair Yugoslavian moped. Scarliotti manages to seduce a convenience store clerk, and during some post-coital banter in his trailer, the clerk asks how many women he’s had. “Counting you?” Scarliotti asks her. Here Roy Blount, Jr. stopped reading and pointed out that he felt this was “a really nice question, polite really,” which elicited quite a bit of laughter from the crowd. A few lines later, after Scarliotti laughs himself into a coughing fit (skillfully acted out by Blount, Jr.), he blurts out: “Quailhead.” Blount, Jr. stopped here once again to confess he didn’t know what that meant, garnering more laughter from the now-delighted crowd. “Scarliotti and the Sinkhole” only gets more and more preposterous, and by the time Blount, Jr. left the stage the audience was pretty much punch-drunk.

Rick Moody

Rick Moody, clad in a stylish black button-down shirt with large white polka dots, was the second to read, and his first words upon taking the microphone were: “Well why the fuck do I have to go after that?” Moody read two very short pieces from Powell’s first story collection, Typical (1991), which he edited for Powell back when he worked at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Powell had included in the collection four short pieces titled after U.S. states: “Texas,” “South Carolina,” “Florida,” and “Kansas.” Moody recalled asking Powell, “Why don’t you do the rest of the states?” To which Powell responded, “I only know those four.” Moody read two of the four, “Texas” and “South Carolina,” in a slow, deliberate, and sometimes almost erotic-sounding voice that made the stories—subjective and unusual takes on their title-states—that much more spellbinding and peculiar.

Elissa Schappell

Next up was Elissa Schappell, who immediately echoed Moody’s “Why the fuck do I have to go after that?” lament. Schappell read from “Trick or Treat,” also from Aliens of Affection, a story about a demented adulterous romance between a twelve-year-old boy and an eccentric woman named Mrs. Hollingsworth, which inspired more laughing fits among the audience members. At one point in the story, Schappell had to start a passage over, and peering out to a dark corner in the back of the room, she joked, “Don’t get mad at me, Padgett.” Though seats were reserved for all the authors, Powell watched and listened to the four authors from a distant, shadowy corner of the room.

The final reader before Powell, Justin Taylor eschewed the “Why the fuck do I have to go after that?” refrain in favor of a simple “Hey.” (Quite a few people said “Hey” back.) He read the beginning of the third of Powell’s six novels, Edisto Revisited (1996), before introducing the man himself. The youngest of the four writers to read, Taylor’s admiration for Powell was palpable as he told the audience how he and a friend used to memorize Powell’s stories and recite them to each other, trading lines back and forth. Taylor studied creative writing under Powell as an undergraduate at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and humbly recalled the first positive feedback Powell wrote on one of his stories, one line at the end: “As a character sketch, this almost works.”

Justin Taylor

After being introduced by Taylor, Powell emerged from his remote spot in the corner to a sustained eruption of applause. Once on stage, it became apparent that Powell had been moved to tears, or as he put it, “gone weepy” and “completely dislocated” by the evening. In a soft voice, he confided to the audience that he hates “taking the podium and thanking people,” but expressed deep gratitude to Pat Strachan, the first editor hired by Catapult, whom he’s worked with since the early eighties. So as not to forget, Powell also quietly noted that he was to introduce the musical act that would follow the reading, singer-songwriter Beth McKee on keyboards and vocals, and her husband Juan Perez on drums. “Juan,” Powell began to riff, “is an illegitimate child of Fidel Castro… he floated over on a log from Cuba… and he’s still going strong and can keep time.” He then went into a brief, somewhat inaudible discussion of the drummer Ginger Baker and illegitimate children, which had the crowd laughing once more, before announcing that Catapult wouldn’t let him subtitle his new collection “45 Failed Novels.” The man was almost as odd as his fiction, a real character, and it would have been a tall order not to be charmed by the whole thing. Still emotional at times, he read three of the shortest pieces from Cries for Help, Various, which he characterized as “either the most failed, or the least failed.”

“Marbles,” the first piece Powell read, is a two-sentence take on the relative value of sanity in the life of a writer:

I am sitting here without my marbles together, envying other people sitting where they are sitting with their marbles together. I have in mind a certain poet in New York, seventy-five or so, in his apartment knowing all that he knows, arranging some lines on paper that advance evidence he knows yet a little more than the prodigious sum we already knew he knew.

“Longing,” the second offering, explores just that, longing:

The kind of exhaustion I am talking about is, simply, or not simply, the broken heart. It makes you long to hold hands with someone you have not hurt who has not hurt you. This longing would be immediately and hotly extant if a dark girl offered you a cup of flan.

In a 2009 interview with MPR News, Powell mentioned an already-completed version of Cries for Help, Various (which also contains plenty of longer, delightfully preposterous narratives), saying at the time that it was “unpublishable,” and that it had “been rejected by about seventeen parties in New York.” Though Powell’s writing is inarguably, and often comically, ingenious, as well as highly enjoyable to read, mainstream success has eluded him for much of his career. He’s been criticized for exalting inventiveness and style at the cost of “perceptive acuity” and the exploration of real meaning. Allegedly, an inability to publish his writing in the 2000s led him to claim for a time, jokingly or otherwise, that he was retired. It was clear that Powell felt some amount of validation at Housing Works Bookstore Café Thursday night. After the reading, while Beth McKee and Juan Perez played music on stage, Powell signed copies of his new collection and took time to chat warmly with anyone who engaged him.

Powell reads

On a more personal note, while I regret not having asked him about the bear in St. Petersburg, this event served for me as a meaningful introduction to Powell and his work. I’d read a handful of his short stories years ago, and had liked them quite a bit, but Cries for Help, Various, along with the evening at Housing Works Bookstore Café, gave me a real appreciation of Powell. Much of his writing is laugh-out-loud funny, and the lack of conformity, along with the careful attention to language present in Cries for Help, Various and in the work read by the guest authors, left me feeling more open to the world at large and the cacophony of magical sorts of voices that can emerge from it.

Here’s a choice line, for example, from “Horses,” the opening story from the new collection:

It’s a Holstein for all I know, and that is one of the galling things about this enterprise, people saying the roan this and the buckskin and the paint and the quarter and the Indian pony and that and this and you have no idea which goddamn horse they are talking about, they are talking about one of fifty things we have here which can get us hung if we are caught, can kill you if you get near one in the wrong way, and can run off and get you beat to shit by the hombres who affect to know how not to have them run away, I have just about had it with this shit, what with most of the crew over there in the 7-Eleven and the Sheriff cruising around out here, around me and the herd and the hot dog wrappers, and the horses are nervous in the wind and the swinging stoplights, and all the fellows with the handlebar mustaches are inside getting coffee, and I’m out here looking like a plebe in a fraternity with fifty stolen monsters I can’t tell apart, and there’s the Sheriff, and we are beyond the day when he can be shot and we go on our way.

You can hear in this sentence the wild lyricism, the alliteration, the disregard for typical sentence length and construction, and the peculiarity of the narrator and his situation. Powell doesn’t seem to be a writer at all prone to compromise, making the narrative voices that populate his fiction all the more unique and, for me, engaging.

If you ever get the opportunity to meet the man, maybe ask him about that bear-wrestling incident. Judging by what I’ve learned about Padgett Powell, the story he’ll tell you, true or not, is likely to be one of a kind.

Justin Taylor and the Unwriteable Idea

In the 26th in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Justin Taylor, author of Flings (Harper), discusses where he works and the intersection of real life and fiction in his writing. 

Where do you do most of your work?
The vast majority of my work is done at home. I have never had a problem with distraction or work/life separation. When the writing is going well a work/life separation is the last thing you want—or the last thing I want. The writing is the thing I would always rather be doing. I also like to read my work aloud which you can’t (or shouldn’t) do in a public setting. When I was younger I used to work in coffee shops, which I rarely do anymore, but when I was younger I had a lot more time on my hands in general, so I still probably did about the same amount of work at home. I have a shared office at the Pratt Institute that I use sometimes. Over the summer it was especially glorious because the A/C was free and nobody else was around. Now that school’s back in session there are my students, my colleagues, their students—all lovely people and it’s a great school, but again, not the kind of place you’d go to spend two hours road-testing the dialogue in a sex scene (or whatever). 

Do you ever borrow characters or situations from real life, and has anyone ever confronted you about it, been angry or pleased?

Saint Augustine: Hipster of Hippo

There’s a wonderful line in Book X of Augustine’s Confessions: “Some memories pour out to crowd the mind and, when one is searching and asking for something quite different, leap forward into the centre as if saying ‘Surely we are what you want?’” That line has stuck with me since I first read it, six or seven years ago; I come back to it all of the time. Several of the stories in Flings originated as attempts to explore that idea, to hear the memories when they petitioned for attention, and give myself over to them and let them crowd my mind. So these stories deliberately court the autobiographical in a certain way, but at the same time they reject the standard autobiographical imperative of seeing oneself as the protagonist, or even of including oneself at all. And of course in the end these stories were subjected to the same manipulations, distortions, and what-if-ing as anything else. Once a given person or event has been translated into words, aestheticized, revised, edited, perhaps made composite, and certainly integrated into a world of imaginary people, places, and things, I don’t think it’s fair—to life or to me—to continue to think of these things as belonging to the order of the real, though hopefully they still feel true, if that makes sense.

Despite all of which—and here we come to the second part of the question—yeah, sometimes people do encounter themselves/their experiences in my work, usually in some kind of funhouse mirror distortion, which I imagine can be quite jarring. If it’s people I’m close to, I give them a heads up when the thing is coming out—not permission to sit down and write it,  mind you, but fair warning that it’s entering the world. Usually, they’re pleased, sometimes even excited. It can be very validating to know that someone took you seriously enough to imagine your inner life for themselves, though of course there’s a perilously thin line between making people feel visible and making them feel exposed. I try to be very straight with people about the difference between “what I think happened” and “what I ended up writing about.” Most are willing to accept the distortions/revisions as not merely as par for the course, but part of the fun. If it’s people I’m no longer close to—or was never close to in the first place—then I just go ahead with it, and hope that if the person in question ever encounters the work, they’ll take it the way it was intended: as a testament to the impression they made on me, and not an attempt at judgment, slander, or revenge. I mean unless it is those things.

What's the best story idea you've had that you've never been able to write to your satisfaction?

This is a great question, and as it happens I have a very specific answer. I can see it in my mind right now, but I can’t bear to give it away. I will say that it’s been with me for many years, and that the story “The New Life” from my first collection and “Adon Olam” in Flings were both attempts to write it, as were a few very early and aborted versions of what became “Mike’s Song” (also in Flings). The culvert below the road where the narrator goes in “Adon Olam” is a crucial image that constitutes one part of it, but that’s as close as I’ve been able to come. And weirdly those are some of my favorite of my own stories, so there must be something powerful and generative about this ongoing failure. Perhaps the unwriteable idea is a kind of goose that lays golden eggs. I’m almost scared to ever get it right now, but I guess there’s small enough risk of that, so I’ll probably keep trying.

Slice Magazine Offers Writers (and Beer) on Tap

By Nick Fuller Googins

Brooklyn, NY, Sept. 6, 2014

It’s Saturday night at powerHouse Arena (a bookstore/events space in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood) and the free beer has run out. What’s striking is that this doesn’t seem to faze anyone. Okay, a few people complain, but they’re probably the ones who arrived late. The rest of us mingling beneath the chandelier glow are taking the beer shortage in stride.

In the House: an appreciative audience

Slice magazine’s “Writers on Tap” billed itself as “a reading for discovering new voices and drinking good beer,” and it served as an interlude of sorts to the weekend-long Slice Literary Writers’ Conference. Slice, based in Brooklyn, publishes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and interviews in a sleek, sexy magazine. According to co-founder Maria Gagliano, who introduced the night’s reading, Slice places a special emphasis on bridging the gap between emerging and established writers, with each issue featuring both well known and up-and-coming authors. The Slice Literary Writers’ Conference, held at St. Francis College in downtown Brooklyn on Sept. 6-7, kept true to this same focus, offering emerging writers the opportunity to meet with agents, attend workshops, and hear from a wide array of literary voices. Many of us here at powerHouse had come straight from the conference.

Earlier that day, we’d heard Tin House editor Rob Spillman, speaking at a panel entitled “The Secret Lives of Literary Magazines,” warn against what he called “Doogie Howser Syndrome,” or the predilection of some beginning writers to tack on an ending that tells the reader everything the previous fifteen pages of the story have already shown. At another panel, “It’s About Me…But It’s Also About You: Writing Nonfiction that Connects with Readers,” Dani Shapiro, author of Still Writing, told us, “Memory is an act of imagination.” During a session on revision, Elissa Schappell, author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls, had this to say: “Anyone who says they write without editing is either full of shit or not a writer…or a genius.”

The “Writers on Tap” reading that evening showcased the work of five writers handpicked by editors from Slice, A Public Space, One Teen Story, and Henry Holt & Co. Included in this bunch were authors Kseniya Melnik and Justin Taylor, both of whom released story collections this year, Melnik with her debut collection, Snow in May (Henry Holt & Co.) and Taylor with Flings (Harper), his second book of stories.

Busy man: Justin Taylor reads from Flings

Celia Johnson, co-founder of Slice, introduced Taylor, describing Flings as “a wonderful ensemble of matters of the heart,” a collection filled with “grief, lust, and falling in-and-out-of-love” that “takes you everywhere, from Oregon to Hong Kong.” Taylor, who later confided that he’d done five Flings readings in the past couple of weeks, took to the podium and said he needed a break from the collection. Instead he read from a thick sheaf of papers, a section of his novel-in-progress about a former child actor who’s leveraged his faded glory into part ownership of a bar—one that he himself patronizes often, especially if a certain female bartender is on duty. Of the former actor: “He liked to sit at the bar and let his longing run away with itself,” and he “assumed that all girls knew all things and modified his behavior accordingly.” If the audience’s reaction offered Taylor some focus-group-like insight as to the response his completed novel may elicit, he can anticipate having to include plenty of pauses for laughter at future readings. But that assumes he’ll have time for pauses.

Justin Taylor is a busy man. In addition to being on tour for his third book, working on his fourth, and teaching at more than one university, he is currently writing a review for Bookforum on Denis Johnson’s new novel, The Laughing Monsters. In preparation, Taylor explained that he’d been reading much of Johnson’s backlist, including his plays.

“Denis Johnson writes plays?” I asked.

Taylor reached into his bag, pulled out Soul of a Whore and Purvis and flipped through, exclaiming with no small degree of admiration that Denis Johnson not only writes plays but he writes them in verse.

Not so La-Z: Kseniya Melnik reads from Snow in May

Sarah Bowlin, editor at Henry Holt, introduced Kseniya Melnik, praising her writing for its ability to “reveal something cutting very easily and something emotional very slyly,” as well as possessing a “human quality that transports you.” Transport us it did, all the way back to Post-War Russia, where much of Melnik’s linked collection is set. She read from “Strawberry Lipstick,” a story that begins with heart-broken Olya, who “lay in bed between her younger sister, Dasha, and her older sister, Zoya, feeling that, at eighteen, her life was over. For what was life without love? A never-ending shift at a factory assembly line.” Bittersweet, cutting and emotional, the tone seemed to instantly and precisely evoke that of a love-sick teenager living through a Soviet winter.

Melnik admitted she enjoys writing stories about snowy places. It comes as little surprise because she grew up in Russia, moved to Alaska at age fifteen, and went to school in upstate New York. Currently she resides and writes in El Paso where it does in fact snow on occasion, though not often and not in recent memory. A word Melnik uses to describe the place is “sweltering.” The incongruity of writing much of Snow in May while living a few football fields from the Mexican border is so delicious that Melnik must be sick of people mentioning it. So I didn’t. But I had to wonder how she coped with such contrast. What was her secret?

The next day, Melnick answered my unasked question while participating in a panel entitled, “Literary Quirks,” when she said, “I cannot write at a desk. I write in a La-Z-Boy. I trick myself to think I’m relaxed.” If that helped her write so sharply about life in snowy Russia while living in El Paso, then that must be one hell of a La-Z-Boy.

Photos courtesy of Slice magazine and © Maria Gagliano

Justin Taylor: "It's the Little Details That Make Fiction Seem Real."

In the 18th in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Justin Taylor, author of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (Harper Perennial), talks process. 

Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and not revised it later?
I don’t think so—or, if I did, it was something that I basically considered a failure, i.e. not worth revisiting. But I am a fairly quick writer—typer, anyway—and so it’s not uncommon for me to produce a whole first draft in one sitting, then come back the next day or whenever and start sifting through it, fix the truly boneheaded errors, and start to figure out which parts of the draft actually interest me, and which need to be jettisoned ASAP. Some of the shorter stories in my collection, “Tetris” for example, came out more or less "right" the first time. Even in that case, I spent a lot of time worrying the prose up, but in terms of what actually happens, it was basically written as it now appears. That's a rare exception.

What kind of research, if any, do you do?
I research on an as-needed basis, and usually in medias res. For example, in the story “Weekend Away,” Rose drives from her home in Portland, Ore., to Cannon Beach, which is on the coast. Along the way, she picks up a hitchhiker. Now, I’ve spent a good deal of time in Portland, and actually visited Cannon Beach, but I didn’t know much about the area in between. So first I mapped out Rose’s route on Google Maps as though I were driving there myself. Then I read some things about the Sunset Highway, which is the road I learned she’d be driving on. I figured out where she’d have to pick her hitcher up (outside Staleys Junction) based on the length of time that I wanted them to spend together in the car.

A lot of what I learned about the Northwest coast never made it in, and I’m sure the good people of Oregon would have forgiven me if I’d just fudged, but I believe that it’s the little details that make fiction feel real—to the author as much as to the reader. Like the hitchhiker telling Rose that his mom has an antique store in Cannon Beach but that she actually lives in Tolovana Park. He doesn’t say that she lives there because it’s cheaper, but then, he wouldn’t have to—she'd figure as much. By the end of the story it’s not clear whether anything that the hitchhiker said was true, but if he did lie to Rose, they were convincing lies precisely because they realistically exploited her presumptions about him, which he would have been aware of when he told them. This is how effective fiction works—it makes you eager to be complicit in your own hoodwinking. Of course, this assumes that the hitchhiker really was lying; he could just as easily have been telling the truth.

What's the longest narrative time period you've ever contained in a short story?
There’s one story in my collection—“Somewhere I Have Heard This Before”—that jumps about six years. You’re told in the first line that Stan, the main character, is eleven years old. A few pages later, Stan is seventeen, and this naturally means that a lot has changed for him (and the other characters) during the missing time. I was thinking of To the Lighthouse, and how Woolf sets aside a special chapter to cover two decades in the life of the Ramsay family and their summer house, and kills off a major character in a parenthetical aside. In a short story, of course, the main constraint is always space—all short stories fly economy class. My whole story runs less than 2,000 words, with the jump taking place about midway through. There's no section break; just a new paragraph which begins “When Stan was seventeen...”, as if the jump were as normal a detail as the color of a shirt or a door opening.

You know when you’re having a very normal conversation with someone, and then they slip in something outrageous? And you’re going “uh huh, yeah, uh huh,” and then a beat or two later, after you’ve already said “yeah, uh huh” to the crazy thing, your brain actually registers what your ears heard and you say, “Whoa, hold on. What was that last thing you said?” I wanted this moment in the story to read like that feeling.