How has the current crisis been affecting your work? Novelists are old hands at social distancing. The origin of The Overstory, he has said, was his “religious conversion” in the presence of a giant redwood, and there is indeed a touch of the mystic as he talks about the present moment as both a reckoning and an opportunity. The 62-year-old novelist lives alone in the Great Smoky Mountains, in Tennessee, a short walk to some of the last old-growth forest in the Eastern United States. They learn, as Powers puts it, to live “on tree-time.” Now that much of humanity finds itself slowed down and staring out the window, that image, like so much of Powers’s work over the course of 12 books, has come to seem more prescient and resonant than ever.
ROCHARD POWERS PATCH
Slowly, he and his wife settle into an altered consciousness, one wholly focused on their tiny patch of natural world.
In The Overstory, Powers’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2018 novel, a man suffers a stroke and finds his reality narrowed to the sliver of yard visible through his bedroom window. Well before our present moment, the novelist Richard Powers was thinking deeply about the themes that now consume us: nature, technology, isolation, community, and what it might be like to withdraw from society. See how they're all staying creative in the time of quarantine here.
We asked 24 of our favorite minds-including Robert Pattinson, Dua Lipa, Offset, Desus + Mero, and more-what they’re discovering about art, and about themselves, in this age of isolation.
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