Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Gravity Changes
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1980
WEBSITE: http://zachpowers.com/
CITY: Fairfax
STATE: VA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.connectsavannah.com/savannah/hometown-absurdity/Content?oid=4172328 * http://www.whurk.org/51/zach-powers
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1980.
EDUCATION:Loyola University New Orleans, B.M., 2002; National University, M.F.A., 2009.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Fiction writer. WTOC-TV, production assistant, 2003, commercial production manager, 2004-08; TATE TV, executive producer, 2008-11; Seersucker Live, cofounder, president, and CEO, 2010-17; University of South Carolina Beaufort, adjunct professor, 2010-12; Savannah College of Art and Design, graduate admission adviser, 2012-13; Telfair Museums, digital communications coordinator, 2013-16; Savannah Morning News, columnist, 2014-17; Northern Virginia Community College, adjunct professor, 2017-.
Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home, board of directors member.
AWARDS:BOA Short Fiction Prize, 2015, for Gravity Changes; Emmy Award, promotional writing for television.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short fiction to literary journals, including Black Warrior Review, Forklift, Ohio, PANK, and Caketrain.
SIDELIGHTS
Zach Powers is a contemporary fiction writer who received the BOA Short Fiction Prize for Gravity Changes, his 2017 collection of short stories of magical realism. His work has appeared in literary journals, including Black Warrior Review, Forklift, Ohio, PANK, and Caketrain. He was a columnist for Savannah Morning News and cofounder of the literary arts nonprofit Seersucker Live, and he sits on the board of directors of the writers’ workshop at the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home. Powers teaches English at Northern Virginia Community College.
In Gravity Changes, Powers explores fantastical, absurd, and surreal worlds. In various stories populated with strange characters, a man marries a giant light bulb, the devil is dealing with his ex-wife, a moon orbits lovingly around a woman, and children defy gravity. In more contemporary stories, Powers comments on social media, the workplace, and same sex romance. Crediting his ability to write literary fiction to reading Haruki Murakami, Powers explained to Jessica Leigh Lebos in Connect Savannah: “If you write weird, you have to be even more solid in the technical to anchor the weirdness. You have to be a little more fastidious in your description and your details in order to be able to sell it and make it convincing.”
A reviewer in Kirkus Reviews commented that it takes the reader time to adjust to the strangeness of Powers’s world. “While each of Powers’ brief tales is a treasure trove of whimsical surrealism, it’s his uncompromising and often melancholy view of human nature that holds this collection together.” Describing the fantastical stories as engaging and leaving lasting impressions, a Publishers Weekly contributor explained: “Powers excels in his earnest care for his characters and a willingness to test out every idea.”
In an interview with Kaylah Rodriguez online at WHURK, Powers explained that writing short stories is a thought experiment for him and that he doesn’t overanalyze them or try to convey specific themes; instead, his goal is to explore the mysteries of his own curiosity and observe new insights when they emerge. He said: “I don’t believe too much in inherent meaning in the work itself, but rather I see meaning as something that inhabits the space between the creation and the reader. Each story means something slightly different for each person.”
Powers focuses on his hometown in 100 Things to Do in Savannah Before You Die, part of the “100 Things to Do Before You Die” series. Called the Hostess City, Savannah is built around twenty-two public squares. Powers described the city’s landscape, Historic District, Tybee Island, beaches, southern history of the region, and night life. He also highlights art shows, restaurants, landmarks, parks, and historic cemeteries.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2017, review of Gravity Changes.
Publishers Weekly, March 20, 2017, review of Gravity Changes, p. 50.
ONLINE
Connect Savannah, https://www.connectsavannah.com/ (March 8, 2017), Jessica Leigh Lebos, “Literary son Zach Powers Returns for Lecture at Flannery O’Connor Home.”
WHURK, http://www.whurk.org/ (May 2017), Kaylah Rodriguez, author interview.
Zach Powers
Interview by Kaylah Rodriguez
Issue 51 • May 2017 • Fairfax
By bending the rules of the world as we know it, this magical realist author offers readers a telling glimpse of their own humanity.
“The most detailed way to describe something is in terms of everything that it’s not.”
We learn right away that Joan knows how to shrink the universe. She explains to us, “The definition of the universe is bigger when there are more nonexistent objects by which we can, through an inverse procedure, describe it.” So she goes about her careful, universe-compacting work: typing and retyping entire novels with one word variances, playing subtly different versions of the same song for inhuman amounts of time until her fingers are bloody and her breath is gone and the universe is smaller.
Joan isn’t real, though. Not in this world, anyway. She is one of the many fictional characters waiting to whisk you down the rabbit hole into a parallel realm of imagination. It’s a place where universes can be shrunk, children can walk on walls, and women’s pupils may expand to swallow you whole, dissolving you entirely. It is the world described—or perhaps, experienced—in Gravity Changes, the debut short fiction collection by Zach Powers, winner of the 2016 BOA Short Fiction Prize.
Powers, a Savannah-native now residing in Fairfax, hasn’t always spent his time and energy creating these surreal, dreamy literature-scapes. As a kid, he would visit a good sci-fi novel from time to time, Ender’s Game being a notable favorite, but he didn’t see himself as the one to put the ink to paper. Not until much later—after college, reading Murakami, and a few early attempts at some fiction writing—did something begin to shift.
“I had a Jazz Studies degree, so I was as good as unemployable,” he said matter-of-factly with half a smirk, swallowing black coffee. We sat in a corner at De Clieu Coffee on Fairfax’s Main Street, amid the clinking of ceramic and the rhythmic buzz of a dozen conversations, with a crisp new copy of Gravity Changes on the table, the gloss of the cover reflecting the yellow lights overhead. He looked back a decade to remember how it started. “Luckily, I did end up finding a job working at a local TV station in Savannah. It was part time and I worked the later shift, so after the evening news, I had a three-hour break until I had to be back at 11 PM. I would go and sit at a coffee shop called Gallery Espresso downtown.” For nine years, before migrating north, he worked as a writer for the television station, sneaking in personal sessions on his breaks. “I didn’t have a plan, I just figured I’d write some stuff and see what I could do.” A few ideas turned into a few stories, and a few stories turned into published work, and eventually an MFA. Writing became the true mode of expression for Powers, allowing him to exploit his creativity in a way he hadn’t quite tapped through music.
While wholly bizarre and unpredictable, the stories in Gravity Changes are actually not completely unlike the reality we are used to. Rarely are things ever neatly contained or fully understood. Written with refreshingly clean, straightforward prose, the strange and extraordinary seem to simply show up alongside the mundane as if they belong there, blurring the lines between them. There’s an unsettling kind of déjà vu about these stories, that familiar sense of both confusion and intrigue that lingers after having an odd conversation with a stranger. Afterward, life goes on and you never encounter said stranger again, but they also never become any less real. So, too, in Powers’s literary world does that same eerie duality of absurd and banal exist, where children dive through portals at the bottoms of swimming pools, then calmly return to the normalcy of school supply shopping and sandwiches on paper plates.
There is something in human nature that looks for meaning in everything, so don’t be surprised when you find yourself searching, trying to pull that thread beneath the text, attempting to unravel whatever it is that these stories are really about. When that happens, be prepared to assign some of that meaning on your own. “Usually, short stories are partly a thought experiment for me,” Powers explained. ”I don’t overanalyze it—or analyze it much at all.” His goal of writing is not so much about conveying specific themes. Rather, he explores the mysteries of his own curiosity, then allows any newfound insights to emerge as they may. “I don’t believe too much in inherent meaning in the work itself, but rather I see meaning as something that inhabits the space between the creation and the reader. Each story means something slightly different for each person.”
Recalling our protagonist Joan, we find a subtle meta story at play. By creating endless variances of things already in existence, she decreases the number of things that don’t exist, thereby shrinking the universe (as measured by the number of things that it isn’t). In a similar manner, Gravity Changes also creates endless variations of itself when contemplated by its readers. The meaning each mind assigns to these stories creates a new, marginally different creation in the world. Whether Powers is actually shrinking our universe or not, he is certainly showing us a different one in this masterful collection.
From the turn of the first page, there is a shift—an exquisite moment of crossing over—into a place where time and space are unrecognizable, but, for better or worse, the human condition remains. Aptly named, Gravity Changes is a stunning, whimsical collection of words that will haunt you in the best way. These stories burrow themselves into your subconscious and force you to question your own reality. After all, who’s to say that walking on the ground is any more normal than walking on walls, anyway?
Gravity Changes will be released on Tuesday, May 16 by publisher BOA Editions. To pre-order, visit zachpowers.com.
Photography by Kaylah Rodriguez
Literary son Zach Powers returns for lecture at Flannery O’Connor Home
By Jessica Leigh Lebos
jll@connectsavannah.com
@typeitloud
“Writing Out of Savannah” w/ Zach Powers
When: 4pm, Sunday, Mar. 12
Where: Flannery O'Connor Home, 207 E. Charlton St.
Cost: Free
Info: flanneryoconnorhome.org
Savannah is a weird place.
The creepy shadows and half-hidden secrets beckon and repulse, populated by a revolving cast of wacky characters providing endless entertainment and cautionary tales.
For author Zach Powers, writing about that absurdity is almost too obvious, like transcribing a robocall from one’s Congressman or trying to stare directly into the sun.
“When you live in a place like Savannah, the weirdness is happening all around you all the time,” he observes.
“It’s sort of cheating—you get inspiration without having to be creative.”
click to enlarge
books-zackpowers-26.jpg
That doesn’t mean his first book of short stories, Gravity Changes, isn’t weird. Nor is it devoid of Savannah’s signature eccentricity. It’s just more peripheral.
“I seldom write specifically about Savannah, but the influence is persistent. It’s influenced everything I’ve ever written, I’m sure,” muses the native son.
Powers will delve deeper into the relationship with his birthplace and his craft for “Writing Out of Savannah: How Hometowns Shape Fiction Set in Other Places,” part of the Spring Lecture Series at the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home on Sunday, March 12.
The scion of an old Savannah family—his great grandfather lived on Warren Square—Powers spent his formative years attending local elementary schools and moved to suburban Atlanta for his teen years, though he returned every holiday to see a city transforming. He settled back in town after graduating from Loyola University in New Orleans, seeking out what was then Savannah’s nascent artsy scene.
“I intentionally made my way downtown because it was the least suburban thing I could do,” he recalls drily. “My time in Atlanta put a real anti-suburban bent in my writing. It’s not always explicit, but it’s there."
He planted himself in a chair at Gallery Espresso, where he wrote every day for 15 years. The jazz studies major (he’s been known to tear it up on the saxophone) eventually earned his MFA and became an encouraging fixture in the city’s literary landscape, leading writers’ workshops and founding the dynamic non-profit performance series Seersucker Live.
“If you write weird, you have to be even more solid in the technical to anchor the weirdness. "
click to tweet
With Gravity Changes, the winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize has channeled the quirkiness of his hometown into tightly-written, mind-stretching stories that feature children who walk on walls, lightbulbs as romantic partners and yaks that talk.
“I was reared by science fiction, and I’m attracted to the world building and making the rules,” he muses.
Influenced by surrealist Aimee Bender (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake) and “post-modern fabulist” Italo Calvino (The Cloven Viscount, The Path to the Nest of Spiders), Gravity Changes also chimes with funny, melancholy echoes of Japanese icon Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore, A Wild Sheep Chase.)
“Haruki Murakami is the author that allowed me to write literary fiction,” acknowledges Powers, adding he has studied carefully Murakami’s prowess with the absurd.
“If you write weird, you have to be even more solid in the technical to anchor the weirdness. You have to be a little more fastidious in your description and your details in order to be able to sell it and make it convincing.”
The official release date of Gravity Changes is May 9, to be celebrated with a special edition of Seersucker Live shared with the release of poet Patricia Lockwood’s new memoir, Priestdaddy. Powers promises to share the stories most imprinted by Savannah when he’s back in town this Sunday.
As of January, Powers now splits his time between here and Fairfax, VA, where his partner Stephanie Grimm recently accepted a position as Art and History Librarian at George Mason University. The anti-suburbanite is coping just fine, exploring his new environs and taking advantage of the cultural offerings of nearby Washington, DC, but there’s no place like home.
“It’s a much less weird place,” he sighs. “A lot of high-density, 1990s condos and apartment complexes.”
He adds quickly, “There’s plenty of absurdity though. I mean, this is the capital of American politics.”
Yet it doesn’t get any stranger than growing up in Savannah and hearing your family history mangled by a tour guide.The author and novelist (his full-length manuscript is making the rounds with his agent) shares how one evening a few years back, he popped into the bar at a certain historic establishment rumored to be haunted.
A group of pub crawlers wandered in looking for a ghost story, and their leader recounted the tale of his ancestor Ann Powers, who supposedly jumped out of the window to escape her abusive husband and has bedeviled the place ever since.
The young Powers is pretty sure that’s not exactly what happened, but he accepts the twisting of the truth as part of his hometown’s charm.
“Savannah is a storytelling city,” he says with a laugh. “It’s built around stories, real or false.”
Zach Powers splits his time between Fairfax, Virginia and Savannah, Georgia.
He is writing this bio himself, and writing it in the third person, which to him feels rather pompous. He is averse to pomposity and is really quite personable. You'd like him. Give Zach Powers a chance. Why do you have to be so judgmental? His debut book, Gravity Changes, won the BOA Short Fiction Prize and was published in 2017 by BOA Editions. His prose and exactly one poem have appeared in such journals as Black Warrior Review, The Conium Review, Forklift, Ohio, PANK, the Tin House blog, and elsewhere. He co-founded the literary arts nonprofit Seersucker Live. He led the writers’ workshop at the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home for eight years. His writing for television won an Emmy, and he was a columnist for Savannah Morning News.
Gravity Changes
Publishers Weekly.
264.12 (Mar. 20, 2017): p50.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Gravity Changes
Zach Powers. BOA (Consortium, dist.), $16 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-942683-37-7
The 19 fantastical stories in this engaging collection bend the laws of physics and fiction to leave lasting impressions.
In the title story, children defy the laws of gravity before the onset of adulthood drags them reluctantly back to earth. A
man struggles to save his marriage to a giant light bulb in "Children in Alaska," while a tiny moon courts a woman by
orbiting her body in the charming, one-page "Little Gray Moon." Stories like "This Next Song," about a doomed date
between two men, still manage to integrate hints of the fantastic, departing from the collection's established mode
without abandoning it entirely. The collection's longest piece, "Sleeping Bears," is also its strongest, turning a clever
metaphor for transparency in the age of social media into a funny, affecting examination of modern workplace
dynamics. Powers excels in his earnest care for his characters and a willingness to test out every idea, whether or not
it's likely to soar. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Gravity Changes." Publishers Weekly, 20 Mar. 2017, p. 50. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487601737&it=r&asid=ae72ccb27a9711e50727f375960d97c6.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487601737
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508707180547 2/2
Powers, Zach: GRAVITY CHANGES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Powers, Zach GRAVITY CHANGES BOA Editions (Adult Fiction) $16.00 5, 16 ISBN: 978-1-942683-37-7
Flying children, lovely light bulbs, and unusually expressive faces are just some of the wonders that populate the world
of Powers' debut short story collection.While each of Powers' brief tales is a treasure trove of whimsical surrealism, it's
his uncompromising and often melancholy view of human nature that holds this collection together. The stories, which
range in length from brief vignettes to longer narratives, bring the reader closer to the emotional reality of life by
distorting the mundane reality of our world. What do leftover characters do with themselves when their action movie is
over and the hero is dead? Can a woman single-handedly shrink the universe? Can a moon be in love with a girl? What
is it like to be married to the devil? Each story presents a different twist; sometimes it is magical, like a man who
becomes one with his couch, and sometimes it is more dreamlike, like a morbid children's game. Sometimes the
difference between the magic and the dreams is not quite clear. It takes a few pages to find secure footing in this
uncanny universe, but Powers' clean, no-frills prose keeps what could otherwise be a disorienting roller coaster
grounded and clear. If some of the stories require a second reading, it's not because Powers strays too far down the
rabbit hole but because they're too provocative to release their hold on the reader all at once. And if any of the glimpses
into this world, a place wholly different and yet somehow recognizable as our own, are too peculiar to evoke their roots
in truth, the next one is never too far away. A fanciful take on life, love, tragedy, and human connection that draws its
strength from insight instead of artifice.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Powers, Zach: GRAVITY CHANGES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485105133&it=r&asid=5dd90040f53884dafba1870569ced15e.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105133