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.

Elissa Schappell on the Continuing Conversation

In the 47th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Elissa Schappell, author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls (Simon & Schuster), tells why she put her collection together the way she did, describes a painful writing experience, and names the books and writers that inspire her.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection?
Arranging the stories in the collection was a challenge for me because, unlike a traditional story collection, I wanted the book to have an arc of sorts and thus read more like a traditional novel with the first and last stories serving as bookends. I also wanted the stories to move back and forth in time, overlapping directly or obliquely, so you’d see the character from several different perspectives and distances. So you could see how, say, the experience of being labeled a slut in high school would inform your identity, reverberating, even twenty-five years later when you’re a grown woman and mother. The ways in which we exist only in the imagination or memory of others and how at odds this perception is with reality. My hope is that as the stories progress, each revealing a new side of a character through another lens, the reader will be challenged to confront their preconceived notions of who these women are. Perhaps question the judgments they’ve passed on these women earlier and consider why they were inclined to do so.

Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and not revised it later?
Once. It’s called, "Try An Outline" and it’s from Use Me.

I knew that there would have to be a story in the book where the father dies. And I hated it. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want it to be all sentimental, then-a-golden-ladder-of-sunlight-reached-down-into-the-hospital-room. I wanted it to feel authentic. I was angry at the universe, angry with my father, and confused. I felt like child. Now were I a girl, faced with writing a difficult paper, my father would have helped me. He’d have said, as he always did, “Make an outline.” This always bothered me to no end. I didn’t want to make a freaking outline. I wanted him to help me write this paper on Of Mice and Men.

As it would happen, the day I sat down to write the story, feeling reluctant, angry and full of doubt, I heard his voice in my head: “Try making an outline,” he said. As ever, this pissed me off. “Really,” I thought. “You really think that’s going to help me get through this? An outline? Sure. Right. Fine. You want an outline so bad, well here it is.”

And so it went. It was the most painful writing experience of my life. I was shaking and sobbing, completely rattled. Anytime I started to slow down, or thought, “I can’t do this, I’ve got to stop,” I’d tell myself, “No. Just keep going. Go down. Go down, touch the bottom and then, when you come up, it won’t hurt as much."

For the next five hours I sat and wrote it, and when I was done, I got up, went to the loo and vomited.

Later when I read it, there were parts I didn’t even remember writing, parts I scarcely recognized.

What book or books made you want to become a writer?
I don’t think I ever wanted to be a writer. I’ve just always been one. At this point in my life, I have no other marketable skills, at all. So, I suppose I’m stuck with it.

Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV, so I read a lot and wrote a lot in my notebooks. I loved all of Salinger, especially Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories. Although later, I’d carry a copy of Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenter because I liked that, despite the experience of being there [editor's note: *spoiler alert*] when Seymour kills himself in “A Good Day for Bananafish,” I could go back, across this bridge of other books and visit him. The conversation continued. The idea that a book could do that, continue the conversation, is what spurred me to write my first book, Use Me, which is about, in part, the relationship between a daughter and her father who is dying of cancer.

As an adult, Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore gave me permission to take my world and the characters that populated it seriously. To write in my voice, to realize a story needn’t be long to be deep. Length doesn’t equal strength. I own all their books—multiple copies of some—the ones most lined and worn are Amy’s Reasons to Live and At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, and Lorrie’s Self-Help and Birds of America.

There was anger and desire and awkwardness in these stories; these women were going into dark places. Their stories were honest in a way I couldn’t be in life, or on the page, and they were using humor as a vehicle to deliver the truth. They made me smarter about the world and myself. They were writing sentences so perfect they demanded re-reading and memorizing. They were able to give up something of themselves without drawing attention to themselves as writers, or ever lapsing into sentimentality. Still, there was always the sense that some part of the story was written with a bone. The humor and sadness, the terrain was familiar to me, so reading them felt a bit like discovering my pack. Although they were bigger and faster and cleverer than me, even if I never made it to the front, I could be a writer, and I wasn’t alone anymore.