M.P. Powers On Books And Writing
M.P. Powers joins me for my latest author exchange. He divides his time between Berlin, Germany and Boynton Beach, Florida.
This interview has been edited lightly.
You published “The Initiate” in 2023. Would you tell me a little bit about it?
“The Initiate” is about Richard Doran, a tool rental shop owner and philosopher and poet — yes, all those things — who quits his life in Florida and tries to start over in Berlin. There, feeling partly reborn, and partly like an institutionalized convict setting his foot back in the world, he seeks to regain his balance by dating. But his dates are all total disasters, culminating in an unplanned pregnancy.
That’s the story on the surface, plus some barroom scenes and travels around Europe. But I see it more as a below-the-surface story. It’s the story about Richard Doran’s inner life. His anxieties, his euphorias, his insanities, and how he turns it into poetry. It’s also full of leitmotifs that the reader probably wouldn’t even notice on the first read. On the second read — if anyone ever gives it one — they might notice it’s a Where’s Waldo of fertility symbols. Lots of foreshadowing moons, and cows, and fruits, and numbers, etc. Plato’s “Theory of Forms” also plays a part, but only as a kind of lowbrow minor character.
How long did it take to write? Do you have a writing routine?
The first version, “Fortuna Berlin,” took about two years. But that version didn’t sit well with me after self-publishing it, so I put it up on cinder blocks in the carport and replaced the exhaust manifold, the shocks and struts, the bucket seats, the CV axle, the power steering fluid and even the wiper blades — not an easy feat for a piece of autofiction. Took about a year. Then I sent it in to Cody [Sexton] at Anxiety Press.
My writing routine varies depending on where I am. In Florida, I write before work, between 4.30 and 6am. In Berlin, I write whenever I have solitude, which is quite often. I can write pretty much anywhere if I just begin.
But ideally, it’s at home, with booze or coffee and some wordless music in the background. I like to write sober and edit drunk, or vice versa. That way I have more than one personality looking at it. I think Bukowski said something similar. But the idea isn’t a new one. The ancient Egyptians did it too according to Herodotus. And I struggle to think of any poet I find great — or interesting as a human — whose muses didn’t reek of booze and vomit in the morning.
Why do you write fiction?
When you’re a living lie, as I was before I had any idea who the hell I was, it’s important that you hide the fact with a great surplus of verbiage. Bullshit, in other words. Storytelling is often just a way for the storyteller to hide. You throw it in the air like gold dust to impair the other person’s vision of you. That’s how it began with me. Obfuscation.
And it kind of came naturally. I’d drink, haul off on the most outrageous tangents, and people seemed to love that side of me. Unfortunately, it was about the only thing I was good at back then, and there weren’t always people to practice on, so eventually I took up writing and started practicing on myself.
Who are a few writers you admire?
The writers I admire are ones whose works I can read more than once. Most books are like shells without the mollusc in them — devoid of a living spirit. But the ancient Greeks and Romans, the German philosophers, and the 19th century Ruskies — they just keep living. Also, D.H. [Lawrence], E.E. [Cummings], Hemingway, Céline, and Buk. They’re the ones I keep returning to and I don’t need much more than them. I’m not a book glutton. I don’t want my head to always be stuffed with other people’s thoughts. I probably reread more than I read.
Any big projects in the works?
I’ve got a poetry collection called “Strange Instruments” coming out with Outcast Press in 2025. I’ve also got a full-length collection of other poems and dozens of stories waiting to be sent out. I am loaded with inventory, but right now I am mostly occupied with the novel I’m working on. It’s a modernization of an old myth. Very happy with it so far.
