PowellsBooks.Blog

Why is the government teaching us to waste water? I'm asking you because I'm talking about your garden.

The fact is, the gardening practices that are endorsed and taught by the U.S. government and the Department of Agriculture make extremely inefficient use of water. How can this be possible when, as of February 1, 2013, more than 60 percent of the contiguous United States was classified as under drought conditions? Water is becoming scarcer by the day. We ought to be looking for new ways to conserve it. Even gardeners in historically water-rich states like Oregon and Minnesota have a responsibility to manage this resource: water scarcity is a fact of life everywhere.

So how does the government tell us we should garden? First, let's consider how most gardens are planted and then watered. The average home garden is about 20 feet by 35 feet, for a total area of 700 square feet. Rows for planting are spaced 3 feet apart. Typically, you'll have about ten 20-foot-long rows for all of your different crops. You may start your season with a row each of carrots, lettuce, Swiss chard, ...

What do you write?

I used to say book-length essays, but the inevitable follow-up question — essays about what? — would take me to another dodge, first-person narrative nonfiction... and seconds later I'd admit, I write about myself.

Now I just say the word: memoir.

I'm 38 years old and I'm working on my third memoir.

As I wrote in the first one, I have never shot heroin in an alley with a needle I knew was dirty, killed anyone by mistake or on purpose, spent even one night in jail, lost a limb, watched anyone burn to death, had to choose the child that would live, seen active duty, lost everything in a flood...

Which is to say: I have almost no story to tell, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about that almost no story. A lot of thinking about almost nothing.

In that first memoir, during the seventh year of a remission, I tried to remember the experience of being chronically ill.

In my second memoir, during the third year after his death, I tried to remember my friend.

In the third one I seem to be trying to find ...

Recently I was invited to give a reading at Colgate University, where I wrote my first novel, Y, while on a one-year teaching fellowship. A handful of my former students accompanied me to lunch the next day, and at some point we fell into a discussion about why the protagonist of my novel, Shannon, was an asexual, androgynous character. One of my students said she hadn't encountered a character like Shannon in literature before; another asked if I could recommend other novels that featured female protagonists who were either androgynous or more masculine than feminine. I said that she would likely find many protagonists like this in LGBT literature — or, at least, it was a place to start. I then suggested Middlesex and its Canadian counterpart, Annabel. She thought a minute. Okay, she said, but she didn't want the protagonist to be androgynous and/or masculine because of her sexuality or genitalia; rather, she wanted to see someone like herself: a heterosexual, though by no means traditionally feminine, woman. A woman who wasn't defined by being a woman.

I had just finished reading Evan S. ...

Like stratosphere, troposphere, and mesosphere, atmospheric regions with which it shares part of its name, the biosphere is a shell-shaped zone enveloping our planet. But where the others are made of nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and trace gases, the biosphere is made of life. It extends in two directions — up and down — farther than most of us realize, and farther than scientists, until a few years ago, would have thought possible.

In 1830, British naturalist Edward Forbes claimed that because sunlight could not penetrate deeper than 600 meters, photosynthesis below that depth was impossible. No photosynthesis meant no photosynthetic organisms. No photosynthetic organisms meant no basis for a food chain. Life, Forbes concluded, could not exist in the deep ocean. In subsequent years, however, scientists did find life at greater depths, dining on dead and decaying organisms that sank slowly from the sunlit waters above. Such life still depended on sunlight, albeit indirectly, and most scientists continued to believe that all organisms relied on the Sun's energy. In the late 1970s, though, geologists using the research submarine Alvin discovered anemones and fish thriving in the warm ...

It was in the middle of a gray and brittle February when I approached the wrought-iron gates of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I was already elbow-deep and several months into researching my book, A Grand Complication. I had read letters, diaries, and books, as well as countless newspaper clippings, yellowed documents, telegrams, and even hotel menus. I pored through photographs, conducted interviews, examined bound auction catalogues, and deciphered archives written in a florid pen abandoned long ago. I was hot on the trail of the two men at the center of this intertwined story: James Ward Packard and Henry Graves Jr., which is what brought me to the graveyard made eerily famous as the setting of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Two of the greatest watch collectors of the 20th century, Packard and Graves had embarked on a quest to possess the most complicated watch in history, resulting in the Graves Supercomplication. And I was hot on the trail of their timepieces too. I had stood before vitrines examining magnificent mechanical watches in museums in New York, Geneva, Jerusalem, and London. On ...

My novel The House Girl tells the story of two women: Lina Sparrow, a lawyer in modern-day New York, and Josephine Bell, a slave in 1850s Virginia. People often ask me why I chose to write about Josephine and who inspired her character. (They assume, I suspect, that Lina is a stand-in for myself: I too have been a lawyer in New York.) I didn't choose my characters, I always reply. My characters chose me.

There's a certain degree of evasion in this answer (I don't know!) but also a degree of truth. The seeds of my characters were planted long ago, and I could no more unplant them than I could remove a childhood scar from my knee or the slight Massachusetts twang from my voice. I grew up in Stockbridge, an old New England town where history pressed in close on all sides. A rock-filled creek ran behind our house and my sisters and I regularly pulled ancient treasures from its icy flow: pieces of broken pottery, a silver spoon, and, one frosty fall morning, a necklace of intricately worked silver blackened by time and ...

I have recently been living in Texas. You'd need to be like me, an apprehensive Englishman, to share or even understand the uneasy thrill I have felt when walking in its countryside (though countryside is not a fitting word; it's far too tame for Texas — its wilds, perhaps, or its terrain).

A country hike — if you can find a stretch of land that isn't fenced or defended with "bob war" — is at best a risky affair in the Lone Star state. I've made mistakes. As the blundering innocent abroad, trusting everything I see, I have inspected a poison ivy too intimately on the seemingly innocuous Hike & Bike trail round Austin's Town Lake (the blisters stayed with me for weeks), and I have been fooled by seemingly smooth-skinned cactuses into grasping hold of their stems and then spent a week tweezering out a hundred tiny and invisible lances. I have tested my nerve by reaching a little too closely toward a lengthy alligator on the Gulf Coast and a saucer-sized tarantula in a Houston car park. I have failed to protect myself sufficiently against mosquitoes and ...

I feel as though, in a certain sense, I've spent the last two years in Antarctica with Douglas Mawson while researching and writing Alone on the Ice, my book about Australia's greatest explorer. Exactly one century ago, in January 1913, Mawson pulled off the feat that Sir Edmund Hillary later called "the greatest survival story in the history of exploration." After his two companions had died — one from falling into a crevasse, the other of exhaustion and hypothermia — Mawson hauled his cut-down sledge 100 miles across the polar plateau to the Main Base hut on Cape Denison. Virtually out of food, with his skin peeling off, his hair falling out, and the blistered soles of his feet detached from the flesh beneath, he made the solo journey in 32 days , during which he was knocked off his feet repeatedly by the winds, fell into several crevasses from which he barely escaped, and at times resorted to crawling on all fours.

We tend facilely to think that the history of exploration, as of athletic feats, follows a steady vector of progress and improvement. The toughest mountaineering routes ...

When I was 17, I fell in love for the first time. His name was Dylan. I had first noticed him when he performed the Elvis Costello song "Alison" in the Beaver Country Day School Talent Show. His voice was thin and cracked in places during the song, but something about him up on stage playing the guitar with his eyes shut and his head thrown back got to me in a way nothing ever had before. He rocked along as he played, spastically dancing in a mustard-colored suit that he wore with a skinny black tie. He looked goofy and exposed and I felt like he was singing to me. I approached him afterward and told him I thought he should have won instead of the girl who twirled batons to the Star Wars theme. In a few days, we were going out. And a few months later, I was ready to have sex for the first time.

I drove to the Planned Parenthood clinic in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near my home in Belmont. In the waiting room there were a few middle-aged women and some young couples ...

When I am suffering from writer's block, I usually try to solve the problem by going for a long walk. My habitual route takes me through an area of parkland in the center of my town, then up a steep hill, climbing through leafy residential streets to a sharp ridge that affords fine easterly views of New York City glimpsed through the trees. On the way up, I am in serious hiking mode, head down into wind or rain or snow, holding as best I can to a constant rhythmic stride. My thoughts become dulled, as if there is no room in my brain for anything beyond the physical mantra of placing one foot doggedly in front of the other.

Once I reach the top of the ridge, I pause only briefly to acknowledge my modest accomplishment before turning for home. As I set off down the hill at a more relaxed pace, I find that the meditative state is broken, and a special kind of satisfied calmness enters in. Ideas start drifting through my mind: not just random thoughts but concepts that are almost fully formed. ...