NICHOLAS POWERS IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID LAWTON
Nicholas Powers is the author of The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street (Upset Press). His writing has appeared in HuffPost, The Indypendent, Insider.com, The Village Voice, Truth-Out, and Apogee Journal. Find his poem “To Kiss a Tree” in the latest great weather for MEDIA anthology, Escape Wheel.
Nicholas will be taking part in our October 17 online Escape Wheel celebration.
David Lawton: Your piece in the new anthology, Escape Wheel, shares the mutual discoveries you are experiencing with your young son. How have you handled explaining the extraordinary circumstances we have been living under this past year?
Nicholas Powers: Luckily, he’s too young to read or understand the news, so I don’t have to explain the shit hit the fan era we live in. I do explain it to my students using literature like Daniel Dafoe’s Journal of the Plague, or Albert Camus’ The Plague. Reading lives that reflect their lives even though they are separated by time and language.
David Lawton: Besides being a poet, you are also a very prolific essayist, covering issues involving politics and social justice. Can you tell us where we can find this work, and give us a sense of what the dialogue out there is telling us?
Nicholas Powers: The voices of social justice go up and down the tonal range from lament, dirge, accusation, rage, prophecy and analysis. At the core, the Left mindset pivots around the primal scene of a violence and the rescue or empowerment of the victim. Using that lens, one can see the minority communities hit harder by Covid-19, the scapegoating of Asian-Americans, the sacrificing of the old and sick for the sake of re-starting the economy, and the cost of not having national healthcare. Past Covid-19, the Left discourse is focusing with increasing passion and anxiety on the election. Each time Republicans win, and especially one like Trump who gleefully disregards bourgeois decorum, then allegories to the rise of the Nazis are made. It increases the terror, and ratchets up the fight or flight response. Check in on your Leftist friends, they might need a hug.
David Lawton: I first met you at a psychedelic storytelling program, and learned that you have written extensively on altered states. Would you mind sharing with us how your vision quests have affected your writing discipline, and how this kind of experience can help our readers deal with the current turmoil in the country?
Nicholas Powers: My first college era psychedelic use was mostly goofy nights of face melting, dizzy dancing, light trails shenanigans. It wasn’t until I took LSD and MDMA after 9/11 that the healing potential of psychedelics became real for me. I’m a dad now and don't indulge but for those who can, if you are struggling with anxiety and want to try them as a form of medicine, prepare your set and setting, maybe have a trusted friend or a guide to sit with you, be prepared for passage through negative imagery or emotions, and purge baby purge. Have a container of sorts - a diary, or canvas, or a musical instrument, or dance, something - that can hold what you learned.
David Lawton: I know that you also cover Burning Man annually, which also has a reputation for hallucinogenic experimentation. But there must be more to that community to impel you to return to that subject so regularly. Tell us.
Nicholas Powers: Burning Man is my spiritual enema, a mind compass reset to a dream, and a great party to sweat out the bullshit of bad faith living. Wild free people are beautiful. It gives me proof that when left to be their creative absurd carnival selves, human beings are worth all the spinning the Earth has done since the sun ignited.
David Lawton: What is on the horizon for Nick Powers? Books? Teaching?
Nicholas Powers: The future is loving my son. Watching him grow stronger and smarter than me. Giving him my stories like feathers for a pair of wings. Warning him about mirrors that can turn into traps. Closing the door on ghosts trying to slip into his ears. And for me? Publishing a vampire novel this October through Upset Press. Writing a book on race and psychedelics called Chemical Exodus for a Berkeley publisher, and dancing in the street when Biden gets elected. I know. I know. He’s not Bernie. But fuck it, he can sniff my hair anytime he wants if it means we have a chance for a neo-liberal watered down Green New Deal. C'mon Biden, massage my shoulders, I’ve been tense since 2016.
Escape Wheel is a dynamic collection of contemporary poetry and fiction from established and emerging writers across the United States and beyond. The anthology also contains an interview with Cornelius Eady.
"These annual anthologies and other work by great weather for MEDIA are an admirable contribution to arts and culture."- The Compulsive Reader
Submissions for our anthologies are open October 15 to January 15.