Author

Interviewer: You were born in the Midwest and moved to Thailand at age eleven. What effect did that experience have on you as a writer?

Powers: That’s such a huge question. It presumes I could somehow know what kind of writer I would have been had I not gone. But I know it affected my entire life – linguistically, intellectually, emotionally, culturally. I live in Bangkok from the age of eleven to sixteen, then came back to the States and finished high school in Illinois. But the years I spent overseas are so incredibly formative, the last years of childhood and the first years of young adulthood.

Interviewer: I’m stuck by the sense of fun in your work, something I seldom see in contemporary fiction.

Johnson: I too find that quality strangely lacking — not true of authors we now think of as “classic,” like, say, E. M. Forster, or even James, who can be very funny. I have no explanation for the American lack, and it has even crossed my mind that a sense of fun can be a curse in the U.S., preventing readers from seeing the serious issues and thoughts that may find their way into a writer’s pages.

Interviewer: More than many writers, you seem unwilling to repeat yourself. I’m thinking of the formal experimentation in your work as well as the thematic diversity. Moody: I was educated…    read more