From the Archives : Richard Powers : The Overstory
About this episode
David Naimon interviews Richard Powers about his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory, exploring themes of storytelling and the human perspective in relation to nature.
Today’s archival episode with Richard Powers, about The Overstory, was recorded in 2019 in the studios of KBOO community radio in Portland, Oregon. Unusually, that same night I appeared with Richard at a live ticketed event at Revolution Hall to discuss the same book. Beyond the differences between an intimate one-on-one in-studio conversation (which today’s episode is), and a public-facing live event, where the presence of the audience is palpable and becomes part of the collective rapport we establish, I also developed two discrete lines of inquiry for each conversation respectively. So if you haven’t heard the live conversation (aired in 2023), I highly recommend it as well. Barbara Kingsolver for the New York Times Book Review declares The Overstory— winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction—a book that accomplishes “what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility.” What does it mean to de-center humans in a story written…
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