Mark Powell's Auspicious Entry Into the Regional Literary Scene

Abstract

Mark Powell's Auspicious Entry Into the Regional Literary Scene George Brosi Mark Powell's first two novels have established him as a formidable force in Appalachian literature, and, with two more novels slated for 2012, his reputation is likely to grow. Powell's work elicits feelings of stark recognition for its verisimilitude to sometimes harsh realities. It has a strong sense of place and great narrative force. Mark Powell was born in 1976 and raised, with an older sister and two younger brothers, in Oconee County, South Carolina. His family moved three times before he was nine-years-old, and then settled on a small farm near West Union, South Carolina. His father is a realtor, and his grandfather ran a sawmill and later a general store and lived on another farm about a quarter of a mile away. Both sides of his family have lived in Oconee County at least back into the 1830s, and Mark Powell was raised in what he describes as "a very conservative and loving" Wesleyan Church cofounded by his paternal great-grandfather. He says he believes his "life will always be a response, both positively and negatively, to the place [he] was raised and the religion [he] imbibed there." At Walhalla High he was class president for four years, played basketball, ran track, and was all-state in cross country. He also got to know Denise Frasier whose father ran a general store serving trout fishermen heading up into the mountains. Powell's family is known for its strong military ties, so The Citadel, South Carolina's military college, was a natural choice for him. There, Powell ran track and cross country, "cast organized religion aside," and graduated with an English major in 1997. After graduation, Powell moved to Columbia, South Carolina, mainly because Denise Frasier was finishing up her undergraduate work there, and got a job at The Book Dispensary, a used book store. The next year he started an MFA program at the University of South Carolina. In 1999 Mark Powell married Denise Frasier, and the following year they purchased an empty cabin on Lake Beckey near Mountain Rest, in the mountains above their hometown. They fixed it up and have gravitated to it ever since during summer and vacation breaks and at times between jobs. An avid outdoorsman, Powell occasionally hunts and fishes, but mostly enjoys hiking and camping and running in [End Page 30] the woods with his yellow lab, Buddy, particularly in the Chattooga River watershed and especially Licklog Falls. Before Powell graduated from the USC MFA Program in 2011, his senior thesis novel, Prodigals, was declared the runner-up for the Peter Taylor Prize for the novel. For the 2001-2002 school year, Powell taught at Tri-County Technical College near Clemson and at nearby Anderson College. The University of Tennessee Press published Prodigals in 2002, and the next year Powell taught at the University of South Carolina and began work on Blood Kin. The following year he taught at Clemson. In 2004 Powell, garnering fellowships from both the prestigious Breadloaf Writers Conference and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he taught at the College of Charleston. The next summer Powell received a play-writing fellowship to study for a month in Prague, and the NEA grant allowed Powell and his wife to remain in Europe into the fall of 2005. He then taught at Young Harris College in North Georgia. The next year, his novel, Blood Kin, won the Peter Taylor Prize, judged by distinguished novelist, Jill McCorkle, and he was invited, for the first time, to teach at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at the Hindman Settlement School in Eastern Kentucky. Powell credits Silas House and Ron Rash, fellow Hindman faculty, as mentors who have ably assisted his literary career. Powell characterizes his spiritual quest as "an attempt to replace the Ten Commandments with the Sermon on the Mount." Although he recognizes that "every step I take towards being a better person is inevitably accompanied by two steps back into selfishness," he has "come to agree fully with Arthur Miller that 'the Bible means justice or it means nothing at all,' and with Dostoevsky who...