Travels with Mark Powell Pete Duval (bio) Mark Powell and I met as fellows at Bread Loaf in August of 2004. We hit it off immediately, bought some electric sheers, shaved our heads, gathered up the shorn hair, put it all in a Ziploc bag. We've been boys ever since. This requires, perhaps, some explanation. I was browsing in the impromptu book store the conference sets up every year in the cellar of one of its yellow buildings, still overwhelmed and wondering how I'd ended up at Bread Loaf, where so many of my literary heroes had passed through. Over in the corner, this tall blond guy was doing the same thing—browsing, seemingly a bit nervous and maybe a little out of place himself. He went out. I followed. Halfway across Route 125, I caught up with him. I forget what I said by way of introduction, but minutes later we were careening into town in my old Benz, lost in manic conversation. I kept thinking, this guy is so trusting and open, so obviously full of life. At dinner two nights later we decided—I'm not sure how or why, exactly—to shave our heads. The next thing I knew, we were standing in the parking lot of the CVS where we'd purchased electric sheers, the passenger door of the Benz open, a Vermont evening falling as we got to work in the light from the cab's ceiling lamp. Just after I'd sheered a landing strip down the middle of Mark's head, what little charge the battery held gave out. The look on his face in the moment before I remembered the DC adapter in the glove compartment would have been hilarious if it weren't also a little frightening. He's a big guy. I found the adapter, and we finished our artless barbering, and drove back up the mountain with the windows open, the cool air on our scalps. One could, I'll admit, be forgiven for considering this an odd decision, shaving one's head in the middle of a literary conference. But it seemed so natural a thing to do, the kind of spontaneous eruption of the ecstatic foolishness and illumination we would share again and again in the years to come, and which I've never regretted, despite our having to reintroduce ourselves to the confused folks at the conference, who no longer recognized us. Mark Powell has a ravenous and eclectic curiosity. He can talk at length and with as much authority about Dietrich Bonhoeffer's notion [End Page 49] of cheap grace as about the nuances of the .-. defense. He knows the words to "Ice, Ice, Baby"—will perform the song, in fact, if asked, with all sincerity and the moves of Vanilla himself—yet listens while he writes to Bach's Concerto Number . in F Minor. Without doubt, he's the hardest working writer I know. He approaches the discipline with the tenacity and deadly seriousness of a moral imperative. The man is old school, in the best senses of that phrase. The furthest thing from doctrinaire, his writing is nevertheless profoundly religious, in large part because it's so clearly sourced to the wellspring of all spiritual understanding—this physical world. Small things matter to him. Or, put another way, there are no small things. To Powell, the concrete contingencies of moment and place are of sacramental significance, the texture of rust on an old Cub Cadet lawn mower as essential to the experience of his fictions as the nuances of character and plot. He's a modest man; he'd be embarrassed by such comparisons, but I see him as heir to the literary lineage of Melville, Conrad, Flannery O'Connor, Denis Johnson, Robert Stone. Reading him, you know immediately you're in the hands of a writer after the big game. His work embraces, like all serious literature, something we perhaps need reminding of more than ever—that we live out our lives, moment to moment, in bodies. In 2007, walking to the train after hearing Don DeLillo read at the 92nd St. Y, we talked about what we hoped...