Features
For genius, C-U is the place
From the flat Nebraska night to the critical care unit's whitescape, from an ancient bird migration site to the folds and fissures of the human brain, place figures prominently in Richard Powers’ latest novel, “The Echo Maker.”
Remarkably
to some, Powers, the 2006 National Book Award winner, author of nine novels
and winner a MacArthur "genius award," nests in Champaign-Urbana,
where he earned his degrees, served as writer-in-residence and now holds
the Swanlund Endowed Chair of English.
Born near Chicago, Powers spent five teen years in Bangkok and has lived in Boston and Holland. Friends and critics rib him for hanging around the rural Midwest. Wouldn’t a big city be more appropriate for a writer a "New Yorker" reviewer described as "one of our most lavishly gifted writers"?
The writer counters that he has to live in the heartland: “It keeps me attached to the themes that infuse all of my books. This place gives me the whole world in a nutshell.
“This combination of simple and complex, of rural pragmatism and international excitement, is great for a writer. It keeps me stimulated without being overwhelmed, supported without being sequestered."
Sometimes Powers bikes in a few blocks to the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, where he is a member of the cognitive neuroscience group and keeps a fold-up cot hanging on the wall of his office.
Lying on that cot, nearly flat as the land around him, Powers dictates his work into his tablet PC and edits it with voice and stylus.
“I love working near the laboratory activity at the Beckman, the chance to meet researchers or walk around eavesdropping on all kinds of scientific work. Life here is like having a home in the city and one in the country—the best of both worlds.”
—Andrea Lynn, Urbana News Bureau