In Zach Powers’ flash fiction story, “Surface Treatments,” a father paints himself into a corner—literally. While the circumstances are absurd, there is such an accuracy and familiarity in the helpless acceptance of his wife and children alternating between observing and gamely participating in his self-exile. We spoke to Powers about writing, this story, and—since he’s also an expert on the subject—what to do when you’re in Savannah.
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Erin McReynolds: Something about this scenario—an unhappy father painting himself into isolation from the rest of his family—while recalling absurdist Italo Calvino, reminds us a little, too, of Carver’s abandoned husband putting all his possessions on the lawn or Cheever’s discarded suburban man swimming across town via his neighbors’ pools. There was such an emotionally honest and recognizable domestic story beneath the weirdness. How did this come to you?
Zach Powers: Someone else mentioned that Cheever story to me, but I have to admit I’ve never read it. In general, I think I write against the midcentury-realist vein, even though I often tackle the same subjects. Maybe the difference is that I’m more existentially absurd where Cheever, Carver, et al. seem to deal with the absurdities of the everyday. Please forgive the haphazardness of that literary analysis.
As for this story specifically, I know exactly where I got the idea. I was at a party, talking to two of my writer friends, Joseph Schwartzburt and Gino Orlandi. Gino had recently moved into a new house and kept repainting the kitchen, three or four times in the first month. I made a joke that he would keep painting until the kitchen shrank to nothing. (It’s surprising how many of my stories start as jokes at parties.) At first, I just latched onto this basic conceit. It wasn’t until I started writing the first scene that the themes emerged. I almost always start this way. The concept acts as the container for the narrative and serves as the inspiration for the language/style.
EM: It seems like such fun to name colors of paint: Dignified, Intuitive, Jovial, Reticence… Do you actually have a color in your head for each of these?
ZP: When I was growing up, my parents got the J. Crew catalog in the mail, and my dad would go through each one reading the most ridiculous color names out loud. The J. Crew colors back then had names like “morose peach” and “trifling lagoon.” I just made those names up, but they’re not too far removed from reality. Inspired by that memory, about halfway through writing this story, I decided to look up actual color names from different paint-makers. I don’t remember which color was which anymore—my interest was in the humorous potential or thematic relevance of the names—but a few of the colors were used literally.
I find that limitations like that, having to borrow words from elsewhere, forces me to write more interestingly. It pulls me out of my linguistic habits and into new territory.
EM: You worked at a local TV station in Savannah and tended to write on your breaks, before ever getting an MFA. What would you say is the main difference between your writing then and your writing post-MFA, especially in terms of the imaginative wildness of your stories?
ZP: I think writing workshops should be for learning craft, not content. I’m still trying to improve how I say things every day, and in those first years of formal study, my craft advanced rapidly. In short, I was not as good at writing then. I hope I’m better now.
Content—what things I say—is another matter. As with “Surface Treatments,” I usually have some weird idea and tie it to a theme. Only after that do I figure out the writing. I love language, and I obsess over it in revision, but the words are a byproduct of the process, the result of combining the other elements of story. Weird idea plus theme equals language.
That formula hasn’t changed since I wrote crappy sci-fi stories in college. I’ve always been interested in ideas, and I prefer fiction that allows itself to think and to indulge in a concept. Traditional workshop pedagogy often teaches against that sort of indulgence, so in some ways I’ve fought against my education to stay true to my natural weirdness.
EM: You also wrote a guidebook: 100 Things to do in Savannah Before You Die. What are a few of your must-dos?
ZP: Now that I live in Virginia, I can share the list of things I always do myself when I go home to Savannah:
Get a beer at Pinkie Master’s. This is Savannah’s quintessential dive bar. Make sure to check out the plaque in the bartop marking the spot where Jimmy Carter once stood.
Eat lunch and/or dinner at Tequila’s Town Mexican Restaurant. Yes, I have been known to eat two meals there in one day.
Grab a coffee. Savannah has five or six exceptional local coffee shops. Gallery Espresso is where I wrote my first two books.
Buy a book. The Book Lady and E. Shaver, both perfect indie booksellers, are barely half a block apart.
EM: What’s been one of your favorite pieces of writing advice?
ZP: My favorite piece of writing advice is that there is no universal writing advice. I, as much as anybody, read essays on craft and attend lectures and take notes at panels. But the point of all that is not to heed everything every author tells me, but to pick and choose what works for my own writing. Even the old standbys—show don’t tell, write what you know, no adverbs—are arbitrary, reflecting conventions more than “good writing.” I think it’s beneficial to try to understand why these pieces of advice get shared so often, and once you understand, you’ll also understand when and how to ignore any piece of advice that doesn’t jibe with you.
Zach Powers is a native of Savannah, Georgia and lives in Arlington, Virginia. His novel, First Cosmic Velocity, will be published in summer 2019 by Putnam, and his debut story collection, Gravity Changes, won the BOA Short Fiction Prize and was published in 2017. He is the Communications Manager at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and teaches writing at Northern Virginia Community College. Get to know him at ZachPowers.com.