Richard Powers and Pico Iyer Discuss the Writing Process at UC Santa Barbara

Pulitzer Prize Winner Powers Attributes Some Inspiration to a Childhood Book on Coral Reefs

“Coming to Santa Barbara from the Smokies is like coming to another planet,” mused Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental novelist Richard Powers in conversation with essayist and novelist Pico Iyer. “It truly is,” Powers emphasized.

Powers and Lyer spoke at UCSB’s Campbell Hall for the Arts & Lectures series on February 23. The pair discussed Powers’s novel Playground and Iyer’s new book, Aflame. The authors also explored the writing process and discussed how they receive inspiration.

In 2019, Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Overstory. The novel intertwines the lives of diverse characters, all connected by their deep relationships with trees. It explores humanity’s destructive impact on nature and the urgent need for ecological awareness.

Powers’s new book, Playground, follows a similar message. It explores the intersection of technology, nature, and human relationships. Powers said the goal of Playground was to “challenge human exceptionalism from both ends.”

Powers dedicated the novel to his sister Peggy and his friend Ray Ray, both of whom profoundly influenced him while writing. He based the character Rafi Young on Ray Ray, drawing on 40 hours of interviews.

He said Peggy, who passed away three years ago, ultimately inspired him to write the novel. When he was 10, she gifted him a book on coral reefs. That book changed everything for him and made him want to become a Marine Biologist. He described reading it as experiencing a completely different world from the one he currently inhabited.

When he and his family moved to Bangkok, Thailand, when he was 11, he explored that world for real. As he snorkeled in the South China Sea, he felt at home. “I could see all my friends down there,” he reflected.

It was his sister’s death that helped him revisit the gift. It was his chance to return and “be that person I never became,” Powers said. Iyer wondered if, by writing Playground, Powers was bringing his sister and his 10-year-old self back to life. But Powers countered, “it was also about letting them go.”

The book centers on two kids, Todd Keane and Rafi Young, who come from different backgrounds but share a unique and meaningful friendship. Rafi is a writer and Todd is a computer programmer. “This is the two halves of me at war with each other,” Powers joked about the book’s characters. Before becoming an author, Powers was a computer programmer.

Beyond the pages of his novels, Powers emphasized the value of experiencing other countries and cultures. His time in Bangkok during his formative years broadened his understanding of the world and helped him develop a deep empathy for the human experience.

Powers also reflected on his time living in Silicon Valley. He recalled attending dinner parties alongside some of the valley’s biggest tech names. They would always remind him to “stick around” a little longer, and they would solve the death problem. Powers thought it was ridiculous to need to fix death as if it were a bad thing.

During this time, he would hike in the Santa Cruz mountains and marvel at the Redwoods. “To see a tree half the width of this stage and as tall as a football field…it just changes your whole sense of what life is up to,” he pondered. Powers emphasized acknowledging our place in the universe, not as the most critical and powerful species but as a small part of a bigger story.

Standing among the trees and staring at the city below, he was overcome with emotion. “Silicon Valley was down there because these trees were up here.” Up there among the trees, he pondered the idea that humans credit themselves for their creations but fail to thank the earth for providing the tools to do so.“We tell this story that we did this by ourselves but it’s by the grace of other forms of life that we’ve gotten away with it as far as we have,” he said and the audience erupted in claps.