I didn't dedicate my life to fiction until I reached my forties, when I realized it was then or never. I'd wanted to be a writer since reading Wuthering Heights at the age of sixteen – an unusual inspiration for a working-class English boy – and started writing as an undergraduate at Cambridge, but was disabled by a marriage that sapped my confidence and energy. Instead I traveled and taught. I lived in Spain and Poland for periods of less than a year, Portugal for ten years (where my wife came from), and the United Arab Emirates for eight years. I played semi-professionally in a band. I visited Africa and the Far East, trekked in the Himalayas, and scoured Europe on a 'savage pilgrimage' reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence's.
By the time I cut myself free from the wreckage of my marriage in 1998, I had a lot to write about. That year I moved from the southern Arabian Desert to the Sonora Desert, to begin an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. I started Villareal, a semi-autobiographical novella about an aspiring painter in love with himself, an enigmatic Spanish girl, and the eponymous city he's living in – which has mythical dimensions.
After another stint in the Middle East between 2000 and 2003, with my second wife, an American, I returned to the USA and began work on The Gulf, a novel that portrays life in the oil-rich emirates, and the cultural and psychological gulfs that abound there: between men and women, Arabs and expatriate westerners, the wealthy and the poor. I'd taught female undergraduates on a women's campus of an Arab university for five years, so I had some rare insights for a western man. While my stories were getting published in national magazines, I began work as a professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas, where I remain to this day.
In 2006 my second marriage foundered and in 2007 my younger son left home for college in Boston, so I am living alone with a beautiful, temperamental calico cat, in a Craftsman house in Conway. I also have a Victorian home in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which might be the most magical town in America.
Copyright © 2007 Garry Craig Powell.