Joe Powers
Categories: Male Authors - Anglophone Authors - Saint John River Valley
Biography
Joe Powers is a native of Fredericton, New Brunswick and is a graduating member of Fredericton High School's class of 1989. He served a stint at the University of New Brunswick, also in Fredericton, and studied journalism at the New Brunswick Community College, Woodstock campus.
Joe is a fiction writer with a fondness for literary sleight-of-hand. He loves the idea of prompting a strong emotional reaction using no more than words and his slightly off-center imagination, and delights in taking the reader on journeys to previously unexplored regions. He occasionally dabbles in genres that follow safer, more conventional routes, but the path he loves most is the twisted, winding one that leads through those dark, shadowy corners of the mind where unseen things creep and slither, and nothing is ever entirely as it seems.
In addition to his oft-neglected, sporadically-maintained blog based on personal observations and opinions, his work has appeared in Bread N' Molasses Magazine, and the anthology Twisted Tails VII: Irreverence.
How has New Brunswick influenced your work?
I tend to write what I know, or at least what I can imagine. I think on some level, whether conscious or not, I write using parts of New Brunswick as my backdrop and later tweak the details to suit my setting. In fact, many of my characters are amalgamations of some of the more colourful people I've encountered in my travels around the “Picture Province.”
What is your favourite New Brunswick book, and why?
I would have to say Herb Curtis' Brennen Siding trilogy has to top my personal list. Herb has a writing style that I really enjoy, and his ability to encompass and convey an era, a time and place, with absolute perfection, I find delightful. I also really enjoyed The Fighting Fisherman by Raymond Fraser. I love biographies, and have always been a fan of Yvon Durelle, and I've read and re-read this one plenty. In my opinion Raymond really knocked it out of the park with this one.
What do you consider to be the highlight of your career so far?
My first real submission to an actual publisher - not a writing contest or anything like that - was not only received and accepted but, as I have since come to discover, done so with unbridled and uncharacteristic enthusiasm by an extremely demanding and normally very hard-to-please editor. I think of the fact that my abilities were able to catch the eye of and impress respected members of the publishing world, and each time I sit down to write anything, I'm motivated to keep working to improve my skills and come up with even better stories.
Source(s): Author.
