In Memory of Matthew Power

My favorite writer was a Magic Mountain

Memories of my friendship with Matthew Power in my Brooklyn post-MFA years flooding back to me: such a supporter of all my farfetched schemes and themes. I was busy throwing parties, and he was off digging deep into the dark heart of the world’s most compelling stories. While most of us writers feel we may harbor in ourselves some potential for greatness, he truly just was. Dreams realized and died doing what he loved most, sure, but too soon. RIP, though that’s not quite his style.

Matthew was a literary journalist of the highest caliber. My favorite long-form article he wrote was about the steaming hot garbage pile people had to live off like parasites in the Philippines. Some context from his intro:

Like most of the outside world, I had first heard of Payatas, the fifty-acre dumpsite on Quezon City’s northern boundary, when it flashed briefly across headlines in July 2000. Little else besides people dying in great numbers on a slow news day will bring notice to a place like this. After weeks of torrential rains spawned by a pair of typhoons, a hundredfoot mountain of garbage gave way and thundered down onto a neighborhood of shanties built in its shadow. The trash, accumulated over three decades, had been piled up to a 70-degree angle, and the rain-saturated mountain had collapsed. Hundreds of people were killed, buried alive in an avalanche of waste. That most of the victims made a living scavenging from the pile itself rendered the tragedy a dark parable of the new millennium, a symptom of the thousand social and economic ills that plague the developing world. I knew that the scavengers had continued living and working at the site even after the disaster, and thinking there was some human truth to be dug from underneath the sorry facts, I wanted to see Payatas for myself.

Matthew came as a guest once, for a mere $100 honorarium though I’m certain he’d happily do it for free, to talk to my NYU continuing ed “Writing 101” students about his process and this essay in particular. He lived his stories and cared deeply always about every topic. The journalism was so 4D and all-consuming that’s how he died - getting heat stroke charting a bit of an adventurist’s journey along the Nile.

I’m grateful his website contains his archive and there’s an award for those similarly inspired: The Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award is a grant of $12,500 to support the work of a promising early-career nonfiction writer on a story that uncovers truths about the human condition.

Learn more on the Literary Reporting Award here.