The Landscape of Possibility: An Interview with Lance Olsen

Trevor Dodge interviews Lance Olsen, award-winning author and former Writer in Residence for the state of Idaho. Olsen--who says he is "drawn to strange and surprising work that can take lots of different forms, but that in some way always resists the blandness of the literary mainstream"--has appeared in the Enteractive Language Festival (pictured left) and wrote about Northwest small publishing for 2GQ (soon to appear on this site).

Lance Olsen was born in 1956 amid the proliferation of shopping malls in northern New Jersey, but spent his first years growing up in a jungle compound in Venezuela, where his father helped set up oil refineries for Exxon. Olsen's earliest memories include the sound of hundreds of crab shells crunching beneath the tires as his family inched along the dirt roads in their Land Rover; the pale mustard stain on his bedsheets from the venom of a bullmaster snake that had taken up residence in the washing machine; and how a thirty-foot python once attacked his father's Volkswagen Beetle.

When he tried to share his experiences during classroom Show and Tell sessions upon his return to the States, his teachers thought he was making it all up and sent him to the principal's office to phone his mother, who confirmed every word.

At that point, surely he must have known he was onto something.

After graduating in 1978 with a BA in English and Journalism from the University of Wisconsin, Olsen enrolled in the prestigious Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa: There he earned his degree in fiction writing and met Andi, an assemblage and collage artist to whom he's now been married for 25 years. In 1980, Olsen continued his studies at the University of Virginia, earning an MA and PhD in Modern and Postmodern Literature. He taught at the University of Kentucky from 1985 to 1990, and at the University of Idaho from 1990 to 2001, when he resigned his professorship to write full-time.

Author of eight novels, one hypertext, four short fiction collections, a co-authored chapbook of poetry, four volumes of literary criticism, a fiction writing textbook, and hundreds of essays, short stories, and reviews, Olsen is easily among the most prolific writers of his generation. He has garnered consistent high praise for his writing and teaching, including an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright in Finland, and a Pushcart Prize. He served as Idaho's Writer in Residence from 1996 to 1998. Currently he lives somatically in central Idaho's mountains and digitally at www.lanceolsen.com. He is co-founder of and contributor to Now What, a new collective blog by alternative prose writers and publishers, which you can find at nowwhatblog.blogspot.com.

2GQ: Landscape and regional identity are major tropes of literary writing done within and about Idaho, almost at times suggesting that its writers are a sort of conduit for the natural world. First, how would you describe the various forms your writing takes? And, second, what role--if any--does the natural world play in these forms?

OLSEN: Part of the pure plain pleasure I derive from writing resides in my promise to myself not to take the same narratological bus twice. I can't imagine getting up each morning to compose similar sorts of stories or books or essays, day after day. Critics sometimes talk about me as a speculative-fiction or avant-pop author, but I consider myself less as a member of either of those literary clubs than I do simply as someone drawn to strange and surprising work that can take lots of different forms, but that in some way always resists the blandness of the literary mainstream--the fictive equivalent, say, of Britney Spears's music--while endeavoring to capture the complex and conflicted sense of what it means to be a human being several heartbeats into this still-new millennium.

If it wakes me up in the midst of my dreaming, I like to write and read it. But I'm afraid, at least for me, regional work does the opposite of waking me up. By and large, it's a compensatory and reductionistic mode that sells well by telling us what we already know about who and where we are.

The "natural world" you bring up is, it almost (but not quite) goes without saying, no longer natural. It hasn't been for more than a century--arguably for quite a bit more than two millennia. Our wilderness areas and national forests are our outdoor museums. But "landscape" in the sense you're using it does play a central role in my eco-novels Burnt, Tonguing the Zeitgeist, Time Famine, and Freaknest as a kind of warning about what our planet will look like within the next twenty years if we're not careful with our dwindling resources and our species' instinct to reproduce like randy rabbits. It also pervades my novel, Girl Imagined by Chance, in which a couple discovers repeatedly that there's no such thing as a wired-down, "authentic" life: every life in 2006 is a mediated life, an artificial construct, and perhaps none so much as the so-called  "natural."

So I suppose the landscapes I care about most deeply in my writing are those of our culture's consciousness and the vibrant imagination.

2GQ: Do you think technology is the agent of this mediation? The uses and abuses of technology are certainly recurring issues in your work. Is this the result of living in the 21st century, where we've made living a "natural," Thoreau-vian lifestyle impossible with the advent of nuclear weapons, television, SUVs, and genetic cloning? And if so, what are the functions of art and the role of the artist in a world where science fiction has become science fact?

OLSEN: The Thoreau-vian lifestyle is a myth--a lovely one, mind you--and always has been. Even Henry David could only tolerate it a couple months before returning to his McJob in a pencil factory. Anyone who sports glasses, contacts, or fillings, let alone pacemakers, plastic limbs, or facelifts, has allowed technology to mediate her or his selfhood. Ditto anyone who drives a car, turns on a toaster or an iPod, watches television, or opens that revolutionary object of technological culture called a book. In this century, we're all techno-centaurs, and the designer quality of that chimeraism will only grow exponentially as computers move from the outside of our heads to the inside in the form of biochips and nanobots.

The sort of mediation I'm most interested these days, however, has to do less with such physical interventions than with certain interventions of mind--that is, how late-stage capitalist media (television and the Internet in particular) have profoundly distanced us from our selves, our bodies, and the external world. We feel increasingly comfortable perceiving at a remove in fast fragments instead of slow wholes. Watch any kid on a video game, any filmic action sequence, any hypertext. We believe we're acting out of free will when in truth we've been subtly coerced into desiring everything from certain toothpaste brands to certain forms of government we once didn't even know we had a capacity to desire.

Such statements sound as if I'm critiquing technology. I'm not. It's with us. It will be with us. A lot of it's a lot of fun. Most of it is alluring. This is simply the case. The important thing is to enjoy what it has to offer, stay aware of what it wants of us, and continue to think about how it's changing us and why. It's extraordinary business, and one that raises essential questions about what it will mean to be an instance of homo sapiens in another ten years, another fifty.

And that, to return to your question, is for me the function of serious art, the role of the serious artist: to help us think about and experience who we are in the largest sense of the word, to challenge us to think beyond who we are, to celebrate and critique and provide ourselves with a possibility space to contemplate where we are and where we might be heading, where we should be heading, where we shouldn't.

To that extent, art at its most intriguing functions in a way it's never functioned before: as a survival kit, a cultural thought-experiment.

2GQ: If our 21st century attention spans prefer, as you argue, the fast fragment over the slow whole, what is the current state of fiction? More specifically, what does this say about our reading appetites for novels? When time is precious, what particular books and/or writers do you feel are worth the expense?

OLSEN: If we're talking about stuff coming out of New York, the general state of fiction is morbidly obese and morose. Like McDonald's, Manhattan publishing is concerned primarily with the bottom line and (in Manhattan's case, metaphorical) arterial sclerosis. Like McDonald's, it is dedicated to thinking of its customers in the least flattering terms.  "By god," say the head honchos of the golden arches,  if our customers want fat, carbs, sugar, and change back from their fiver, then that's what we're going to give them." It's the same in New York, only with intellectual fluff and Oprahtic feelings.

Obviously that isn't to say Manhattan doesn't publish some wonderful work, but it is to say examples of it are surprisingly few and far between. The flavor of the decade, so far as New York is concerned, seems to me to be Redemptive with Nuts--i.e., feel-good stuff, comforting stuff, slightly new-agey triumph-of-the-spirit stuff. If you like musicals, you'll love The New York Times best-seller list. Everything will work out in the end, the books on it say. Goodness triumphs over evil. There is nothing new under the Ecclesiastes. Tomorrow will be better than today. Don't worry; be happy. Be sad for a little while, obviously, but then be happy. Characters are plump people. Plot is pleasant arc. Language is plain transparence. The body is boring, politics passé, gender stable, realism real, the page a predictable arrangement of paragraphs descending. Go to sleep.

Indicative of our culture of narcissism, one also gets more mollycoddlish memoirs than you can shake a bankroll at, most written by people too young, naïve, unselfcritical, and/or provincial to know what they're talking about, but who adore talking about themselves nonetheless. Britney Spears wrote hers, I believe, when she was nineteen.

If, however, we're talking about fiction coming from alternative presses across the country--the micro-breweries and indie labels of the publishing world--then the general state of fiction is diverse and exciting. In 2003 I was appointed Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two (FC2), and was both honored and daunted to be joining one of the most well-known publishers of innovative fiction in the country. I've been thrilled by the manuscripts I've seen produced outside the mainstream, and can guarantee you'll almost never go very wrong picking up something brought out by such independent presses as Coffee House, Chiasmus, Clear Cut, Starcherone, and Spuyten Duyvil.

Two quick dynamite under-the-Manhattan-radar recommendations. First is Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, which appeared from Small Beer Press. Chances are you haven't read anything lately as exuberantly eccentric as the ten stories in her second collection, unless you caught the eleven in her first, Stranger Things Happen. New homeowners worry everything they've brought with them from their previous digs--clothes, soap, cat--is haunted, while a legion of ominous rabbits amass in their front yard. An ex-con fixates on devising a Zombie Contingency Plan just in case the undead ever decide to invade the world of the living. A typical episode of a TV show within a TV show takes place entirely  inside the top drawer of a card catalog, in pitch dark, and it's all Morse code with subtitles. Link's elliptical, metalogical stories read like fractured fairytales dreamed by Escher. And although in an interview Link cites Eurdora Welty and Tolkien among her influences, her lighter-hearted (and, on occasion, granted, less substantial) fiction bears a closer family resemblance to the playful work of Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, and Angela Carter.

Second is Patrik Ourednik's utterly brilliant Europeana, which Dalkey Archive brought out recently. An alluringly unusual postmodern historiography, Europeana recounts an absurdist's absurd (if all-too-true) history of Europe in a whopping 122 pages by limning in childlike paratactic prose a wealth of atrocities, discoveries, movements, facts, and theories, all from a quirky bird's-eye perspective. The opening two sentences are emblematic of the rest:  "The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were tall too, while the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in the First World War who measured 176 centimeters, and so they were sent into battle on the front lines in order to scare the Germans." Ourednik, a Czech who has lived in France since 1984, has invented a new cross-genre form: the encyclopedic prose-poem built on painfully funny, painfully accurate non-sequiturs.

Manhattan publishing doesn't know what to do with such literary effervescence.

2GQ: I couldn't help noticing the publication date for Girl Imagined by Chance was September 11, 2002, a year to the day after the terrorist attacks. Having grown up in suburban New Jersey, how did you react to that terrible day? What bearing--if any--do you think it has had or will have on your writing?

A: I remember waking up as usual on 9/11, sitting down to breakfast, and Andi calling a guy in town who was supposed to stop by to put in a new window for us. He told us what had happened while we were sleeping and we turned on the television just in time to see the second plane hit the second tower. I recall with glassy clarity thinking how a certain facile liberalism left over from the sixties died that second--in the same way, say, a certain facile Marxism left over from the nineteenth century died on November 9, 1989. The liberalism I'm talking about is the sort that's starry-eyed and says things like all us humans are basically good. That is, it's the sort that espouses ideas thought by teens who haven't lived very long or very richly.

I think after 9/11 many people like me, who came to adulthood during the Vietnam era, had to radically readjust their perceptions about the role of, for instance, the military and government in their lives, and it seems to me many haven't been up to the challenge. Andi and I visited Ground Zero on the first-year anniversary of 9/11 to pay our respects, and, standing over that great absence, I could see why it's difficult to be up to the challenge: 9/11's a brutal tear in American reality's fabric, an honest-to-god postmodern moment reminding us that anything really is always possible.

No serious fiction has emerged yet evincing an awareness of 9/11 in its DNA, in its deepest rhythms and harmonics. (A book like Jonathan Safran Foer's very young, very messy Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close doesn't, in my mind, do it.) Like the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, or any other national crisis, it's going to take years and distance before artists can engage with the profound ramifications of what happened that morning. Our culture's still in shock, all these years later, still trying to trying to figure out what to think and how to act. What's odder for me, though, is to imagine that in retrospect 9/11 will seem much less consequential than it does now in light of what will surely transpire within our borders in the next decade or two: the detonation of the first dirty bomb in a major city, the first widespread chemical or biological attack.

This, I suppose, is why I don't buy into the redemptive art campaign. I'm just not a redemptive sort of guy. For me, breathing in the end simply doesn't work.

2GQ: As someone who strives to never do the same thing twice, can you talk a little bit about your most recent projects, starting with the short story collection Hideous Beauties? How are these different from your previous work?

OLSEN: Hideous Beauties is a collection of experimental fictions, each based on a photograph, painting, sketch, collage, or assemblage by one of my favorite artists: Hans Bellmer, Joel-Peter Witkin, Andy Warhol, et al. Andi and I also collaborated on two text-image collages based on her continuing freakshow project. The idea for the whole happened when a writer-friend and I visited the Chicago Art Institute several years ago. We didn't have much time, so we decided, in a brash move we thought André Breton might appreciate, arbitrarily to choose right or left at each intersection we crossed, thereby letting chance rather than maps direct us. We soon found ourselves in front of Paul Delvaux's extraordinarily mysterious "Village of the Mermaids" in the surrealist gallery. My friend challenged us both to write a story based on it. What's exciting and fresh for me with this undertaking is engaging in extended narrative ways with artwork, trying to imagine the unorthodox form each might invite as it moves through the filter of language.

There are two versions of my novel 10:01: the print and the hypermedia: Both are set in an AMC theater on the fourth floor of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, and both drift in and out of the minds of forty-some-odd moviegoers the ten minutes and one second before the feature begins. Originally, there was just going to be the print version. About halfway through writing it, I got the idea for creating a complementary electronic one—-an iteration that isn't simply a digital adaptation, but a rethinking (characters are cut and added, facts are changed, the text moves from a temporal to a spatial presentation, etc.) that through its form opens onto questions about how we read, why we read, what the difference is between reading on page and screen, between reading and watching, about which text is the more  authentic" one. I collaborated on it with a terrific digital artist named Tim Guthrie. What was interesting for me was how a third text emerged between the dead-tree and digital ones--a sort of virtual 10:01.

Finally, my most recent novel, Nietzsche's Kisses, is about the last crazy night one of the most radical and influential 19th century German philosophers spends on earth. Fritz had been mad for a decade. His sister, Lisbeth, had sequestered him away in a small room on the top floor of a house in Weimar. The book endeavors to find its form in the philosopher's cleaving consciousness as he endeavors to recollect his history on his deathbed. The structure mimics a backbroke Zarathustra in that there are four musical movements. Each is made up of three sub-sections: one told in first person, one in second, one in third. The first-person sub-sections mimic Nietzsche's real-time attempts at thought when thought is no longer possible; the second-person ones his rambling fever dreams; the third-person his flagging stabs at narrativizing a life that has become as much hallucination as information. What drew me to Nietzsche was his vigorously contrarian mind, the brutally brilliant way he had of boring into a culture's suppositions to test them, navigate the tunnels of social assumption to their minotaur moments. While I set out to learn what it felt like as that mind slowly unspooled, what I actually discovered was how historical fiction is an exercise in connecting imaginary time dots, a re-viewing of what may never have been, a revelation of the narrativity involved in creating the only sort of yesterday any of us can create: a staticky simulation.

It sounds from those descriptions like my three most recent books have absolutely nothing in common with each other, but that's not entirely the case. By way of explanation, let me end this interview with a parable . . .

I was sitting in a 727 a couple of weeks ago on a flight from somewhere to somewhere else, laptop open in front of me, trying to get a little writing done, when I began to pick up on a conversation the two passengers in front of me were having. They were guys, grayish, probably in their mid-fifties, apparently businessmen, and they were talking about the novel the one on the left was reading.

Now, virtually nobody talks about fiction any more in public, except in maybe two or three university departments, the odd independent bookstore, and a handful of review organs and blogs, so I wanted to hear what they had to say. I leaned forward to see what they were discussing. It was the latest by one of those corporate authors who are known less for being authors than for being rich and famous.

"Pretty good?" asked the guy on the right, indicating with his thumb the hardcover the guy on the left was holding up.

"Yeah," said the guy on the left. "I guess."

"How so?" asked the guy on the right.

"Um," said the guy on the left. "Um. It's got three-page chapters. I love novels with three-page chapters."

Most--though by no means all--Manhattan books want nothing more in the world these days than to be screenplays when they grow up. Such fictions are emblematic of the Ebert&Roeperization of literature and thought. My writing wants to do something else. It wants to insist that language, experience, and ideas are not and can never be three-page chapters, but are always-already profoundly complicated, rich, revealing things.

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As an adjunct, Trevor Dodge taught shamelessly self-aggrandizing courses in literature, writing, and cultural studies at the College of Southern Idaho, Boise State University, Portland Community College, Clark College, Marylhurst University, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. He now teaches composition, literature and fiction writing at Clackamas Community College, and is also an associate editor of Clackamas Literary Review. His novella, Yellow #10, was published in 2003 by Eraserhead Press. Chiasmus Press will publish his first collection of short fiction, Everyone I Know Lives On Roads, in 2006.