Interview with Lance Olsen
 

If you want both great storytelling and thoughtful critique on mainstream and alternative writing and publishing, look no further than Lance Olsen. He’s quiet about his newest novel’s publishing quest—"It’s always best at this stage in a book’s life, I think, to simply duck and cover."—but readers will be impressed with his excerpt and what Olsen had to say in a recent e-mail interview with WritersDojo.org Fiction Editor Kristin Thiel.

Writers' Dojo: It’s wonderful of you, both for small or new journals and for building buzz about your book overall, to allow excerpts out into the world ahead of the book’s publication date. How do you choose what sections to publish early? What does the excerpt in Perigee and the one on the Dojo’s site say about the book, and your current writing interests, overall?

Lance Olsen: The nature of a novel is raucously different from the nature of a story, in that the latter is a tight pop song, structurally speaking, and the former a webbed symphony. So the difficulty in choosing sections of a novel to publish have to do with how well they can really stand alone, speak for themselves, enjoy their own company. It’s always surprising how few sections can.

What I’m interested in these days, I think, is the exploration of musical form, so Calendar of Regrets, from which this excerpt is excised, takes the shape of twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month of the year. Each narrative appropriates a different genre and explores a different style, and each engages in a different way thematically with the following propositions which make up the novel’s trio of epigraphs:

(1) “Once upon a time I was someone then that stopped.” (Laird Hunt, The Exquisite);
(2) “This too is erotic—the anticipation of the pleasure of making sense.” (Lyn Hejinian, My Life);
(3) “To hope is to contradict the future.” (E. M. Cioran, All Gaul is Divided).

There’s a narrative set in suburban Minnesota in 2006 that takes on the contours of an epistolary narrative in which a middle-aged school teacher recounts her fetish for making porn videos and sending them to strangers around the country in order to wake them up existentially. There’s one set in ancient Greece that recasts the myth of Iphigenia from Agamemnon’s daughter’s POV. There’s one set now that adopts tropes of a fairy tale and relates the story of a little boy born as a notebook in which others write their desires. And so on. Each narrative is be connected to the others, not through plot events, but rather through a musical structuring of recurring metaphors and images, transpositions of the same scenes and/or phrases, and temporally transmuted characters. The result is a multiple narrative about, maybe, narrativity itself, how we tell ourselves and our worlds again and again in an attempt to stabilize a truth that, as Nabokov once said, should only exist within quotation marks.

Writers' Dojo: You’re connected to the Starcherone Prize, not only as a member of the “alternative press” world but also having been one of its judges. It stopped last year because of lack of funds and time, which in part points to the uphill struggle non-mainstream writing and supporters generally face. Does its come back this for 2009 speak to a bigger, and positive, change in the publishing world?

Lance Olsen: Yes and no. Yes in the sense that the viral spread of indie publishing since, say, the eighties is only increasing over the long run, re-paradigming mainstream’s desire to bring out novels and short story collections that want to be movies when they grow up. No in the sense that, because of the recent economic collapse, a large number of presses have either folded or gone on hiatus. I suspect the latter trend will blow over, but not quickly, and not without the help of a lot of readers. Things will get worse in publishing before they get better.

Writers' Dojo: I’ve heard you talk about the importance of those interested in nonmainstream writing to not only write it and buy it but to review it and otherwise talk about it. Can you recommend a specific review journal, site, etc. that people could regularly check out for recommendations?

Lance Olsen: There are a handful of really wonderful ones I check out regularly—in print, American Book Review, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Rain Taxi; online Rain Taxi's digital version and Jefferson Hansen’s terrific Experimental Fiction and Poetry.

Writers' Dojo: Do you have a publisher/publish date for Calendar of Regrets?

Lance Olsen: No, I’m afraid not.  It’s just begun to circulate, and, well, it’s always best at this stage in a book’s life, I think, to simply duck and cover.