Lance Olsen: Difference between revisions

Lance Olsen (born 14 October 1956) is an American postmodern writer.

Biography

Lance Olsen was born in New Jersey. He received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1978, honors, Phi Beta Kappa), an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (1980), and an M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia. For ten years he taught as associate and then full professor at the University of Idaho; for two he directed the University of Idaho's M.F.A. program. He has also taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, the University of Kentucky, on summer and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Turku, Finland, and at various writing conferences. Since 2007 he has taught experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah,^[1] and since 2002 he has served as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two,^[2] or FC2; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities. With Michael Mejia, he is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review.^[3] Olsen's wife, assemblage-artist Andi Olsen, and he divide their time between the mountains of central Idaho and Salt Lake City.

Writing

Olsen is author of eleven novels, one hypermedia text, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and two anti-textbooks about experimental writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Hotel Amerika, and Best American Non-Required Reading. He is known for his fictional biographies (examples of historiographic metafiction), such as Nietzsche's Kisses and Head in Flames, for which he does extensive historical research,^[4] as well as his work in avantpop, postmodernism, speculative fiction, experimental writing practices, and critifiction (the blending of theory and narrativity in a single text).

The hypermedial version of his novel 10:01, created in collaboration with artist Tim S. Guthrie, was published by the Iowa Review Web in 2005 and included in the Electronic Literature Organization Collection: Volume One.

Lance Olsen’s story “News Feed| Status Updates| Photos| Posted Items| Live Feed” won an &NOW award in 2009 and was published in The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing.^[5] Olsen is a regular participant in the biennial &NOW Festival, a celebration of experimental and innovative writing, and has collaborated with a board member of &NOW, Davis Schneiderman, on a series of short works.^[6]

Awards

Olsen was the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize in Fiction Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin from January through May 2013.^[7] He is a Guggenheim^[8] and an N.E.A. fellowship recipient,^[9] winner of a Pushcart Prize,^[10] and was the governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence from 1996-1998.^[11] His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and his work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, and Finnish.

Bibliography

Novels

• Live from Earth (NY: Available Press/Ballantine Books,1991)
• Tonguing the Zeitgeist (San Francisco, CA: Permeable Press,1994)
• Burnt (La Grande, OR: Wordcraft, 1996)
• Time Famine (San Francisco, CA: Permeable Press, 1996)
• Freaknest (La Grande, OR: Wordcraft, 2000)
• Girl Imagined by Chance (Tallahassee, FL: Fiction Collective Two, 2002)
• 10:01 (print version: Portland, OR: Chiasmus Press, 2005; hypermedia version: Iowa Review Web 7.2 November 2005)
• Nietzsche's Kisses (Tallahassee, FL: Fiction Collective Two, 2006)
• Anxious Pleasures: A Novel After Kafka (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007)
• Head in Flames (Portland, OR: Chiasmus Press, 2009)
• Calendar of Regrets (Tuscaloosa, AL: Fiction Collective Two, 2010)

Anti-Textbooks

• Rebel Yell: Writing Fiction (San Jose: Cambrian Press, 1998)
• Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing (Washington, D.C.: Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2012)

Critical Studies

• Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987)
• Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990)
• William Gibson (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1992)
• Surfing Tomorrow: Essays on the Future of American Fiction (Prairie Village: Potpourri, 1995), editor
• Lolita: A Janus Text (NY: Twayne, 1995)
• In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop, co-edited with Mark Amerika (SDSU Press, 1995)

Short Story Collections

• My Dates With Franz (Amherst, MA: Bluestone Press, 1993)
• Scherzi, I Believe (La Grande, OR: Wordcraft, 1994)
• Sewing Shut My Eyes (Normal/Tallahassee: Fiction Collective Two/Black Ice, 2000)
• Hideous Beauties (Portland, OR: Eraserhead, 2003)

External links

• Interview (2012) with Lance Olsen about Architectures of Possibility continent. Vol.2(1):40–43.
• Interview (2010) with Lance Olsen about Head in Flames with Rain Taxi
• Interview (2008) with Lance Olsen on the FC2 Blog
• Interview (2006) with Lance Olsen about Nietzsche's Kisses, by The Nietzsche Circle
• Interview (2003) with Lance Olsen about Girl Imagined by Chance and Hideous Beauties with FlashPoint

References

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