Olsen - Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing

architectures of possibility:

after innovative writing

lance olsen

in collaboration with trevor dodge

Architectures of Possibility 2012 by Lance Olsen

Published by Guide Dog Books

Bowie, MD

First Edition

Cover Image by Ivan Titor

Book Design by Jennifer Barnes

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011942820

www.GuideDogBooks.com

Also by Lance Olsen

NOVELS

Live from Earth

Tonguing the Zeitgeist

Burnt

Time Famine

Freaknest

Girl Imagined by Chance

10:01

Nietzsches Kisses

Anxious Pleasures

Head in Flames

Calendar of Regrets

SHORT STORIES

My Dates with Franz

Scherzi, I Believe

Sewing Shut My Eyes

Hideous Beauties

NONFICTION

Ellipse of Uncertainty

Circus of the Mind in Motion

William Gibson

Lolita: A Janus Text

Acknowledgements

Oceanic thanks to Trevor Dodge, who brainstormed with me, conducted most of the flash interviews interpolated through this book (save those with Kathy Acker, Joseph Cardinale, Robert Coover, Lydia Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Noy Holland, Shelley Jackson, Ted Pelton, Susan Steinberg, and Joe Wenderoth, which I conducted myself), and contributed to the writing of the opening of the chapter on publishing pragmatics. Without him and his friendship through the years, what follows would have been a different, lesser thing.

Each of the writers who agreed to be interviewed: thank you so much for your generosity, insight, and honesty. The idea behind those interviews was to create various counterpoints to (and occasional harmonies with) my own voice through the pages of Architectures of Possibility , and I couldnt have imagined in advance things would turn out as invigoratingly musical as they did.

I am grateful to Brian C. Clark for originally suggesting I write a version of this book, which I did, under his guidance, in 1997, for his press, Permeable; to Andy Watson and Cambrian Press for bringing that book to fruition as Rebel Yell a year later; to D. Harlan Wilson, John Lawson, and Jennifer Barnes at Raw Dog Screaming Press, and to Trevor Dodge, for convincing me to reimagine that version all this time later.

I am deeply thankful to my students from the beginning for teaching me what comes next, and to Melanie Rae Thon, for our extraordinary walks, talks, and joyful lessons in seeing; Lidia Yuknavitch, for our brain-sharing trust; and the Board of Directors at FC2 for challenging me with every manuscript we consider to rethink the innovative and embrace the collaborative paradigm.

And how, oh how, can I ever thank you, Andi, enough?

Table of Contents

one possibility spaces

interviews with

brian evenson

susan steinberg

joe wenderoth

two eat your elders

interviews with

kate bernheimer

robert coover

alan singer

three the mcdonaldization of the literary marketplace

interviews with

davis schneiderman

david shields

four workshop model(s)

interviews with

r. m. berry

monica drake

matthew kirkpatrick

curtis white

five the garbage disposal imagination

interview with

doug rice

six beginnings

interviews with

lucy corin

michael mejia

seven narrativity

interviews with

kathy acker

deb olin unferth

eight settings

interviews with

laird hunt

michael martone

nine characters: flat/round

interviews with

katherine dunn

dave gibbons

thomas e. kennedy

ten characters: the metaphysics of the pronominal hoax

interviews with

lydia davis

samuel r. delany

elisabeth sheffield

eleven temporality

interview with

scott mccloud

twelve point of view

interview with

d. harlan wilson

thirteen word worlds

interviews with

noy holland

ben marcus

carole maso

melanie rae thon

fourteen endings

interviews with

joseph cardinale

norman lock

fifteen materiality & immateriality: one

interviews with

nick montfort

stephanie strickland

steve tomasula

sixteen materiality & immateriality: two

interviews with

shelley jackson

jeffrey deshell

lidia yuknavitch

seventeen re-visions

interview with

lynne tillman

eighteen publishing pragmatics

interview with

bradford morrow

nineteen literary activism & the tribal ecology

interviews with

matt bell

debra di blasi

eric lorberer

ted pelton

twenty reading list: 101 limit texts

For Andi,

Creative Righter Extraordinaire

The aim of literatureis the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.Donald Barthelme

I cant understand why people are frightened of new ideas. Im frightened of the old ones.John Cage

Theres many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. Flannery OConnor

one

possibility spaces

Carefully follow what most textbooks on fiction tell you, and chances are you will end up producing a well-crafted piece that could have been produced just as easily in 1830.

You will end up producing, that is, a narrative where language is transparent and focus falls on your protagonists psychology. That protagonist will be rounded, resonant, believable, and usually middle or lower-middle class. Your setting will be urban or suburban and rendered with the precision of a photograph, while the form your narrative takes will be so predictable, so patterned by convention, as to be virtually invisible: it will have a beginning, a muddle, and an ending through which your character will travel in order to learn something about himself, herself, or his or her relationship to society or nature.

You will end up producing some version of realism, in other words, and realism is a genre of averagesa genre about middle-of-the-road people living on Main Street in Middletown, Middle America.

In For a New Novel , Alain Robbe-Grillet calls this sort of writing the Balzacian Mode because in a sense its impulse stems from the early nineteenth-century work of Honor de Balzac, although it could just as well be called the Defoean Modeafter Daniel Defoe and his 1719 puritanically detailed pseudo-reportage of Robinson Crusoes daily accomplishments on his famous island. (Revealingly, Crusoes first inclination after finding himself shipwrecked is to recreate as closely as possible a bourgeois European enclaveanother kind of Main Street.)

Such fiction, according to Ian Watt, appeared in the eighteenth century with the rise of the new middle class in England and on the Continent. Rooted in the journalism, diaries, letters, and personal journals of the time, it is the stuff of Richardson and Fielding and their literary offspring: Flaubert and Chekhov, Ann Beattie and John Updike, Amy Tan and Jonathan Franzen. It represents a way of perceiving influenced by rationalist philosophers like Locke and Descartes that embrace a pragmatic, empirical understanding of the universe that emphasizes individual experience and consciousness.

Samuel R. Delany once pointed out those sorts of fictions arent written for readers in, say, New York, where all the mega-publishing houses and slick magazines reside in the U.S., but for a certain imagined housewife living in a small-yet-comfortable house somewhere in Nebraska. If theres nothing in a given narrative she can relate to, nothing and no one she wants to know something about, then that narrative is out of luck so far as that publishing world goes.