One involves a filmmaker and her attempts at creating a short experimental documentary about the Jetty. It has one narrative running across the top of each page (actually I don’t know what I mean when I say the word “top”) and one running across the bottom of each page (ditto). LO: My novel Theories of Forgetting is an experiment shaped like a spiral. The danger is to do no more than continue being ourselves, writing as we have always written, which is both boring and existentially perilous. After all, part of living now-rather, than, say, in 1714, is to inhabit multiple localities simultaneously.

The notion of being a writer of a particular place is both true and easy/necessary to challenge. Questions of locality are nothing if not troublesome. But, having said that, I’d also point out Smithson grew up about 12 miles from where I did in northern Jersey. Having said that, my novel Theories of Forgetting is completely influenced-both in form and content-by Robert Smithson’s amazing earthwork The Spiral Jetty at the north end of the Great Salt Lake. In other words, I don’t identify myself in terms of locality so much as in terms of aesthetic or political positions that may or may not connect with where I happen to be living. LO: I think of myself more as an author who happens to live in Utah than as a Utah author. I was interested, then, in creating something that felt musical in structure-you know, not linear, but a network of recurring themes, phrases, images, sounds, whatever that play off each other and grow, as Donald Barthelme said his stories did, “Like barnacles on a wreck or a rock.” You can and should dip into those narraticules in any order. So ] is comprised of language bursts, narraticules (brief observations, facts, quotations, recollections, theoretical reflections), about stuff as diverse as David Bowie and Samuel Beckett, my years in the Venezuelan jungle (long story) and avant-garde music. These days, for most of us, it’s all data flooding in all the time. LO: The essential question for me as a writer is: How does one write the contemporary? That is, how, in 2014, do you write in a way that doesn’t simply rewrite 1914 or 1814 or 1514? In ], my critifictional meditation on the confluence of curiosity, travel and innovative writing practices, I wanted to generate a structure that made the reader feel like, and therefore think about, how we take in information. That’s where I first discovered these crazy-ass books by people like Raymond Federman ( Double or Nothing) and Ronald Sukenick ( 98.6) and realized there was this whole other universe of literature they don’t teach you about in school––this “ Literary Subculture of the Secret Handshake.” In that moment, all the traffic lights changed. On Friday evenings, geek that I was, I headed to the library to read and sift through the new-acquisitions cart. So, I majored in journalism at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, got bored, and soon switched to English. Lance Olsen: I grew up in a bland leafy suburb in northern Jersey populated by tons of hermetically sealed shopping malls. SLUG spoke with Olsen about these projects and the secret handshake ecology of innovative writing practices. His latest books––the trash diary ] and novel Theories of Forgetting––explore what the medium might be amidst the detritus that defines the contemporary. Author, traveller, and teacher of narrativity and innovative writing at the University of Utah, Olsen wonderfully shares what it means to be alive now, here. SLUG: Lance Olsen is the literary astronaut we dreamt of being as children-turning far-out worlds abuzz with the difficult imagination, surviving re-entry with stories to share.

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