Olsen captivates audience with creative stories
By Eric Pero Argonaut Senior Staff
With titles such as "Cybermorphic Beat-up Get-Down Subterranean Homesick Reality-Sandwich Blues," "Sewing Shut my Eyes," and "Tonguing the Zeitgeist," Lance Olsen has his finger on the pulse of modern fiction.
Olsen, University of Idaho professor of English, read from his
new novel "Freaknest," and short story collection entitled,
"Sewing Shut my Eyes," Wednesday in the UI school of
law courtroom.
The reading was packed with students, faculty and community members,
all listening intently to Olsen's beautifully crafted, rhythmic
stories.
Matt Blackburn, a graduate student in the English department,
introduced Olsen with a rhythmic crazed roller-coaster ride about
monkeys typing the works of Shakespeare, but not even touching
the works of Olsen - thus explaining his greatness.
When Olsen took control of the microphone, he began explaining
the direction he was trying to go with the three pieces he would
be reading.
It is all about interest in voice-rhythms and diction that create
the characters, he said. He did this not by simply getting into
character, but by becoming the character.
Olsen brought the audience into the minds of a New Jersey call
girl who witnesses a cybermorphic poet gone haywire and a baby-sitting
dart player from London. The third story involved six pages composed
of one sentence.
Olsen knew he wanted to be a writer from an incredibly young
age. He attributes at least part of this to his growing up in
a Venezuelan jungle compound.
"I sort of came to consciousness in this jungle compound
and you can't help taking a certain degree of unhinged reality
for granted,"Olsen said.
When Olsen moved back to the United States he told stories of
the jungle and poisonous snakes being in their family's washing
machine at his school show-and-tell. "My teachers wouldn't
believe me. They would think I was making all this up,"
Olsen said. "From a really early age, people were thinking
my early childhood was fiction and that has to have had a profound
effect."
When Olsen was 13, he had a revelation that he wanted to be a
writer. Olsen said he was reading Edgar Allan Poe's "The
Pit and the Pendulum" and it hit him. "I just remember
going, oh, this doesn't look so hard to do. This would be really
fun," Olsen said. After that point, it took him 20 years
to realize how hard it really was.
Trying to make a living from writing was a difficult task for
Olsen. He began as a journalist and then moved to literature.
"They pay you to sit around and talk about books that you
love with people who love books," Olsen said. The UI has
been home for Olsen for 10 years now and he loves it here.
Olsen says his stories are, "Strange, weird, out of the
ordinary stuff. Fiction that gets us to think about the world
in ways we haven't before." Olsen's books are available
at Book People in downtown Moscow and online at Amazon.com.
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