Lance Olsen
Photo by Andi Olsen
Bio
Lance Olsen is author of more than 25 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novels Dreamlives of Debris (Dzanc, 2017) and My Red Heaven (Dzanc, forthcoming 2020). His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, such as Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, and Best American Non-Required Reading. A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.
What’s spectacular about this fellowship, what makes me beyond grateful, is its ability to buoy the heart and imagination, reenergize both in the wake of external affirmation for my project, how this National Endowment for the Arts fellowship functions as a gift in the form of the one thing every artist fiercely feels the need for more of: time. In my case, the latter translates into distance from institutional life and into sustained focus on my novel-in-progress. At the novel’s core will be a wealthy American refugee and his wife who have fled their increasingly repressive country in the late 21st century by uploading their minds to a supercomputer in Cairo, Egypt, part of the progressive states of North Africa and Europe. The novel’s structure will echo the dazzling constellation of neurons firing. That is, the overall narrative will take the shape of a sparking collage of many tiny narraticules, which will add up in the end to nine stories, all of which revolve around a single image: that of holding hands—although in each this image will appear in a radically different context.