Calendar of Regrets is a wildly inventive and visually rich collage of twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month of the year, all pertaining to notions of travel—through time, space, narrative, and death. The poisoning of the painter Hieronymus Bosch; anchorman Dan Rather’s mysterious mugging on Park Avenue as he strolls home alone one October evening; a series of postcard meditations on the idea of travel from a young American journalist visiting Burma; a husband-and-wife team of fundamentalist Christian suicide bombers; the myth of Iphigenia from Agamemnon’s daughter’s point of view—these and other stories form a mosaic, connected through a pattern of musical motifs, transposed scenes, and recurring characters. It is a narrative about narrativity itself, the human obsession with telling ourselves and our worlds over and over again in an attempt to stabilize a truth that, as Nabokov once said, should only exist within quotation marks. View a trailer for the book here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZvaLi91Blk 

Calendar of Regrets

Olsen PH.D., Professor Lance

Who says you can't teach creativity?
Ideal for individual or classroom use, ARCHITECTURES OF POSSIBILITY theorizes and questions the often unconscious assumptions behind such traditional writing gestures as temporality, scene, and characterization; offers various suggestions for generating writing that resists, rethinks, and/or expands the very notion of narrativity; visits a number of important concerns/trends/obsessions in current writing (both on the page and off); discusses marketplace (ir)realities; hones critical reading and manuscript editing capabilities; and strengthens problem-solving muscles from brainstorming to literary activism.
Exercises and supplemental reading lists challenge authors to push their work into self-aware and surprising territory. In addition, ARCHITECTURES OF POSSIBILITY features something entirely lacking in most books about creative writing: more than 40 interviews with contemporary innovative authors, editors, and publishers (including Robert Coover, Lydia Davis, Brian Evenson, Shelley Jackson, Ben Marcus, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Steve Tomasula, Deb Olin Unferth, Joe Wenderoth, and Lidia Yuknavitch) working in diverse media, providing significant insights into the multifaceted worlds of experimental writers' writing.
"Through examples and samples, through exercises designed to pique your brain, even through interviews with authors, this book lays the groundwork for the birth of new ideas. It is a honeycomb filled with thousands of blastocysts from which you—each of you—can nurture and grow new literary children."—Daulton Dickey

Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Guide Dog Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Olsen PH.D., Professor Lance. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Olsen PH.D., Professor Lance

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Olsen PH.D., Professor Lance. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Calendar of Regrets

Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing