Lucy Corin and Lance Olsen: September 25, 2014

After sharing her excitement to be reading with Lance Olsen, Lucy Corin reads from One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses. These stories include "Threat,” “Cake,” "Versions," “Taken,” “Tahiti,” “Metaphor”, “July Fourth,” “Apocalypse Is Passed,” “Sesame,” “Review,” “The Lonely Shard,” and “After."

Lance Olsen begins with a short talk on Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, and its relation to his novel Theories of Forgetting. He discusses the symbolic significance of the spiral, and Smithson's interest in entropology, or the anthropology of disintegration. He then outlines the structure of his novel Theories of Forgetting, which consists of three narratives connected by Smithson's piece. He follows this by reading an excerpt from the novel. The reading closes with the screening of a short film made in collaboration with his partner Andi Olsen. 

In response to questions from the audience, Lucy Corin and Lance Olsen discuss the origins of their writing voices and the methods they used for writing their respective books. Corin mentions that she first started writing "the apocalypses" after a cross-country road trip, that she was influenced by the loneliness of the landscape, and the way the people she encountered or saw on the trip seemed "non-specific" like blips. Lance Olsen, in response to the same question, speaks to writing as a means of engaging with an aesthetic problem. In the case of Theories of Forgetting this meant writing a book that mirrored the structure of Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Both writers then discuss future projects, the physicality of writing, and the challenges of structuring their novels.