Lance Olsen is a professor of English and writing at the University of Utah. He is also the author of fifteen novels, one hypermedia text, five nonfiction books, five short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and two anti-textbooks about experimental writing, and most recently the novels My Red Heaven (Dzanc, 2020) and Skin Elegies (Dzanc, 2021). In other words, he's no dabbler.
We talk about small presses versus the New York publishing ecology, the fallacy of self-publishing, changes in the world of publishing, the role of literary agents, his former role with Fiction Collective 2 (FC2), and the function of universities and foundations as replacement for the medieval or Renaissance patron of the arts.
We also talk about how writing is different from other art forms, and why we write (versus doing those other things).
