For more than seventeen years, I’ve had the extraordinary good fortune of encountering Lance Olsen’s work and, even better, knowing the extraordinary person behind it. Along the way, I’ve read his books, interviewed him (twice: in 2013 and in 20142), published his writing eleven times in Big Other, taught Skin Elegies and Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing, championed seven of his books ([[ there. ]], How to Unfeel the Dead: New & Selected Fictions, Theories of Forgetting, Skin Elegies, My Red Heaven, and Always Crashing in the Same Car, and An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies), and included him in the inaugural lineup of Subversity’s Innovative Fiction Seminar. But a list of professional intersections, however gratifying, hardly captures what makes Lance worth celebrating.

What has always mattered most to me is the restless intelligence behind his work, that is, the audacity to take nothing, especially form and language, for granted, the rigor to follow an idea into unfamiliar territory, and the generosity that makes intellectual adventure feel like an invitation to think and feel otherwise rather than some kind of test or obstacle to overcome. Lance’s writing challenges our habits of perception, our assumptions about what literature can or should do, and our willingness to remain within the so-called comfort zone of received thinking and what we think we know. His work reminds me why I fell in love with innovative writing in the first place: because the familiar is never the whole story, and because language, at its most subversively alive, can make the world engagingly strange enough to see again.

It’s fitting that Lance shares a birthday with Hannah Arendt, who reminds us that “thinking itself is dangerous.” Lance has made a world of words embracing that danger. As he puts it, innovative fiction asks, “what is fiction, what can it do, and how, and why?” For him, it’s “a possibility space where everything can and should be imagined and attempted.” This is the vital spirit that animates his work: a refusal to accept the limits of inherited forms, received ideas, or conventional ways of seeing. As he observes elsewhere, “there are always other ways to construct the text of our texts, the texts of our lives.” Few writers have done more to remind me that literature’s deepest possibilities emerge precisely when we risk thinking, imagining, and writing otherwise.

So, in celebration of his seventieth birthday, here are at least seventy reasons to celebrate Lance Olsen: the writer, the provocateur, the generous intellectual companion, and the singular creative force who continues to remind us that literature is not just an art of expression but an art of possibility:

1. An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies (Dzanc Books, 2026)
2. Absolute Away (Dzanc Books, 2024)
3. Shrapnel (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024)
4. Always Crashing in the Same Car (FC2, 2023)
5. Skin Elegies (Dzanc, 2021)
6. My Red Heaven (Dzanc, 2020)
7. Dreamlives of Debris (Dzanc, 2017)
8. There’s No Place Like Time: A Retrospective (&Now Books, 2016)
9. Theories of Forgetting (Fiction Collective Two, 2014)
10. Calendar of Regrets (Fiction Collective Two, 2010)
11. Head in Flames (Chiasmus Press, 2009)
12. Anxious Pleasures: A Novel After Kafka (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007)
13. Nietzsche’s Kisses (Fiction Collective Two, 2006)
14. 10:01 (Chiasmus Press, 2005; hypermedia version: Iowa Review Web 7.2, 2005)
15. Girl Imagined by Chance (Fiction Collective Two, 2002)
16. Freaknest (Wordcraft, 2000)
17. Time Famine (Permeable Press, 1996)
18. Burnt (Wordcraft, 1996)
19. Tonguing the Zeitgeist (Permeable Press,1994)
20. Live from Earth (Available Press/Ballantine Books,1991)
21. Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2012)
22. Rebel Yell: Writing Fiction (Cambrian Press, 1998)
23. [[ there. ]] (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2014)
24. In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop, co-edited with Mark Amerika (SDSU Press, 1995)
25. Lolita: A Janus Text (Twayne, 1995)
26. Surfing Tomorrow: Essays on the Future of American Fiction (Potpourri, 1995), editor
27. William Gibson: A Reader’s Guide (Starmont House, 1992)
28. Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision (Wayne State University Press, 1990)
29. Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy (Greenwood Press, 1987)
30. How to Unfeel the Dead: New & Selected Fictions (Teksteditions, 2014)
31. Hideous Beauties (Eraserhead, 2003)
32. Sewing Shut My Eyes (Fiction Collective Two/Black Ice, 2000)
33. Scherzi, I Believe (Wordcraft, 1994)
34. My Dates with Franz (Bluestone Press, 1993)
35. “Cuddly Doll Caught on Barbed Wire” (Big Other, 2024)
36. “Absolute Away” (Big Other, 2024)
37. “(Trans)Forms as Philosophy” (Big Other, 2022)
38. “Always Crashing in the Same Car” (Big Other, 2021)
39. “He Can’t Remember, He’s No Longer Sure, Maybe” (Big Other, 2021)
40. “Beautiful Boy Falling” (Big Other, 2020)
41. “A Sentence About a Sentence I Love: From Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons“ (Big Other, 2019)
42. “169 Tweets on the Nature of Possibility” (Big Other, 2019)
43. Lance Olsen’s “Literary Pillars” (Big Other, 2012)
44. Between the Covers podcast with Lance Olsen about My Red Heaven
45. Between the Covers podcast with Lance Olsen about Absolute Away and Shrapnel
46. Interview with Lance Olsen on NPR’s Berlin Journal
47. My interview with Lance Olsen about Head in Flames
48. My interview with Lance Olsen about Calendar of Regrets
49. John Domini’s Interview with Lance Olsen about Theories of Forgetting
50. Interview with Lance Olsen about Nietzsche’s Kisses
51. “Urgent Possibility: Talking With Lance Olsen on FC2’s 40th Birthday”
52. “The Difficult Imagination”
53. “Narratological Amphibiousness, or: Invitation To the Covert History of Possibility”
54. Marcus Smith’s interview at WBYU’s Thinking Aloud
55. Rachel Levy’s interview at the Lit Pub
56. “Blindmanning as Being”
57. But I Digress… podcast interview with Lance Olsen
58. “Book Notes” for [[ there. ]] at Largehearted Boy
59. “Book Notes” for Theories of Forgetting at Largehearted Boy
60. Robert Lopez’s interview with Lance Olsen
61. George Salis’s interview with Lance Olsen
62. Lance Olsen interview for Architectures of Possibility at Audible Authors
63. Interview about Architectures of Possibility
64. “Accretive Dreams, Junk Narrativity, & Orphaned Excess in Moderation”
65. “Embodying the World”
66. “Learning to Wish for More”
67. Interview with Lance Olsen at continent
68. Flashpoint’s interview with Lance Olsen
69. Pop Matter’s interview with Lance Olsen
70. Continuum’s interview with Lance Olsen