Lance Olsen, author of four novels, two short story collections, and four books of criticism, and editor of several volumes of essays on contemporary fiction, grew up in a jungle compound in Venezuela and the hermetically-sealed climate-controlled malls of northern New Jersey. Idaho Writer-In-Residence, he teaches at the University of Idaho and lives on a farm with his artist wife, Andi Olsen, where they spend "just way too much time watching television". His latest project, Rebel Yell, is a non-fiction book about writing and publishing, available from Cambrian/Permeable in the USA. BBR editor Chris Reed caught up with Lance during a recent stay in London.

Chris Reed: It struck me reading Tonguing the Zeitgeist and Burnt that society is as much of a character in your novels, and as much of a caricature in your novels, as the people themselves.

Lance Olsen: I'm very interested in characters, I enjoy my characters an awful lot, but I also like to explore the larger palate of social conditions and environmental conditions, and take the time to detail the look of a city in a whole paragraph.

CR: The parallel I draw is with the Russian writer Gogol, who's been described as the master of the subordinate clause (Lance laughs) in that all of a sudden you're shooting off at a tangent telling so-and-so what happened about such-and-such an academic, and it takes a break in the text to actually bring the reader back to what you're actually talking about. That's the type of detail that you like to –

LO: I think another character in my texts, or another element that works like character might in other texts, is the sentence structure itself. I love language, and I love creating sentences that are themselves as complex as other people's chapters might be, playing round with syntax and sound, seeing where they can take me. So yeah, Gogol would be a great progenitor to this linguistic dance, or, more recently, people like Thomas Pynchon.

CR: Both these books are from small press publishers, and not the first from these publishers either. Do you prefer working with independent publishers, or is it that despite being a Philip K. Dick finalist, the big publishers simply haven't discovered Lance Olsen yet?

LO: My first novel, Live from Earth, came out from a big publisher, Ballentine, and I had a taste of what New York publishing was all about, and the taste was pretty sour. What happens in that universe is that you feel you're a car on a Ford assembly line, and editors care deeply about you for the better part of 15/20 minutes and then move on to the next mechandise on said line. After Live from Earth, I wrote Tonguing the Zeitgeist and had a hard time with New York because they said it was too stylistically flashy and too psychologically dark, whereas my first novel had been much more upbeat. Then I came across Permeable Press and started working with Brian Clark, and just had a really good time. What I discovered is that in the small press you're creating a beautiful piece of book-as-art rather than one more fictive car. I've had a lot more input on everything from layout and cover to distribution and advertising and, weirdly enough, Tonguing the Zeitgeist got just a whole lot more attention than Live from Earth ever did, even though Live from Earth was the one that came out from the big press. And ditto, by the bye, with Dave Memmott at Wordcraft, who brought out Burnt and Scherzi. He's so careful in the way he puts something together that you feel you've created more than a book at the end of the day. New York's subtext is always "We need to please a fairly large population". So any editorial decision I ever heard from a New York publisher had to do more with the larger sell of the book than it did with the quality of the book in hand. With Brian Clark and Dave Memmott the only editorial policy has been to make the book as strong as possible, on the terms that the book itself creates.

CR: This is only the second time that we've actually met face to face, but I know enough about yourself and Andi to detect a lot of autobiographically-derived material (Lance laughs) in the short story collection Scherzi I Believe and especially Burnt – there's lots of slightly-built, blond-bearded academics (Lance laughs louder) with artistic wives who live in remote log cabins. Are you one of those writers who strongly believes in only writing about what you know?

LO: Oh no, not at all! I think the counterpoint to that impulse is Tonguing the Zeitgeist, which consists of a completely imagined world. I've taught creative writing now for a number of years and seen a lot of students rise through the ranks and become professional writers. My advice to them is write about what you know, and then embellish like mad. I think what happens a lot of times is that autobiography is something you need to work through early on and get out of your system, but that the real stuff in fiction begins after autobiography ends. After you've gotten out that one story about who you are and where you came from the game starts getting interesting, because what you're left to play with is your imagination. Burnt actually grew out of a manuscript I was working on before Tonguing the Zeitgeist, so aesthetically the sequence goes Live from Earth-Burnt-Tonguing the Zeitgeist, with stories in Scherzi covering all of those years – the more autobiographical ones would actually be the earlier stories. And I feel there is this point where I engaged the warp drive on my imagination and was able to push forward into a post-autobiographical realm, and that's the realm that's really been exciting me for the last few years.

CR: With Andi being an artist as well, how does it affect your writing having another creative person around you all the time? Are you extremely protective of your personal creative space, or are you always sparking off each other and bringing out the best in each other?

LO: Definitely the latter. In fact we've recently collaborated on a collection of computer-generated collage-texts that fuse word and image, and that's a great metaphor for how we've worked together over the years. Andi's always been my first editor. She reads my stuff as soon as I think I'm done with it. She's ruthless, she's honest, she's incisive, and she always makes me really mad when she first reads something and gives her account, and then of course I realise she's right and go back and rework it. We're continually sitting down and talking through ideas, talking through approaches and feeding off each other.

CR: You mentioned earlier about teaching creative writing. There's a British magazine that's recently closed down after about ten issues because the editor wanted to concentrate on his own writing, and he claimed that the "sub-standard" material he was getting for submissions was having a "malignant" effect on his own work. As a professional creative writing instructor, do you feel your work has been in danger of suffering in the same way?

LO: I have to use two very different rooms in my mind, one for writing, one for teaching writing. The danger in teaching writing is to become infected by bad prose, and so the days that I teach I don't write. I teach Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and I dedicate myself wholeheartedly to the process, which I cherish. When I go home I decompress, read some good prose, and then by Friday morning I'm ready to start writing. It's easy for someone who's attuned to prose to catch an awful case of dangling clauses and ugly adjectival constructions. I suppose I should add that Burnt is actually about a professor who ends up killing a student because of his terrible prose (laughs).

CR: Talking about the style of writing, what's been your involvement with the avant-pop movement?

LO: I have a complex relationship with it. People have talked about me as an avant-pop author, and there are a lot of ways in which I think of myself as one, if we define avant-pop as an impulse to explore textual limits that harmonises well with the avant-garde but also possesses a rabid if ambivalent pop-aesthetic. I'm thinking of people like Pynchon and Burroughs. But I also imagine just from the way I've defined it that the avant-pop may well be little more than a rediscovering of the anti-narratological wheel. It's doing nothing that previous manifestations of postmodernism haven't done. There may even be a sense in which it's simply repackaging postmodernism to gain a higher media profile, and that disturbs me. Is it, I wonder, an idea created by a generation that's so unaware of what went before it that it's simply unconsciously recreating what already existed, or is it an idea created by a generation that's so hyper-aware that MTV's rotation schedule will drop a song if it hasn't been selling X millions of copies every 24-hour period, that it's just trying to reinvent something that sounds trendy.

CR: I got the impression from Larry McCaffery's first avant-pop anthology that he was very much an academic with a theory, desperate for something to support that theory in the classic academic tradition, and that really he was really scratching around trying to find something.

LO: Charcot once said that Theory is good, but it doesn't prevent things from happening. A less cynical reading of the avant-pop phenomenon is that it's putting a new spin on certain emphases of postmodernism – especially the whole exploration of technology, technological discourse, and pop culture. I think that's where Larry's contribution is. At the same time I am not one of those people who embrace it and think it's just the coolest thing to happen since white bread. I worry some people may self-consciously be trying to create a movement after the fact.

CR: That was my impression with Mark Amerika's Kafka Chronicles, that it was just too busy posturing to get on with the writing. Compare that to people like Don Webb or David Blair, who are just getting on and doing things the way they want to, and if someone else wants to come along and stick a label on it that's fine, but that's not foremost in their mind when they're doing the creating.

LO: And isn't that how it ultimately should be? That critics create paradigms by which we can understand, create shorthands for various kinds of literature, various ways of approaching reality, but writers should be writing. I find myself a little schizophrenic on that front because in one side of my brainstem I'm writing criticism, and in the other I'm writing fiction, and I try really hard to keep those two halves divorced but I'm not sure I can ever succeed. Someone like Don Webb, who's just so incredibly wonderful and eccentric, is obviously recreating the story genre with every story he does – is he avant-pop? If we want him to be.

CR: Like you were saying about the autobiographical content, is this whole postmodern, extreme type of writing – I noticed some in Scherzi – part of the same maturing process writers have to go through before they can get on with their own material?

LO: I literally thought of most of the stories in Scherzi as experiments, saw them as places where I could explore what words could do, and what I could do with words. Writing those pieces was a process of finding my own voice among the possibilities, trying different strategies – which means sometimes they're going to work, sometimes they're not – and through them I started finding my own sense of being able to function within a certain kind of Olsenic universe of discourse. The stories I'm working on now have moved beyond that kind of radical experimentalism. I still love the idea of extreme play as an element in a fiction, I love the idea of self-consciousness as an element, but no longer as an overriding one. That's not why we read fiction.

CR: But there must also be a complicity in there. For such experimental pieces to be published, editors must also be going through that process of maturation as editors. It's all very well for you to be experimenting for your own sake, but for that to end up in print there's obviously a partnership involved before it even reaches the reader.

LO: So did you go through that stage as editor?

CR: I reckon so. You could probably say that.

LO: It's not an unhealthy thing to go through.

CR: It's something I feel a lot better for.

LO: It's the equivalent in a lot of ways of when you're 16/17/18 of going out and just getting royally blitzed one weekend to see what your brain can handle! (both laugh)

CR: And maybe the next weekend as well, just to confirm it!

LO: Or in some of our cases several years! My story 'Plasma Blizzard' is an example of "I want to see what this baby can do", and I'm really happy that I performed all the technical gymnastics I did in it, and it was a really healthy thing to have gone through. I'd much rather have done it than not have done it. But I won't do it again ... I lost too many brain cells.

CR: You make the point about rock music in Tonguing that there's only so many variables that can be put together to make a song, and of that finite quantity there's a finite subset that would make a rock song, and a finite subset within that subset that would make a rock song that would be popular, and so on. Don't you think that science fiction/speculative fiction is running along much the same lines?

LO: Absolutely. I think not just science fiction/speculative fiction but all fiction. This goes back to postmodernism and avant-pop. I think we live in such a self-reflexive time, one of the few in history that is continually trying as we're living it to define itself. It wasn't as though somebody woke up in 1500 and said "Let's call what went before The Middle Ages", but we are, we're saying "Should we call ourselves postmodern? Should we call ourselves avant-pop?" And we're very conscious of the fact that a lot of narratives have already been told. The game is to try and find ways to tell them that seem fresh, that maybe even are fresh. Realist fiction, it seems to me, died long ago; it's just telling the same suburban story of domestic problems over and over and over again. I can hardly read it any more. Speculative fiction is doing some interesting stuff, with people like Don Webb and Paul Di Filippo out there. But I certainly think with cyberpunk having burnt out in the late '80s that science fiction authors are painfully aware of the fact that, you know, "What do we do now?" The genre of science fiction seems to lend itself to telling the same core stories repeatedly, and I'm just waiting for somebody to come along in that realm to stir it up again. Isn't that the process? You know, the New Wave came along in the '60s and stirred up SF, cyberpunk came along in the '80s and stirred it up again, so we're just biding our time.

CR: So faced with that situation of just biding our time, and you said that Lance Olsen is more or less finding his voice now – he's been through the process of maturation, the autobiographical, the experimental – how is Lance Olsen going to cope with that finite number of stories?

LO: Lance Olsen is going to try not to think about that real deeply. Of everything I've written I'm proudest of Time Famine, and I think the reason is that it's complex without that intellectual masturbation that we've been talking about. It has a style I've been striving toward for years. And it's balanced with a richer sense of psychology than I've been able to discover before in my characters, yet a lot of the obsessions that I've been working with since the very beginning – you know the whole idea that our culture feels taped, that our lives feel taped, that we're living in this televisual reality in the late 20th century – are very much a part of it. Now what you want to call that – is it speculative, is it cyberpunk, is it retelling the same stories? – ultimately is going to be for other people to figure out. But, for me, I feel like I've hit what is interesting me and what is enjoyable to do, and I hope that it's not the same as everybody else is doing, I hope I'm not reinventing the wheel, but you never know. I'm not sure what Monet must have felt like when he was painting, but you're always standing right up next to the canvas when you're in the midst of creating and you just see this brush stroke and that brush stroke and you're just trying to get this brush stroke right and it's only when it's done for a while that you can really stand back and say "My God, I just painted waterlilies!" (laughs)

CR: And the big problem we've all got to face, whether we're writers or editors or publishers or whatever, is that in a couple of years' time everything that we've produced today is going to be out of fashion, because it will all date from before the turn of the century – before the turn of the millennium – and that is really going to frighten a lot of people.

LO: And again there's two ways to look at that. One of them is to just get really scared. The other is ... I feel like the world is just, at the turn of the century, a big television set and that we're all linked up to satellite and there are 250 channels on, and everything's rippin', you know, and that's really exciting ... we sense we're at a brink and God knows what's going to happen at 12:01 in the year 2000 but I want to be there. It's going to be a kick.

Visit Lance Olsen's electronic avatar at http://www.cafezeitgeist.com.