Review of Architectures of Possibility by Lance Olsen with Trevor Hodge

Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing is not your average book about writing, which may be suggested by its title. Lance Olsen is interested in creative writing as a ‘series of choices’, whereby to ‘write one way rather than another is to convey, not simply an aesthetics, but a course of thinking, a course of being in the world, that privileges one approach to “reality” over another’ (13). He’s not interested in the ‘Balzacian mode’ of writing, a term introduced by Alain Robbe-Grillet to refer to the works of nineteenth century authors like Honoré de Balzac who preferenced realism, here defined as a ‘genre of averages’ (11). Rather it is writing ‘as a possibility space where everything can and should be considered, attempted, and troubled’ (13).

Review continued at M/C Reviews.