Recapture

by Erica Olsen

The Utah Canyons WildMall gives tourists exactly what they want. An archivist preserves a rare map of a vanished Lake Tahoe. The Grand Canyon can only be visited in replica form. These stories—lyrical, deadpan, surreal—blur the line between the natural world and the world we make.

165 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2012

About the author

Erica Olsen lives in the Four Corners area. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. Her work has received awards including the 2011 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose (for “Grand Canyon II,” included in Recapture), a Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and residencies at Ucross and the Center for Land Use Interpretation. She has worked most recently as an archivist at Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding, Utah, and a museum technician at the Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores, Colorado, both grant-funded positions supporting the preservation of archaeological collections.

Reviews

[Barbara Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Something in the voice and occasional odd humor of these stories seemed so familiar—like remembering what it was like to be thirty, and a woman, in love with a vanishing West. Or a changing West. And a changing sense of self. It takes guts to explore that terrain. I admire Olsen's nerve. My favorite story is "Everywhen."

There is tenderness here, in these short tales of changed landscapes (both geographic and human) recaptured in clean strong prose.

[R.G. Ziemer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this. Every page a delight. Admittedly, this very specific corner of the world holds a special attraction for me -- we've been visiting SE Utah since the late 60s, and my in-laws lived in Moab for some 25 years. My wife, indeed our whole family, plus a select group of friends older and younger than ourselves, fell in love with the high desert landscape, the air, the redrock, the contradictory sense of timelessness and antiquity....
But what Olsen has captured/recaptured here is not only the beauty of that world, but arguable more important, the way people move through it, dwell inside it; the way their lives are shaped with it. (It's hard to explain) but Olsen succeeds in recreating some of the truth of the place, the truths of the people in that place in the present time.
Highly recommended.

[Kevin Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very engaging collection of short stories by a very talented writer. Her background in museum and archaeological research in the American Southwest enriches her tales with a deep grounding in the cultural and natural history of the region.

[Tim Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book to keep in your bag, or have in the back of your pocket for when you need a quick escape.

[Charlie Quimby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erica Olsen's RECAPTURE & Other Stories is more than a collection of "other stories;" it's a curation of artifacts around themes of loss, searching and memory. The motif of return keeps returning.

Relationships—if they can be found in these stories—are broken, in the process of breaking or being partially assembled from the materials found on site.

Some of the pieces run barely a page or two; one is more than half footnotes. The fragments don't cohere to make a single object, but like lipid-coated pot sherds, baskets, granaries and stacked stones, they provide clues for us to extract truths about our vanished selves.

In "The Curation of Silence," Olsen takes this notion to its extreme. She imagines a discipline that studies captured silences, but the empty vessels hold the most meaning for the collector:

To collect was not only to preserve, but also to alter through the addition of new meanings—just as the books on my shelf were becoming an autobiography of myself that would also be dispersed someday—meanings which were individual, personal and destined to fade away without a trace.

With her background as an archivist and a museum technician in the Four Corners area of the southwest, Olsen knows what this landscape can tell us. Americans typically don't have to live daily with thousand-year structures or billion-year geology. We can make our own ruins, thank you, and build over them with something new and reassuring.

But out here the big spaces and silences force us to confront our conceits of individuality and national exceptionalism. Unlike the forest-dwellers, we can't help but see how time and nature always win out.

Out here, we ready ourselves to become the next Anasazi.

In the title story that concludes the book, a character has headed east to find the original location of an ancient cliff dwelling that was "saved" early in the last century and carted to California, where it was reassembled and then devolved into a personal folly, a movie set, a theme park and a century-old re-ruin. Her assignment is to figure out how to return it because it's now an obstruction to development.

Despite their provenance, the stones have no interest to anyone in Utah, where minor ruins are "a dime a dozen."

Not long before, she'd journeyed to Norway to trace her family history.

She'd brought a handful of photos of houses with her on the trip, snapshots sent from Norway to America between the 1920s and the 1940s. On the back of one was written: vårt hus! Our house! But whose? They'd written it with such confidence, such an absence of information for Kelsey. They knew who they were. No one remembered them now. [...] It was a very house-conscious place, Norway."

Yes, as documentation crumbles and memories become indistinct, the past erodes and the physical world itself teeters on abstraction.

In the opening story, the Grand Canyon, after a disaster, now is accessible to the public only as a replica. In another, park workers try to manage the visitor's wilderness experience through high technology, while they watch a lot of Netflix in their spare time. They are like mall cops, consoling themselves that "the simulated protects the real."

And who is to say a fake Grand Canyon is any less real than our precious photos and the memories they evoke?

Real nature still intrudes on these illusions of it, though.

A hiker heads out into the back country without adequate preparation but is saved by dumb luck and technology. He's able to find a Maverick convenience store to warm up in but can't find love.

An unattached archaeologist returns to find his singlewide incinerated.

He did a survey. There was the incinerated and the merely charred. The fake wood and the real wood. Made in USA, made in China. His decisions of conscience, his consolations, the ways he punished himself, the museum of his life.

Olsen's characters discover themselves in barren places, putting together shattered pieces, with little hope of restoring the original patterns. Or they work in dioramas and theme ruins that seem "sterile and well-kept... like they sent a cleaning crew to vacuum the sites at night."

But these stories are not as depressing as they might sound. Olsen captures a west that is difficult to see from an armchair and presents a view that can be disturbing up close for those who think the world is supposed to be filled for them.

We are not the first to search. We all live on scoured ground. Maintaining this consciousness can be an act of courage and hope, she seems to say, as we amass reserves against a certain winter.

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

read my full review @ http://bit.ly/SRMuHe

My opinion: In my humble opinion, it takes a special person to have the skill set necessary to write short stories and not treat them as off-shoots of full length novels. Short stories require a conciseness while respecting the characters and setting, in doing justice to them and not underwriting who they are while "telling" the story. There is also a respect which is imperative in not underwriting the story, as well. Olsen is one of these authors. Her characters are inviting, while not always being perfect and her descriptors for the setting make the reader feel that they are walking right along side the characters. To boot, her stories are engrossing in the short amount of pages given for each of them.

On a side note, while the stories are set in the American West/Southwest could limit the audience for this book by the description, I would encourage readers outside this region of the US to take a look at this dynamic tiny read!

[Wendy Hines · Rating 4 out of 5]

This small book filled with short stories is jam-packed with breathtaking writing. From the idea of only visiting the Grand Canyon through a replica form to an archaeologist who returns home to find his home only cinders..each story is detailed enough to give you a sense of nature and of the Southwest. The characters are essential to the sometimes ironic and thought-provoking situations.

With photographs, memories and more, who is to say what is real and what is not? With our world and that of nature, Olsen writes with a clever and wry twist that will keep the reader thoroughly entertained. I was intrigued and read it in one sitting - it's fabulous!

[David Pace]

The advantage to this book is that it's a series of stories that you can jump around and pick out of sequence. Some of them are VERY short. Olsen has a wry view of how the American West is experience, by Americans in general, but even, perhaps especially by Westerners themselves. This is a funny, ironic, sometimes disturbing book of tales that point to the flashpoints of contemporary Western experience, especially as it relates to conservation, the environmental ethic and the country's relentless, insatiable appetite for consumerism.