Results by title
3 books match the query 'Olsen, W Scott'
A Year In Place
W Scott Olsen
University of Utah Press, 2001
W. Scott Olsen and Bret Lott invited a dozen friends to consider one particular calendar month in the place they call home. The result is A Year in Place, a captivating collection of new writing by twelve eminent American writers.
More than a montage of voices and experiences, A Year in Place illustrates, as Olsen and Lott explain in their introduction, the trends in American thinking about who we are and what we care about. Rick Bass takes us to the Yaak Valley of Montana in June, where fawns are arriving, "newly-emerged, knocked-legged and groggy, legs still unfolding from that long sleeping passage." Peggy Shumaker explores the special social and cultural time that is March in Fairbanks, Alaska, where a long winter has whetted the psychic despair of inhabitants who find in the "sky’s unbearable brightness . . . a waking pain beyond endurance." Michael Martone transports us through memory to Indiana in the 1950s where each May a blimp "yawed and floated up," wallowing above a suburban neighborhood on its way to the Indianapolis 500.
These and nine other contributions yield an unforgettable book about "the places we find ourselves blessed enough to be."
Reading Frames
Explorations in What Makes a Photograph WorkW. Scott Olsen
University of Utah Press, 2026
A collaboration between English professor and photographer W. Scott Olsen and Tomasz Trzebiatowski, founder of Frames magazine, Reading Frames gathers sixty-nine photographs first featured in Frames’ digital companion. Olsen’s essays interrogate the compositional and aesthetic elements of the photographs, but rather than offering technical instruction, Olsen writes with a literary sensibility, tracing how light, tone, color, and line evoke mood, meaning, and story. The essays ask us to linger with each photograph, guiding readers toward attentiveness, presence, and conversation with the image itself. Suited both to introductory photography classes and to general readers, this book is an example of how truly seeing an image is not the same as looking at it.
Sacred Place
W Scott Olsen
University of Utah Press, 1996
Some of today's most significant writers and poets explore the relation between what we call the sacred and what we witness in the apparent world.
This unprecedented anthology brings together a provocative mix of new and well known writers whose poetry and prose broaches the possibility of something "bigger" going on, something more significant at stake. Is some powerful agency at work in what we see or are we just wishing (or fearing) that there were? Who can say? Who would dare? What’s most intriguing about the selections in this volume is that the authors do dare. What’s most attractive about them is that they resist answering that dare with reductions. They prefer the swoon of multiple possibilities over the relative comfort of conclusions. Various as they are, the works collected in The Sacred Place share a common reverence for the word itself, and perhaps best of all—they share a common understanding that no one of them comprehends fully what that means. They seem to desire instead a sense that the humble stuff surrounding us affords a likely enough habitation for the sacred, even now.