Olsen, W. Scott 1958-

PERSONAL:

Born 1958.

CAREER:

Writer, 1993—. Concordia College, Moorhead, MN, professor of English, and chair of environmental studies program.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Meeting the Neighbors: Sketches of Life on the Northern Prairie, North Star Press of St. Cloud (St. Cloud, MN), 1993.

(Editor, with Scott Cairns) The Sacred Place: Witnessing the Holy in the Physical World, University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City, UT), 1996.

(With others) When We Say We're Home: A Quartet of Place and Memory, foreword by Judith Kitchen, University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City, UT), 1999.

(Editor, with Bret Lott) A Year in Place, University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City, UT), 2001.

Gravity, the Allure of Distance: Essays on the Act of Travel, University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City, UT), 2003.

At Speed: Traveling the Long Road between Two Points, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2006.

Contributor of stories and essays to periodicals, including Kenyon, North Dakota Quarterly, Ascent, Willow Springs, and Kansas Quarterly.

SIDELIGHTS:

W. Scott Olsen has written or edited books that discuss traveling and the idea of locus, or place. Works like When We Say We're Home: A Quartet of Place and Memory; Gravity, the Allure of Distance: Essays on the Act of Travel; and At Speed: Traveling the Long Road between Two Points examine the art of journeying and the ways in which humans understand the meaning of location. Each of Olsen's books approaches these actions in a different way; When We Say We're Home and A Year in Place, for instance, evoke the spirit of place outside the lens of travel. The latter book draws on the talents of twelve different artists to describe different parts of the country at different times of the year. The former, a collection of essays, discusses the relationship between a sense of self and a sense of place, the process of "escaping the prison of place and memory," explained Sue Samson in Library Journal, and the ways in which members of our uprooted society create both self and place.

Gravity, the Allure of Distance looks at travel over the high plains of the U.S. and Canadian Midwest, and At Speed chronicles six different journeys through very different parts of the Americas. Olsen, declared Travis McDade in a Library Journal review of Gravity, the Allure of Distance, describes "the otherwise bleak Minnesota, North Dakota, and southern Canadian plains nicely" and lovingly. "He knows the land," McDade concluded, "and it shows." "What [Olsen] sees and how he glowingly describes the scenes," George Cohen wrote in his Booklist review of At Speed, "make this book a pleasure to read."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 2006, George Cohen, review of At Speed: Traveling the Long Road between Two Points, p. 22.

Library Journal, March 15, 1999, Sue Samson, review of When We Say We're Home: A Quartet of Place and Memory, p. 80; March 15, 2001, Joyce Sparrows, review of A Year in Place, p. 84; October 1, 2003, Travis McDade, review of Gravity, the Allure of Distance: Essays on the Act of Travel, p. 106.

ONLINE

Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter,http://www.arch.ksu.edu/ (January 22, 2007), Herb Childress, review of The Sacred Place: Witnessing the Holy in the Physical World.