Frontier Psychiatrist

Author Brian Oliu

From romantic missed connections to video games, Brian Oliu‘s writing takes on subjects from his own experience, but presents them in a way that is magical in their strangeness, generous in their openness, and deeply human in their resonance. Oliu is most recently the author of Level End (Origami Zoo Press, 2012) and The Fullness of Everything: Three Chapbooks by Tyler Gobble, Brian Oliu & Christopher Newgent (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2012). In 2011, Tiny Hardcore Press published his collection of Craigslist Missed Connections, So You Know It’s Me. Originally from New Jersey, Oliu currently lives in Tuscaloosa, where he teaches at the University of Alabama. Following the tornadoes of April 27, 2011, Oliu organized the anthology Tuscaloosa Runs This: An Anthology of Tuscaloosa Writers. Originally published as an eBook in the weeks following the storm, Tuscaloosa Runs This was published as a print book in April 2012. Additionally, his work has been anthologized in Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2 (Norton, 2008), Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (University of Iowa Press, 2012), and Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).   Gina Myers first met Brian at the Slash Pine Festival at the University of Alabama in 2011 and previously reviewed So You Know It’s Me. She recently interviewed him over e-mail about his recent publications, Tuscaloosa, and future projects.

It seems like a lot of your work–at least what I am familiar with–is project based. Come See For Yourself, your contribution to The Fullness of Everything, is a collection of short prose pieces named after the counties of New Jersey. Can you tell me where the idea for this project came from?

I’ve always been interested in the idea of cartography and map making: I find place really interesting and I had just finished writing ‘So You Know It’s Me’ which is very much about place & I obviously hadn’t gotten that theme entirely out of my system yet! It was a project I started while I was home in New Jersey over the summer of 2011–we had just survived the tornado down in Tuscaloosa and it felt strange to be away. I started to take in the strangeness of New Jersey (it is an extremely peculiar & haunted state) and decided to run with it.

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