By Erica Olsen
Melissa Dziedzic: The duplicating of the Grand Canyon is an interesting concept for a story, how did you come up with the initial idea? Did you start work on the piece with a familiarity with the geology and formations you were discussing?
Erica Olsen: The initial idea for the story came from Lascaux II, the replica cave art site in France, which was constructed because visitation was damaging the original prehistoric art. So I was thinking about the idea of loving a place to death, and about how the Grand Canyon, this enormous symbol of the American landscape--it's a mile deep and up to 18 miles wide--might need to be saved from us. I was also thinking about the swiftness of the destruction caused by the tsunami in Japan, the release of radiation there, and the history of uranium mining near the Grand Canyon. If we loved the Grand Canyon to death, or if it suddenly were off limits, I thought that it could and would be replicated, because we need it to be part of our landscape.
I've been to the Grand Canyon probably a half-dozen times, the first time when I was a little kid, maybe two years old. In the last few years, I've been there several times. It's between where I now live in the Four Corners area and where my family lives in California, so it's easy to do a drive-through and a quick hike. Admission is $25 per vehicle, but if you have a national park pass, you can justify spending just a few hours there. The geological details I included are only a sampling of the strata. With a 500-word limit, I had to be selective.
The Four Corners area is full of landforms that are literally textbook examples of geology, like the arches and natural bridges of southeast Utah. That was another inspiration for the story: educational displays like the reproduction sandstone features at the visitor center at Arches National Park in Moab, Utah.
MD: The story deals with the actuality of memory, your descriptions playing with the line between perception and reality. Taking into account what you say about photographs, how severe do you think our reliance is on outside means to validate our memories?
EO: I studied archives management in a grad program at Western Washington University. There was a very practical aspect to the program: arrangement and description of collections, preservation, and so on. There was also a theoretical aspect, which focused on how archivists and curators are keepers of our collective memory. "No sources-no history," that's one quote I remember from our reading. Historical records, including photographs, have enormous evidentiary value. They prove that something actually happened.
Many of the stories in my forthcoming collection, Recapture (Torrey House Press, fall 2012) deal with this question of perception and reality through artifact, memory, or place. Before writing "Grand Canyon II," I'd written another very short piece, "The Keepers," for an anthology called Tahoe Blues (forthcoming from Bona Fide Books). The publisher put out a call for submissions of stories about Lake Tahoe, and I thought, well, what if the lake weren't there anymore? I envisioned a world in which the lake had basically vanished due to some cataclysmic geologic or climatic event, and then I wrote about the work of the archivists who were preserving maps and other records of the lake. When I started "Grand Canyon II," I knew that memory and documentation would be a part of the story.
MD: This replication of reality is "found acceptable by most visitors." What would you say that means about them, the average American, in terms of our society's cling to the idea of Americana? Also, how does the narrator's continued urge to return to something she knows to be inherently fake play into that?
EO: Well, most visitors to the Grand Canyon never go below the rim. For them, it's a landscape of views. And then, there's the aspect that if the original can't be visited, then certainly a replica will do. I'll go to Lascaux II if I ever have the opportunity! I also wanted something a little bit corporate in tone, like a marketing report. If most people like it, OK, it's a successful product launch.
For the narrator of "Grand Canyon II," the desire to go back to the park is personal. She knows it's a replica, but the experience she has there is authentic. The replica canyon is a work of art, which we, and the narrator, respond to with genuine emotion.
Erica Olsen’s stories and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, High Country News, and other magazines. Her collection of short fiction, Recapture (which includes “Grand Canyon II”), will be published by Torrey House Press in fall 2012. She has an MFA from the University of Montana, and she lives and works in the Four Corners area, doing contract archives and curation work for archaeology museums.
