Brian Oliu - Jaw-dropping emotional dynamites: between creepy and loving, between tender and overbearing, between honest and fully sliced open

Brian Oliu, So You Know It’s Me, Tiny Hardcore Press, 2011.

“In So You Know It’s Me, Brian Oliu posits an ideal reader/missed connection/desired presence, all the while negotiating with the ever-eroding nature of time. Major ambitions for such a small book! Each brief meditation explores the daunting, existential task of searching (for you, whoever you are), and yet, with tender and earnest energy, retains a lover’s belief in the act of seeking. This playfully looping & arcing essay-sequence (intelligent rather than clever! graceful rather than trendily chaotic and jittery!) made this reader feel the acute pleasures of being both sought and found.”—Lia Purpura

“Saw you on the morning bus reading a book, but it wasn’t Brian Oliu’s So You Know It’s Me. Too bad, really. Oliu’s book is playful, beautifully structured, filled with surprise and pleasure. Also: odd and wonderful. We might have had that relationship, you and I, had you read the book. Oliu’s book. Read it now, or you will miss out again.” — Dinty W. Moore

„This pieces are the jaw-dropping emotional dynamites that I’ve come to expect from Brian Oliu. Missed connections smack out of their writers a sincere ridiculousness through uncovering nagging memories, minute observations, and quirky hopes. In So You Know It’s Me, the second release from Tiny Hardcore Press, Brian Oliu takes this trope and runs it through a cycle that banners missed connections that are as strangely endearing as they are ridiculously sad, as wildly hopeful as they are emotionally seeping.
Originally posted in Tuscaloosa’s Craiglist Missed Connections page, these short lyric essays flex their brilliance by displaying their grace in walking so many touchy lines: between creepy and loving, between tender and overbearing, between honest and fully sliced open. Oliu (or his speaker) reaches deep within his emotions and tosses out whatever feels real. Take “In Motion-UA Rec Center M4W,” from the beginning of the collection, where the speaker bounds through his observations about a woman at the gym, watching her on the elliptical and relating her position, her motion, to himself and the world around them. The pure sense of total concentration, or perhaps obsession, in that singular moment is astounding. As it starts, the speaker shimmies around a metaphor to find this woman’s place:
It is because you believe in movement without movement. It is because you want to move your legs up and down like pistons—no, not pistons, as that would conjure up images of machinery and mechanism and you are neither of these things: you are human, toned. You are not the machine: you are its operator.
As it circles within itself, the thoughts turn to others around them: bodybuilders, prospective students on a tour, a recollection of seeing two girls kiss in the racquetball courts. Finally, it’s back to the woman, her hair shaking as she exercises, and one last line-straddling admission: “I am left to wonder where it is you think you are going.”
This last sentence is a shining example of the depth of these pieces. Like with other missed connections on Craigslist, the backstory is far larger than the short prose would admit, but where the true radiance comes through is when Oliu takes the dense emotion and experience hidden beneath a missed connection and runs with it, exposing the delicacy, the vulnerability, and the susceptibility of human emotions.
This display comes full force as the book continues, as pieces and even the speaker’s past began to connect. At times, it goes beyond a simple missed connection, for instance when the speaker seems to (or pretends to?) know the woman, like in “Hand Me Downs-America’s Thrift M4W” where the speaker says that the woman’s mother always liked him, or when the writing dances out of the realism and into the fantasy full-blown, as in “UUDDLRRBASTART-GAMESTOP M4W” when the speaker tells of the girl’s past lives. In these moments, the balancing act tips at times, the endearing into the creepy, the spontaneity into the repeated.
Through the layers, however, we are bombarded with the realization that this speaker is us, that this woman is us. The beauty of Oliu’s first book is how his speaker, whether it be him or not, is unafraid to rip open himself and risk being a creep, being dramatic, being over-the-top. The emotion in these pieces jumps out to look us straight in the eye, as if to say, watch closely this is you; you’re gonna have to deal with it.“ - Vouched

„There’s a lot of delusion involved in trying to find someone on Craigslist Missed Connections. The writer deludes herself into thinking that the message will find its intended recipient. The reader deludes himself into thinking that the the stranger with whom he shared a glance in the bookstore just happens to want to talk about their connection anonymously on a website better suited to finding garage sales or cheap furniture. Everyone acts on faith that the beautiful person at the gym or across the aisle at the grocery store could feel the same way they do. It is a weird corner of the internet: a gathering place of regrets and could-have-beens, an intersection of desire, delusion, hope, and isolation.
Enter Brian Oliu, who, over the course of a month and a half in 2010, posted twenty-two lyric essays on the Craigslist Missed Connections board of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he lives and teaches. Tiny Hardcore Press has collected the essays in So You Know It’s Me, their second title, after xTx’s Normally Special. So You Know It’s Me is built of electrifying glances, imaginings, recollections, and variations on simple, repeated phrases. Like many actual Missed Connections, the language seems to be a thin shell around a core of warm, obsessive loneliness. In “Taska Losa – The Park at Manderson Landing m4w,” the narrator lists the things drowned in the Black Warrior River, then writes,
“Let me let you in on a secret: this town is falling into the river. Here is a list of everything that will be gone: the stadium where I saw you, the frozen yogurt shop where I saw you, the gym where I saw you, the bookstore where I saw you, the store where I saw you, the store where I saw you, the intersection where I saw you… Where will that leave us?”
The essays inhabit and expand their odd little genre by maintaining their Craigslist-style titles (e.g. “Roll – Bryant-Denney Stadium m4w” and “First Day – UA Campus m4w”) and riffing on the “I can’t believe I’m writing this you’ll probably never read this tell me what I was wearing so I know it’s you” apologetic-hopeful-desperate language found in real Craigslist Missed Connections, often to heartbreaking effect, as in the final essay:
“Tell me where I am so I know it’s you. Tell me about the time when so I know it’s you. Tell me the shape of my face so I know it’s you… If this is you, tell me these things. If this is you, twenty-two. If this is you, remove your face from the faces of all of these girls I’ve been missing when all I’ve been missing is you.”
The essays that compose So You Know It’s Me lose something in the translation from Craigslist posts to physical, bound work. Craigslist deletes posts older than forty-five days, which means that as the final essay was published on the site, the first was being erased. By vanishing after only a month and a half, the original Craigslist posts were able to embody the fleeting quality of romantic obsession. The essays themselves became missed connections. Of course, physical form also means permanence, which means the work is back out in the world, finding an audience more appreciative than the lovesick denizens of Tuscaloosa. Whatever form Brian Oliu’s writing takes, it gets me excited because it does something that few other literary works attempt: it turns disposable internet dribblings into something beautiful, smart, and memorable.“ - Ian Denning

„Missed Connections. Everyone has them. That glance, that shy gesture, that unexpected brush of fingertips with a stranger who just may be the one that gets away. Everyone has them, but not everyone writes a Missed Connection post on Craigslist, and I’m almost certain that only one person has written a whole book of them.
That person is Brian Oliu, and the book is So You Know It’s Me, a 54-page collection of Missed Connections originally posted on Tuscaloosa’s Craigslist website from September to November 2010. The 23 pieces of flash nonfiction were originally serialized, one every two days, but as a collected work they coalesce into a single story. The trajectory is beautiful in its subtle movement: At first, single images echo through distant pieces, hinting at the ghost of something greater, until the final few essays vibrate with a resonance that links everything together.
Even with those capstone pieces, there is nothing easy or simple about Oliu’s book. In fact, one of its strengths is its refusal to tread water, sinking one minute into an uncomfortable extreme only to find buoyancy the next. For instance, Oliu’s attention to detail creates a rather creepy narrator who borders on obsessive in early pieces like “Roll—Bryant Denny Stadium,” where he has been watching this presumed stranger so carefully that he can comment on her “black and white checkered hounds tooth: alternating bands of four black and four white threads in both warp and filling or weft woven in a simple 2:2 twill.” But later that same focus on specifics becomes touching, even endearing, when it conveys the depth of feelings rather than an off-kilter fetishization of a shirt.
So much of So You Know It’s Me is about straddling the line between the acceptable and the unacceptable. It’s in that attention to detail that borders on obsession. It’s in the ambiguity of the narrative, in the way it isn’t clear if this is one woman he has seen multiple times (i.e., stalking), one woman with whom he’s in a relationship, or multiple women. It’s in the project itself: a literary creation that gestated on a forum one step short of a dating service. Anyone who has ever straddled anything knows that it’s not a comfortable position. So You Know It’s Me isn’t a comfortable book, either.
But it’s a good discomfort. It evokes thoughts about one’s own missed connections and how they can and do affect one's life. It’s a message that Oliu wanted to convey, as he stated in an interview on his website: “To think about these missed scenarios is extremely healthy—it makes you realize the life that you have and what can be done to make it even better. But to pine for them makes you ignore the life that you do live: to say if you’re entirely relying on missed connections, you’re going to miss every connection.” - Matthew Merendo

"I don’t want you to guess what I was drinking. I was drinking Earl Gray tea. I was drinking Earl Gray tea and I was reading Brian Oliu’s new book SO YOU KNOW IT’S ME when you and your strong lavender approached. You were wearing cut-off jean shorts. You had a thing in your hair, maybe chopsticks, scissored. You were squeezing a copy of a book about water. You had a funny look in your eyes, like your eyes were broken, dangling—maybe your eyes were cleaning windows on the skyscraper of you. I invited you to sit down, or at least I wanted to. I invited you to sit down and then I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to tell you how much I liked the book I was reading. I wanted to quote you things like this from FRIEND OF A FRIEND – FACEBOOK, TUSCALOOASA, AL M4W—
“She was kind. She serves as a reminder to tell the ones that we love that we love them, that we needed her to die to be reminded of this, to think about saying these words one day when the stereo in the car is off or the meal we ordered is taking longer than usual to get to us. Yes—we must shove dead girls in our mouths, swallow them, have them speak for us by not speaking. I wish I knew you better. You will be missed.”
—tell you that sometimes writing can be wonderfully refreshing, that things, models, cultural forms emerge, and it’s our job to push ourselves into them, onto them, to use them, wear them like awesome suits. I wanted to tell you that this is what Brian Oliu has done with his book. He has made beautiful exploding confessions. He has made beautiful exploding repetitions. He’s spotlighted the pure heart of the desperate. And maybe you wanted to tell me about your book, too. Maybe you wanted to ask if I’d read it. The answer would’ve been: Yes. I like water. But we didn’t talk much. We didn’t talk at all. You read your book and I read mine. I thought about the poetry of Brian Oliu’s book, the perfection of change and loss. I wanted to choke more lines from the book onto your skin. I wanted to quote you this from TASKA LOSA – THE PARK AT MANDERSON LANDING M4W—
“Here is a list of people who have drowned in the river: apple, bear, crush, dime, eagle, fire, fire, ghost, ghost, ghost, hair, iron, jab, kite, loss, lost, lose, me. Here is a list of what it sounded like when they were drowning: the rolling up of a car window when you know it is going to rain later that day, a gas-powered stove turning on in order to boil water for noodles, a hand feeling around an empty pocket.”
I finished my Earl Gray, and left. I stumbled into the parking lot, my nostrils clinging to your jasmine despite the hard cough of exhaust. I punched the sun on the cheek, thinking: They’ve done it again. They’ve gone and done it again. You disappeared behind the pages. I knew how to find you." - Mel Bosworth

"I love interesting, intimate, and unexpected descriptions when I read because in the hands of a great writer, I see the world in different ways. Today, I want to talk about Brian’s uncommon ability to work with description throughout So You Know It’s Me. This book probably affected me most in how it showed me the world in different ways. The narrative that emerges from these essays takes place in a college town, Tuscaloosa, Alabama but the way this story is told and the kinds of descriptions Brian uses make you think that this story, this mystery, is taking place in a whole new world.
Brian’s finest descriptions come when he is speaking directly to the unnamed woman he is writing to about how he sees her. There is such tenderness and generosity of spirit and at times even eroticism in how he sees her and understands her, probably in ways she is unable to see or understand herself. The longing in those descriptions pulls at me terribly. That is not a bad thing.
When he sees her at the UA rec center, Brian writes:
It is because you believe in movement without movement. It is because you want to move your legs up and down like pistons — no, not pistons, as that would conjure up images of machinery and mechanism and you are neither of these things: you are human, toned. You are not of the machine: you are its operator. You are the one who makes the sloping roller ramps beneath the pedal links slide back and forth like marbles down a chute of a game I played as a child, when exercise was part of existing, throwing my body into leaves, chasing my neighbor around the backyard because that was the game that we played, because that is what was expected of us.
There is so much going on in that passage — the body as a machine, the elliptical machine as a childhood game, these descriptions evoking a memory that not only reveals how he sees her but how she makes him see himself, what she makes him unearth from within himself.
Then, at Barnes and Noble, the unnamed woman is sitting at a table in the café.
I would’ve come over to you, to the table near the window where you sat, but I would have no place to put my drink­ — it would’ve left a watery broken ring on the table, and I could not put you through that again: those nights where the boys with their parents’ bank cards bought you drinks they thought you liked because they were drinks you pretended to like­ — they were too red, too sweet, they curled your tongue like a thin paperback in a back pocket, though I would not describe your tongue this way: you know the story of Lennon and Chapman and Salinger and that is something I don’t want you to think about: about blood, about The Dakota, about autographs.
I love this passage for the tone, the cadence of it, the way it works at the language level with each word connecting to the next in an unexpected way. I’ve never thought of a curled tongue as a paperback book but when I read this passage, I find it to be a lovely, apt description. I can see the pink curl of flesh as clearly as I see the curved pages of a book in a back pocket. This book contains many such gorgeous images.
Later in the book, Brian sees his unnamed woman at an intersection:
My view of you was blurry­ — the type of blur evident when all is in motion: mothers moving in quickly to place kisses on the cheek, everyone quickly turning their heads when hearing the word ‘sister’, hearing a song, hearing a name that is similar to their name.
These essays originally appeared on Craiglist so the words, themselves, were fleeting, a blur. As I read this description, I thought about the glimpses we catch of people, the blurs of human bodies in motion. What Brian captures here is everything that can go through your mind when you see someone you long for from a distance. This passage put me there on the street corner, holding that same gaze. I love when writing makes me feel immersed in a scene.
In a parking garage, Brian thinks about how she once said his name:
You said my name once, before you knew it was my name. You knew the weight it carried, the touch of the tongue to the roof of your mouth briefly, pausing for a second before forcing the hot air out.
The physicality here and the perfect description of the tiny moments that go into the saying of a name are what captivated me. As a writer, Brian’s ability to see the world in such an intimate way has really helped me think about how I can break down anything from a breath to the speaking of a word to an affection shared by two people in more beautiful, unique ways.
Toward the end of the book, Brian thinks about cooking with his Missed Connections woman in his kitchen.
If I told you that they took handfuls of soil and cupped them in their hands like water and spread them out in empty gaps, would you think of the time we made dinner together, rolling the dough into circles, flattening everything yet being mindful of the spreading out, the melting together. Would you remember the cutting of the city into cubes, the streets into lines­ — would you remember spilling the oil, spilling the white of a cracked egg, watching it slide across the vinyl like a ghost, like our bodies if we danced while the yeast rose and the edges burned.
This is another passage where I thought about cadence and the unexpected transitions from one word to the next as well as the images those words evoked. There’s a scene at the end of the short film Logorama where the city is overtaken by oil and the black stuff starts flooding the street grid almost exactly the way Brian describes the spilling of oil and egg here. I was also drawn to the rising yeast and burned edges because these are such specific choices. To take the breaking of bread and make that into something so poetic, almost musical, is what makes the whole of So You Know It’s Me so entrancing." - Roxane Gay

"Along with many of Brian Oliu’s fans, I first read the pieces collected in So You Know It’s Me during their original appearance on Craigslist over a six-week stretch last fall. In that initial iteration, the narrative unfolded with a poignancy that seemed connected to the ephemeral nature of its presentation. (As Oliu knew, the posts would be deleted after forty-five days, in accordance with Craigslist policy.) It’s always perilous to divorce a work of art from its original context, and the pieces in this collection—designed for impermanence—were particularly susceptible to corruption from a new medium. Fortunately, Oliu and the savvy folks at Tiny Hardcore Press have created a text that accumulates, rather than sheds, nuance and richness from its single-volume presentation. So You Know It’s Me offers an unflinching portrait of devotion and desire, of relationship and revelation. It is smart without being a smart-ass. It is genuine but not cloying. It deserves attention.
It demands attention, too. From the opening pages, this book proves as playful as it is provocative, and it resists easy assimilation. So You Know It’s Me wears many hats. It synthesizes missed connection and bildüngsroman. Its dense references—which range from obscure college football coaches to the process for making hounds tooth fabric, from the The Little Prince to the Odyssey—reward careful probing. It offers a loving chronicle of Tuscaloosa, Alabama—not a store-bought map bound by the rules of cartography, but the kind of sketch someone would draw on the back of a paper bag. It weaves together the stories of many women in an attempt to recapture the story of one woman. It presents a narrator talking his way into relationship and self-awareness. It warns you that intimacy is a gem so lovely as to be nonexistent, then leads you to a quarry and asks you to watch as it chips away anyway. It promises jewels, then brandishes “your heart where a rock once was.” It takes hold, holds fast.
It arrests us, but the book itself keeps moving, subverting genres and disrupting formal expectations. Attentive to every detail, Oliu even employs the book’s headers as fields of play. While the even-numbered pages conventionally state the author’s name, the odd numbered pages cleverly invert the book’s title, transforming So You Know It’s Me to So I Know It’s You and thereby further implicating readers in the narrative. We are simultaneously the ones searching and the ones sought, the missing and the missed. This is not just a narrative of one man seeking one woman. Rather, as the narrator tells us, “this is about you.” We readers are not that you, of course, in any literal sense. We know we have never eaten yogurt while fearing our brother’s death, never been wounded by wire. But words are seductive, and despite what we know, we begin to believe.
The book’s conclusion rewards our faith. Each of the its first twenty-two entries has been introduced with the same convention: a number indicating the day of its posting, a title, a location, and a description of who is looking for whom. These entries are all set in Tuscaloosa—on the university campus, at a local bookstore, in a park by the river—and the search is always described as M4W.
The book’s final section ruptures that pattern. Gone are the titles, the descriptors of the narrator and his beloved. This final section gives us only a location, or, more accurately, an anti-location—“45 Nowhere.” Fittingly, this section contains no content. On one level, of course, this gestures toward the fact that on the forty-fifth day, Craigslist began deleting Oliu’s original posts. Forty-five days after the last one was posted, they had all disappeared. More significantly, this also reminds us of what we’ve suspected all along: this story is ours as much as it is the narrator’s. As the narrator points out earlier in the text, we know who we are and where we have been. We also know who we have missed. Rather than being a clever gimmick, then, Oliu’s blank page serves as a testament to his own generosity, his knowledge that although this narrator is a single person in Tuscaloosa, this story belongs to each of us. We remain unmapped, unmoored, undone—ravished by this author, his words, his search for what has been missed, his faith that lovely things remain within our reach.
So You Know It’s Me is one of the loveliest texts I know. Read it. Reread it. Send it to the first person you ever loved. Stash a copy at your favorite landmark. Take a photo of it there at your favorite landmark. Deliver that photo to Brian Oliu. To find him, go to Tuscaloosa. Drive down the street that you saw on television when the tornado hit. You will know it for its lack of landmarks. Turn toward the florist’s that used to house the best butcher in town. Keep going until you reach the road where the first grade teacher used to live. When you get to the house that is no longer her house, turn left. Look for Alabama’s colors—white siding, a red porch. Find the open door. Fill the open arms." - Elizabeth Wade

"I love the images in this story so very much. You said you based this story on the Nintendo video game "Gradius." I've never played that game, but looking it up online it seems to be about aliens and spacecrafts. Can you talk a little about how that game translated to this story for you?
- First, thank you! Gradius is an interesting case as the game itself was one of the first of its kind: a side-scrolling space-ship shoot-em-up where the game sends as many enemies as possible at you while you attempt to navigate the world and blow everything up. The game itself spawned multiple sequels and various spin-offs, such as Salamander (which I make reference to) as well as Life Force, in which the entire battle takes place inside of a human body. What is so fascinating in Gradius is that there is a constant theme of destruction and regeneration: you blow up an alien only to have another one appear right behind it. Your spaceship blows up for a moment and flickers back on the screen where it disappeared. Furthermore, the screen keeps moving you along — there is no stopping or going backwards. It literally pushes you forward. That was some of the imagery I wanted to capture in the story: that everything is sliding towards danger, and things keep appearing, getting destroyed, and re-appearing.
Are you doing a series of stories based on video games? Why? And what other games have you written about?
- I'm currently putting the finishing touches on Leave Luck To Heaven, which is a collection of 32 lyric essays based off of 8-bit Nintendo games. There are some other "gaming elements" included in the collection, such as "boss battles" and "save points" as well. I've covered the majority of the classic games, (Zelda, Ninja Gaiden, Super Mario Bros, Tetris) plus a couple of my personal favorites and games that affected me when I was growing up (Maniac Mansion, River City Ransom, Shadowgate). Video games have been such an important part of my life as well as my childhood — to me they're like the new version of fairytales: classic stories that everyone can relate to in different ways. We all remember the moment when we used the whistle to drain the pool in Legend of Zelda, we remember the basements and bedrooms that we played these games in vividly. I'm a firm believer in writing what you love, and I loved everything about these games (and still love them!) and so it just made sense to start writing about them: these games as extended metaphors for my own life, whether it is "modern-day Brian" or "Brian as a child," the images resonate greatly with me.
I loved this story even though I didn't really understand what it was about. The rhythm and the language captivated me, and it still does every time I reread. Do you find that you like stories more when they "break the rules" of traditional narrative? Do you write this way often or is this an exception?
- I've never been one for "traditional narrative" as I struggle with writing that way! I find a lot of joy in having a story to tell and attempting to express it in moments and small nuances: I never go out and say "this is about this thing." Instead, I am more concerned in creating emotion: to have someone feel the story rather than understand it. As a non-fiction writer, it's a†conundrum: there are so many things to say, and yet there's a fear in saying them out loud, so we search for other ways to express these thoughts — through research, through extended metaphors, through synthesis and parallels; the ability to say everything without saying everything. My thesis adviser, Michael Martone, talked about the concept of "leakage" — these moments where the actual story shines through and the reader can get a glimpse of what's really going on behind the tapestry, and I've always been fascinated by those moments and the power that they hold. The story is a basic one: a person I love has Trichotillomania — the need to pull one's hair out. The city I live in (Tuscaloosa, Alabama) is slowly sliding into the Black Warrior River. These moments fused with the gaming language as well as the idea of movement and regeneration are layered on top of each other to create some sort of mosaic. (I should add that this story was written well before the tornado hit Tuscaloosa in late April — although as someone who includes Tuscaloosa in a lot of my writing, there's a sort of eeriness in going back to these pieces that were written before the storm and see how they've changed.)
You mentioned a lot of these already, but when I was younger I was obsessed with Metroid, Tetris and Super Mario Brothers. What's your favorite Nintendo game ever?
- Oh man. This is a tough one. A lot of my favorites were actually Super Nintendo games: A Link To The Past, Earthbound, Super Metroid. As for NES games, I've always loved River City Ransom, the Megaman series, and Dr. Mario. If we talk about modern games, I adored Bioshock, as well as the Metal Gear Solid series. The other day I spent eight straight hours playing the new version of Mortal Kombat. I play a lot of FIFA as well.
Dr. Mario! I loved that game. Ok, enough about video games. What else do you do when you're not writing?
- I'm on the Internet constantly. I just love information, whether it's reading articles or seeing what various B-List celebrities are up to on Twitter. There isn't a ton to do in Tuscaloosa, but I'm fortunate enough to have a really great group of friends, so we do a decent job of entertaining ourselves. I unabashedly love pop music and so I throw a bunch of dance parties at the local bar. I play a good amount of basketball. Maybe a video game or two." - Interview by Tara Laskowski

A Conversation with Brian Oliu at Lit Pub

Brian Oliu, Level End, Origami Zoo Press, 2012.

"When you arrive, the music changes. In Level End, Brian Oliu treats you as a player rather than a reader, providing a video game walkthrough made of lyric essays, guiding you through the toughest boss battles. In this world, though, the pixelated enemies you face are uncannily familiar: angry family members, lost loves, yourself on a night after too much wine. Oliu’s game-inspired pieces are labyrinthine and beautiful–you’ll want to get lost on the way to the nearest save point–and they serve as a constant reminder that what you find at the end might not be at all what you expected."

Check out previously published pieces included in this chapbook:
Save Point: Hot Springs & Boss Battle: The Final Boss at DIAGRAM
Boss Battle: The One With the Long Neck at elimae
Boss Battle: My Brother Who Controls the Weather at RealPoetik


"When you arrive, the music changes. In Level End, Brian Oliu treats you as a player rather than a reader, providing a video game walkthrough made of lyric essays, guiding you through the toughest boss battles. In this world though, the pixelated enemies you face are uncannily familiar: angry family members, lost loves, yourself on a night after too much wine. Oliu’s game-inspired pieces are labyrinthine and beautiful–you’ll want to get lost on the way to the nearest save point–and they serve as a constant reminder that what you find at the end might not be at all what you expected." - Sam Martone

“Among the recent wave of young writers with a literary interest in video games, Brian Oliu is both the least literal and the most successful in representing their strange, surreal logics. His lyric essays read the way video games felt before they understood themselves: mysterious, lonely, sad, funny, weird, existing in their own desire as much as (or more than) their bodies. They read the way it feels to remember something incorrectly.” - Mike Meginnis
When I arrived, the music changed, and then it went silent—nothing of note except for the ringing in my ears, the residue of the clinking of a glass, the dropped phone call, the silence of a house in the morning. There is nothing romantic about the idea of final when final arrives like this: not with an arrow in the eye, not with a body losing grip on the floor and disappearing in the dark with a sparkle and a wink, not with a final blink after turning magenta, a red not found in nature, a red not found in your face, not even while choking, not even while gasping for breath. What you have imagined the final stage to be is not what it is—here is a list it is not. It is not surrounded by family and handwritten cards from friends, fresh flowers replacing dead flowers, no, never dead flowers, get them out of here, cast them into the street, put them in another room, the water will not save you. — from Level End by Brian Oliu

"Released on April 2nd by Origami Zoo Press, Brian Oliu’s Level End is a stunning collection of video game inspired lyrical essays. This slim volume, with a total of thirteen stories checking in at about twenty pages, packs quite a punch.
In many ways the marriage of Oliu’s work with Origami Zoo is perfect. The two person operation, located in Pittsburgh, focuses on quality not quantity, publishing only a few titles per year. Printed in small runs of no more than 200 editions, the indie press forces a relationship with it’s audience on a much more personal level than the bigger publishers out there right now. Level End has that similar special, almost delicate feeling to it as well. Reading makes you feel as though you’ve been granted access to something, something that feels very important at first, even if the details or answers don’t quite manifest themselves until later on.
Each story, usually no more than a page or two in length, takes the reader further into the maze of a pixellated journey, one that is full of dark corners, secret passageways, and mortal enemies. Mysterious and quirky at times yet equally honest and revealing, Level End is unlike anything you’ll read. Using the inherent oddities within video games as a launching point, Oliu has positioned himself at the forefront of a new frontier, one where the numbing sensation caused by hours in front of a screen, controller gripped tightly in hand, are used to dissect human nature at large, extrapolating larger truths out of the sometimes conscious shifting and mind altering effects that have overtaken a generation of youths raised in front of a video game.
You need not be a gamer to enjoy the linguistic beauty present on every page. You don’t have to know what a boss battle is to bask in the wonder of Oliu’s well crafted sentences, his alluring prose and sense of imagery and economical use of every word, creating mini narratives that brim with life. The book, much like a great game, hypnotizes you, lulls you into an odd mixture of comfort and amazement with its repetitive narrative structure, forcing you to keep up.
Choosing a favorite story from this collection is like trying to narrow down a shelf full of classic video games to just one that you’ll be allowed to play from here on out. “Boss Battle: A Woman Made of Feathers” is that one, that complex mix of groundbreaking graphics and compelling storylines. Reading it for the first time is an experience, like the first time you tackled Super Metroid. Consider the opening of the story, complete with a language gushing with so much energy that the area between you and the words are the only thing around you that matters. The tunnel vision inducing, spell binding metaphors roll off the reader’s tongue with such ease that you’re forced to go back and reread the last sentence just to make sure you really read it correctly. Basically, it’s so good that the only way to do it justice is to drop the entire thing like a bomb and let everyone else experience it.
“When I arrived, the music changed—you rotating like a flower with a cracked stem—you rotating like you are caught in the wind: blades on a fan above us where we once slept, a buzz saw, a spinning plate. This is the room that you are locked in— deep within a house that someone else has built, rooms leading to other rooms: you in the middle of the eye, you to the east. I remember you beautiful—long necked, silver shined, wrists bent in the back of cars, hair on the window. You bit my leg once: drew blood, wiped it on your white coat. If I could fit your body inside my mouth I would, you said, and I believed you: to be swal- lowed whole like a fish is a noble way to lose one’s way—out of breath, crushed to serve a purpose. As you spin your feathers come undone—they crash into the walls, they spin in reverse. I can catch anything you throw at me: grasp it between my fingers; snatch it as it floats to the ground. I try to pluck what is left of you from the air, but the vane slices my palm. I will do better. I promise to you I will do better. Your feathers get caught in the door. They stick to the walls. Your armor is in the world, and you are naked: arms out, palms up. You have lost weight. You have a new bruise, a freckle on your hip I don’t remember. I roll my sleeve to my elbow and show you where you bit me: the teeth marks are gone—the skin has snapped back to where it should be. The color, too, is gone: no gradient to red and purple, all anomalies dabbed over. Some of the feathers return to your body; the hollow shaft cuts your skin and digs through the layers of what is left of where you stood, the vane twisting down- ward. When there are no feathers left the door will open. The music will stop. No one will know we were here.“
If you like what you’ve read, the rest of the collection won’t disappoint. This is a must read, it has become an instant favorite of mine, a rare book that I’d been eagerly anticipating in the mail that actually outdid my expectations.
A limited Gold Edition of Level End is also available for purchase. This includes collector’s case and a CD complete with extras such as the e-book file, an audio recording of Oliu reading from his work, videos of actual boss battle, and extra artwork. It’s a fitting way to experience such a unique book." - jmww blog

"Level 1: The Choosing of Attributes, of Feats; the Learning of Movement—backwards, forwards, the strafe; the Acquisition of Weaponry.
You are in a room, then another. A series of rooms is a hallway and this is where you are. There is music—do not become attached: it will change. Brian Oliu is your guide, like Virgil to Dante. To succeed, look around the room. Hear the music. Now steal everything: the water, the bodies, the swords on racks—instruments of abstraction, of breaking into pieces. These are important. Nod to Brian Oliu. Do not forget to save. Proceed to the next room.
Level 2: The One You’ve Been Waiting For, the Boss Battle, the Acquisition of Treasure.
When you arrive, the music will change. This is inevitable. Brian Oliu will expect this. No matter how many times it will happen, you will not. You will lose yourself in this room. There will be a battle but it will be between you and yourself. The text will narrate.
The text will tell you when to feel your body, when to feel your soul. The text will tell you how many hearts are beating inside your chest. The text will tell you when it is appropriate to breathe. Your reward will come in the form of gold coins, feathers, leaves; air in lungs. Be grateful and nod to Brian Oliu, your guide.
Level End: “Something that is you but made of magic.”
This is what Brian Oliu is trying to tell you: that your body is pieces, that you are pieces, that you are. That breathing is important. That when you reach the end, “there is nothing romantic about the idea of final.” That when you reach the end you will either wake up like you were or like you were not. These are the only two options.
This is what Brian Oliu is trying to tell you: that when you read—when you read anything—you are seeing “something that is you but made of magic.” You are seeing “something magic.” Listen when he tells you. Level up" - htmlgiant

When I was a kid, I took the surrealism of video games for granted. In the eighties and early nineties, video games were full of fantasies that only made sense to those who hadn't figured out the real world. Bullets were slow enough to jump over. Grabbing a maple leaf would give you a raccoon tail and the power of flight. Caves were shaped like words and giant diamonds fell from the sky.

Brian Oliu's chapbook of lyrical essays, Level End, inspired by boss fights in old-school video games, deals in similar sparkling illogics. It is a book full of gold robots and butterflies, brothers who shoot lightning from their hands, and lost loves imagined as snake-necked guardians of scarlet rooms. His prose, like the labyrinths in the games that inspired it, twists and turns in on itself. You get the feeling a hand might rise out of the floor and take you back to the beginning. In "Boss Battle: The Thing That Burrows Up To Greet Us," Oliu writes:

Think of how light I must be, for once. Think about how the sand keeps me upright instead of pushing me downward to something that we cannot see through: that the room is filled with silt and yet the hair on top of our heads is not brushing against the ceiling, that before the wind blew the dust through the doors this place was larger than my heart gave it credit for; air above our bodies for miles, our knuckles will not scrape against the plaster if we raise our fists to fight or if we raise our hands to surrender.

Images of open spaces and rooms too small to enclose what they contain abound. Level End has a fascination with consumption and being consumed. Oliu's narrators, like the video game protagonists of yore, are constantly in danger of being swallowed by sand or dirt, water, mouths, or darkness. But Oliu's narrators are not video game protagonists, and this is what keeps Level End from becoming an exercise in fanboydom. Oliu uses the mechanic of the boss battle—a fight with a super-powered enemy, typically at the end of a long slog through a dungeon, cave, or enemy stronghold—as a way of talking about moments of personal crisis. A conversation with an angry brother. An encounter with an ex. The aftermath of bad, drunken decisions. In the collection's least veiled piece, "Save Point: Inn," a group of young people staying as guests in a European house decide to eat and drink everything they can lay their hands on. It ends with the imagined aftermath of the bender:

We have drunk all of the wine. We have drunk all of the wine and we are not sorry—we deserved it, it was there and it is ours. No one will miss it. No one will wonder. Some of us are trying to sleep—some try to ignore what is happening: our beds our alibis. We shout out advice from the floor: walk slower, be quieter, forget about the spoons. We know what will happen: we will wake up in the morning and someone did not throw the empty bottles into the sea. Someone has broken a glass and there is blood everywhere. Someone will walk with a limp. We will return to the ocean from where we once came—a different shore this time.

Oliu is one of a number of young writers who are interested in transmuting the raw material of video games into epiphany and lyricism. This transformation raises questions. We've had video games for forty years. The writers coming of age now grew up with Nintendos and Super Nintendos and Sega Geneses on dusty shelves under their TVs. How has growing up with these games rewired our creative consciousness? Why has it taken video games so long—much longer than other once-dubious pop cultural institutions like rock and roll and television—to integrate into literature? What methods of understanding the world have Bubble Bobble and Super Mario Brothers given us, if any?

Level End seems to poke around the edges of that last question. The games Oliu borrows from and pays homage to are almost always treated as emblems of nostalgia: nostalgia for the 80s, for retro technology, for childhood. It's inescapable, but they signify more than that. By repurposing the mechanics and aesthetics of the video games that we obsessed over and mapped out on graph paper, the video games whose surreal and iconic imagery leaked into our dreams, Oliu is tapping into nostalgia, yes, but also memory and systems of understanding and a unique way of looking at the world. "You have eaten all of the cake," he writes, "you have eaten all of the jewels, you have put your hands to the sides of every princess, and this is where it ends." - Ian Denning

"Recently, we hung out with Brian Oliu near the Origami Zoo’s paper polar bear habitat. We laughed as the paper polar bear dived into the water, but then became sad as he unfolded, fell open and apart. We fished him out but he was too soggy to fold back into a bear, so Brian, never without a pair of scissors, solemnly cut the bear into paper snowflakes and hung them from the ceiling. Then, Brian told us a bit about his upcoming collection of video game boss battle-inspired lyric essays, Level End, as we watched the snowflakes spin and growl above us.
Tell us a little bit about Level End. Why video games? And, more specifically, why boss battles? How’d you go about writing these lyric essays?
- Level End is a collection of lyric essays inspired by videogames–most specifically the boss battle. In games when you reach the end of a level/dungeon, there is usually a much larger and scarier enemy that you must defeat to move on to the next stage. Typically, these battles fall under certain videogame tropes: there’s always a battle against some sort of dragon, another against a robot, a version of the hero, etc. I have a larger collection of videogame pieces that deal with specific 8-bit Nintendo games: Metroid, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and I wanted to include more winks to those who enjoy videogames throughout the large collection–I started thinking about other elements of videogames and the first thing that came to mind were save points and boss battles.
Is there anybody else writing video game-inspired stuff that you’re digging right now? Will anyone ever make a good film adaptation of a video game
- I’m really enjoying Mike Meginnis‘ Exits Are project–he did a collaboration with various authors over GChat where he pretended to be an old-school text adventure game. Really fun stuff. I participated in one of them as well & it should be up there soon. I’ve always considered putting together an anthology of videogame writing: wouldn’t that be fun? As far as a good film adaptation of a video game, I sincerely doubt it. I mean, maybe Zelda? You could pull that off as a nice adventure film. Of course I’d love to see a Bioshock movie but I’d be absolutely terrified that they’d screw it up incredibly.
Do you have a favorite gaming experience? Something that stands out in your mind as a pivotal moment for you as a gamer?
- I remember having an incredible amount of joy when I finally beat Super Metroid–I had rented the game, had to return it, and actually just turned around & rented it again so I could finish it. Still one of the best games of all time in my opinion. My favorite game of all time is Earthbound–one of the best endings ever, as with its sequel, Mother 3, which were huge inspirations for ‘Level End’. I’ve also had a lot of great sports video game moments: playing against friends and snatching undeserved victories.
You seem to be pretty consistently working on new writing. What other projects are in the works right now?
- Let’s see! I’m in the process of translating some work from Catalan into English: first my aunt’s book of poetry which was originally published in the ’70s. That’s a pretty straight-forward translation. I’m also translating my grandfather’s book, which was about the essence of running. That is a little less literal and is more of a book project/a biography/a lyric essay. Other than that I’m writing some lyric essays based off of pop/dance music, which has been a lot of fun.
Tiny Hardcore Press is our Press Crush of the Month. What’s working with them been like?
- So great! Roxane Gay is the hardest working woman in show business & it is an honor to be associated with her. The books are great and were a perfect fit for ‘So You Know It’s Me‘–the care she took with the book and making sure it wound up in the right hands is something that I will always cherish and appreciate. She is one of the great champions of indie literature and I absolutely adore and respect her and the work that she has done for me and other writers.
If you were a boss, what would the game be like and how would we defeat you?
- What’s the Jay-Z line in ‘Monster’? ’Everybody wants to know what my Achilles’ Heel is?Loooooooooove.’ I could probably be easily defeated with a hug. The game, I imagine, would be a game that involved a lot of leveling up, climbing, and buying cool stuff ala River City Ransom." - Interview at Origami Zoo Press

"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.
How would you categorize the pieces in Come See For Yourself? Your work is often referred to as lyric essays or literary nonfiction, but it seems the pieces could just as easily be prose poems or fiction. Is genre important to you?
- The concept of genre isn’t overly important to me, although I have never seen myself as anything but a lyric essayist: obviously there has been some major backlash against the term recently, which is all ridiculous & unfounded. To me, the essay is less in the product and more in the craft of the thing. I feel as if the people who are against the term believe that a lyric essay is created by taking a poem that doesn’t work & suddenly turning it into ‘a lyric essay’. It doesn’t work that way. I’ve always ascribed to the traditional definition of ‘essay’, in that it is an ‘attempt’. My work has been published as prose poems & as fiction and I am fine with that. However, ideally, I want the reader to know that these stories are true and that “I”, Brian Oliu, is very much a part of these stories: I don’t want the reader to lose track of the author which might be a little narcissistic of me & the opposite of, say, how fiction writers want the reader to be immersed in a story, but I feel like it adds a sense of urgency & importance to the work, almost like I am working these emotions and situations out in real time & thus telling the reader a secret.
I think that is one of the interesting things about Level End–that while the pieces within read like fiction where the narrator is traveling in a magical world and has to battle the awaiting boss, they are really about your experience as you assume the role of the character in a game. Are the pieces in Level End all based on actual games? And for people who may not play video games, can you define what a “boss battle” is?
- When playing a videogame, at the end of a stage or a level the hero typically has to fight an enemy in order to advance in the game. Typically, this enemy is unlike any other enemy the hero has faced thus far and much stronger, or has to be attacked in a certain way. In a game like Super Mario Bros., the fight against Bowser is a boss battle. The pieces are based on actual games: there are “boss battle tropes” if you will–there’s always a boss that will disappear & reappear, a boss that is underwater, and usually a boss that is deeply personal to the character. I had The Legend of Zelda in mind while I was writing this, as well as Mother 3, & I think people who are familiar with those games can see their influence.
When I was young, I played a lot of pinball at the hockey rink, but I’m not familiar with too many videogames. Even so, I could recognize the tropes, and I loved the repetition of “When I arrived, the music changed” that occurs at the opening of the boss battle pieces. I think this gets at what Mike Meginnis called the games’ “strange, surreal logics.” At the same time, there’s human/real-world experience interwoven with the game logic. Did these seemingly disparate threads come together naturally for you?
- It’s really interesting that you bring up logic because that is something that has always been very important to me as a writer: that when I write everything links back to itself in a certain way. Although I don’t necessarily intend for the reader to be completely aware of the logic, it is one of the ways that I determine that a piece is ‘done’ when I am writing it. The thread between “game” & “gamer” is a strong one: unlike films where we are watching other characters & have no say in the outcome, the gamer is in control of a character in a predetermined world. Not only that, but we “become” the character–when Mario accidentally falls into a pit we exclaim “I just died”: as a result there is a connection there; that we are a part of the journey & we have a responsibility to see the story until the end.
In a way, I can see this interest in interactivity relating to your collection of missed connections that you originally posted on Tuscaloosa’s Craigslist and that was later published as So You Know It’s Me. By choosing to post these in such a format, you allowed people who read the missed connections section to read themselves into the pieces. What was the response like to these? Did you receive any e-mails back through your posts?
- That’s a really nice way of putting it: the idea of people ‘reading themselves into the pieces’. Many people have asked if they were written to anyone in particular, & the answer is that they were written to a multitude of people all at once: strangers whom I saw about town, people in my past, a few folks who had passed away. I knew a few folks who really did think that the posts were specifically about them when they weren’t, & I like to think that is a pretty good compliment in regards to what I was trying to accomplish. I received a few emails: one from a high school girl who said that she wasn’t the girl that I was looking for but she ‘takes poetry classes’ & thought ‘it was really nice’. Another one said ‘interesting, tell me your greatest fear’, & another one said that a painting I was referring to was ‘Starry Night’ (it wasn’t). There were a few homages on the board for a short period of time, all eventually revealed to be friends of mine, which I all thought were really great.
It seems like you have a great community of friends and writers in Tuscaloosa. Can you tell me a little about what it was like to put together the collection Tuscaloosa Runs This?
- After the tornado, there was such a great outpouring from the writing community for those down here in Tuscaloosa–there are a lot of great writers & people down here and I think most folks in the literary scene knew of at least one person that has ties to Alabama. I remember waking up two or three days after the storm & thinking that I should put together an eBook of Tuscaloosa writers as a fundraiser: I put a call out on facebook (from a patch of grass on the University of Alabama campus–literally the only place in town to have Internet in the first few days after the storm) to those who no longer lived in Tuscaloosa, & let as many people around here know about the project. I wanted to get it out into the world as soon as possible so I gave everyone a deadline of a week, which I think forced & allowed people here to sit down and write for the first time since the storms. It was definitely an honor to publish those pieces. In January, I was approached by Bob Weatherly, owner of Egan’s, our favorite bar, about printing a physical copy of the book. We got the print copies in around the end of March & we have been selling them around town & online ever since.
You have a lot of pride in Alabama, from the writing community, to the football team (Roll Tide!), and you were even an early advocate of Huntsville-based rappers G-Side and received some vindication when Spin named them one of the top new acts. Do you feel like there’s a musical and artistic resurgence occurring, or has the rest of the nation just been slow to pay attention?
- I think that folks have been slow to pay attention, but I also feel as if the word is getting out there a bit quicker because of the Internet–it really does change everything and lets people know that there is quality stuff to be found & heard down here in Alabama. I believe in that Spin interview G-Side talks about the importance of the Internet community: they realized they had fans in Norway & so that’s where they went. They release everything online & have a very active Twitter account. Actually, they were one of the first people to retweet about Tuscaloosa Runs This way back in the day! But I think people feel as if Alabama is a tough place to be ‘proud of’, considering its history & its on-going problems, however, there are a lot of things that folks down here can take pride in, & I think that excites people a great deal. We can sure as hell take pride in our football team, that’s for sure!
You also DJ at Egan’s. If someone were passing through Tuscaloosa and happened to catch your night, what could he or she expect to hear?
- The secret of DJing is actually quite easy: play stuff that makes girls dance. If the girls dance, everyone else follows. I have an unabashed love of cheesy pop music & considering my New Jersey origins, the ridiculous club anthems have always been in my blood. I really love playing 90s hip hop & some gems that folks have forgotten about. I played Nelly’s ‘Country Grammar’ the last time I DJed and the place went bonkers.
What are you currently working on? Do you have any upcoming readings or publications?
- It’s pretty quiet on that front as of right now–it’s been a long few months of publicity for the two chapbooks and getting Tuscaloosa Runs This off the ground, so I’m going to allow myself to get back into writing and creating. I’ve been writing dance song/DJ-inspired pieces that I’ve really enjoyed, & so that’s my current project. I’ve been doing some translations as well: my aunt wrote a book of poetry in Catalan so I’m translating that as a warm-up to tackling a book-length project that is about my grandfather, who wrote a book on long-distance running (also in Catalan). It’ll be nice to have the summer to relax and (hopefully!) be productive." - Interview by Gina Myers

Book teaser on Vimeo

!~!~!~^^: The Princess is Definitely in This Castle 1.0 :^^~!~!~! by Mike Meginnis & Brian Oliu

Brian's Web page