Word count: 152
Paragraphs: 2
There’s this photograph of us from October 2016 when John visited Salt Lake to read at the downtown library from his then-new linguistically and imaginatively explosive collection of interconnected stories about our society of the celluloid spectacle, Movieola!, part rowdy Robert Coover, part zany Italo Calvino, all vital John Domini, perhaps my special favorite among his work. We’re sitting together in an Italian restaurant and John’s holding up a signed copy of Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street which he’d discovered earlier that day at Ken Sanders Rare Books. You should see John’s broad smile, that spark in his eyes. They’re emblematic of him: an author/reviewer with a sharp, discerning, exuberant, encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary fiction who came alive when talking about the books he adored; a passionate literary activist who was happiest when bringing together writers and readers around literal and metaphoric tables; an always supportive, tender-hearted friend. I’m heart-hammered he’s gone.
Lance Olsen is author of more than twenty books of and about innovative writing, including the novels Theories of Forgetting, from which this passage is an excerpt), Calendar of Regrets, and Nietzsche's Kisses. He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.