By Mair Allen, 2021 Conference Assistant
This year MCWC welcomes Chris Dennis as the instructor of our 2021 Short Fiction workshop. Dennis’s short story collection, Here is What You Do, was published in 2019 by SoHo Press. His work has also appeared in The Paris Review, Playgirl, McSweeney’s, Granta, Lit Hub, and Guernica.
In Dennis’s workshop writers can expect to explore the construction of a unique narrative voice in the context of their own point of view and style. By studying prominent authors and recognizing their subject positions, Dennis says, writers in this workshop will have the opportunity to “stand directly before the lens of your own individuality, look out on an original world, and tell us what you see.” Dennis took the time to talk to MCWC about how his own positionality frames his writing, allowing questions to lead to more questions, and how revising can shift patterns into purpose.
In your essay “Eldorado, Illinois,” which was published in The Paris Review, you write about your life in a rural area and about your experience of incarceration, an event which paralleled the plot of the title story in Here Is What You Do—a decade after the story was written. Although these are common narratives in the United States today, they are often absent or erased from contemporary literature. Can you speak on the connections between place, queerness, and class in your writing?
Recently I purchased a little, regional nature almanac. It’s yellow, printed on rough, recycled paper, with a pencil drawing of a striped bass on the cover. It’s organized by months of the year, and so for instance you could open up to the month of May and learn that brown bats begin having their babies this time of year, that box turtles begin waking up, and that twayblade orchids have started blooming in sunny clearings of the forest. What I mean to say, is that I have to find a good way to be gay here, to stay connected, to have purpose. I have to search for small, queer ways to enjoy this backwards place where so many people have giant rubber testicles hanging from the hitches of their trucks, and stiff, new confederate flags nailed to the sides of their garages. It’s hard sometimes to make a place gay that doesn’t want to be gay. It’s hard to stay sober in a place where meth and Milwaukee’s Best feel like a prerequisite for survival. But I’m doing my best, and writing is one way of doing that, of making a spot for myself in a poor, conservative town where Christianity or drugs are still the primary source of comfort when something confusing or uncomfortable appears in the news or in one’s life.
I often wonder if people from lower classes think more about the construct of class? That’s almost certainly not true. My parents were what you might call “working poor.” We lived in public housing in a very rural midwestern town, and this of course defined my identity in many ways. As a young person growing up in the 80s and 90s I often thought that money, that status maybe, might be the thing that saved me from the discomfort of being gay in a county that is still ranked as one of the poorest in the state. I longed to have power over my life, and saw that class was one way of having it. It’s an interesting predicament though, being poor and queer in the middle of nowhere, because it means you have to find other resources to feel relevant, and for me that was books, and creativity.
Have you read much about the lawsuit in California in the 1970s over racial and cultural bias in standardized testing? It really stuck with me because one of the things that attorneys point to when establishing bias is word choice. They argued over things like the use of the word, “ruby” or “chartreuse” so of course many marginalized people in communities with fewer resources were like, “Our children have never seen a precious gemstone” or “How can we name a color we’ve never seen?” This resonated so much with me. Part of having access to power means having access to information, and that bridge so often gets built with money. I’m always trying to write about that problem, in particular how this problem of naming the world is even more complicated when one’s community is afraid of naming things—like queerness—because they know that naming something gives it power, and they’d just, you know, rather not.
In an interview with Emily Robbins in The Rumpus you say your stories start with questions, that “some questions just elicit a vast kind of wonderment that can only be addressed with a thought experiment—a story.” What questions are you holding and are you finding ways to work towards answers in your work lately?
I desperately want to surprise myself when I write, but I rarely do. So many obvious, boring things have to be said before I ever get to the really good stuff. For example, I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions about punishment and why as a society we’ve been so historically obsessed with punishing people. This question only really leads to more questions. I think writing towards the hope of a good answer is a useful way to work, even if you only end up with better questions.
Your workshop at MCWC focuses on how point of view, voice, and style lend purpose to writing. Your short story collection Here Is What You Do has viewpoints from many positionalities outside your own. How do you approach the complexity of writing different subjectivities? Conversely, how do you approach teaching others to access their own authentic voices in their writing?
Oh it’s just terrifying trying to write what you don’t know, but of course you begin because you can’t help it. As someone who knows very little, I think writing to discover is the most interesting work—or maybe the only work? One must be willing to fail many, many times, and to look back over those accidents for a clue, for a pattern, for a habit of thinking that might be revealing—because it’s there, among our ticks and idiosyncrasies, that a more personal, original voice can emerge. It’s interesting to look for the things that a narrator seems fixated on, and to try and understand how they’re in service of the story. I find that if I’m able to locate the particulars of someone’s vision, I can begin to understand what their motives are, and revise withmore intention, until the accidents become intentional. Kathryn Davis once told me to think of this Yeats line when revising, and I’ve found it to be very useful: “Cast a cold eye / on life, on death.”
In an essay for Guernica you write about being seen by your father when he gives you a cassette of Dolly Parton’s greatest hits and the tension of peers recognizing a part of your identity when you play it on the bus to school. Can you speak about the risks and rewards of making oneself visible through writing?
I’ve only recently begun writing nonfiction, but it’s only in my attempts to write in this new way that I can look back at the fiction I’ve written and realize how very transparent I was even when I thought I was telling a story about someone else. You know how they say that you’re everyone in your dreams? I think in most ways we are also every character in the stories we tell. I think the risks and rewards are probably the same. The risk is, people will see you, and perhaps they’ll see a you that you didn’t mean to show them. And so the reward is similar, that you might see a version of yourself you haven’t seen before.
You currently work in Public Health. Are there specific ways you balance your work and writing life or ways they inform each other?
Other than sometimes writing a few sentences while I’m at work, it’s hard to balance. I try to sneak a little writing in early in the morning, but also for a few months now my friend calls me each night and forces me to sit quietly on the phone with her for 22 minutes while we both write. I’m always uncomfortable and grouchy about it at first, but those minutes get my brain going, and I can usually eke out something that will sustain me later on. I’ve definitely found that social work, and the world of public health have kind of infected my point of view as a writer. There’s a way of looking at the world that happens because of the work we do outside of writing. We have to fight against it sometimes. I find that it’s important to resist, just a little, the point of view that the world is trying to thrust upon us, and not succumb to the very easy impulse of just writing about the things that our environment bends us toward.
To learn more about Chris Dennis, you can find him on Twitter @ChrisDnns.
General registration is now open! To register for the workshop of your choice, visit mcwc.org/2021-registration. There is no application required to attend MCWC and registration includes the morning workshop and all afternoon and evening events. All events will be held over Zoom this year.