Chris Dennis Gets Gritty with Short Story Collection

The queer memoir is, at the risk of sounding a bit insensitive, a little overdone. Don’t get me wrong; we all have stories to tell, but when everyone is writing a memoir, it loses a little bit of punch.

That’s what makes Chris Dennis’ writing so special. He takes the concept of the queer memoir and subverts it into a dark, brutal, and powerful series of short stories. His approach makes his collection an easy read, and we wanted to know a little bit more about the monster inside the man. Here’s what he had to say.

What inspired you to write this book?
I wanted to write a book about how sex is sometimes not about sex. Sometimes it is about power, and identity, or anxiety, or a need for love. I was curious about the ways seemingly arbitrary signifiers of masculinity, femininity, or androgyny define our sexual desires. I was interested in the way any random moment might be calcified in the heat of a person’s sexual development.

Our beliefs and our vulnerabilities become the architecture of our fantasies. I tried to show characters whose intellectual lives manifest in their sex life: two prison inmates, a traumatized orphan, an obsessive professor, Martin Luther King Jr., a Cher fanatic, an out-of-control widow.

What shaped you to write the way you write?
My dad is a drummer. He played country music mostly, and we listened to a lot of country music in our house while I was growing up. The tradition of storytelling in country music had an enormous impact on my understanding of what good communication could look like and sound like.

Music taught me the importance of making public what might feel very private and was my earliest encounter with poetic language. It made me long to communicate in that way, made me aware of the power of telling stories, of being open and honest about hardships, and pain, and poverty, and love, about the inherent poetry in sadness and longing.

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What made you start writing?
I grew up in a very small coal mining and farming community in the 80s and 90s, so the characters and narratives of country music resonated for me in a lot of crucial ways, except for one: the appalling lack of queer narratives. I saw how revelatory and transformative storytelling could be and badly wanted to be a part of it, to see people like me in the stories I loved.

I started writing because I was inspired by songwriting, but I eventually had to write the kinds of stories I wanted to read. There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes from not hearing or seeing other people who love like you do or feel like you do. There has been an incredible deficit of queer life in literature, and this had a profound effect on my identity, on my understanding of who I was.

It’s important to tell LGBTQ stories for the same reasons it’s important to see stories about black astronauts or female presidents; because stories help us to see what is possible; they allow us to dream of what we might not otherwise dream, to imagine ourselves in spaces we’ve never been before or even knew existed.

I sometimes don’t know how I lived before I found Richard Siken, Adam Haslett, Annie Proulx, James Baldwin, David Sedaris, Alice Walker, Tennessee Williams, Mary Oliver, Carl Phillips, Luis Negron, Oliver Sacks, John Waters, Stacey Richter, Kimberly King Parsons, or Saeed Jones.

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Did you have any exposure to queer narratives when looking for inspiration in your writing?
In the small town where I grew up, there were very few openly gay people, and the most notable of them was a man who was murdered in 1980, the year after I was born. His body was found long after he’d died in an abandoned house across the street from where we lived.

It was an ongoing piece of lore in our town, and always with this implication that his sexuality somehow explained his death. No one was ever convicted of the crime, but after reading the police reports and talking with people in the community, I’m desperate to write his story.

What do you want people to get out of this collection?
The collection is full of difficult people, and writing it helped me to more fully consider the sort of people who are difficult to love, people whose behaviors are hurtful or hard to understand. I hope others can leave the book with a more complicated sense of the ways we cope with trauma, of the wild ways we work to escape darkness. I hope people will come away with a more empathic view of mental illness. Unkind people need our kindness the most, and yet, I tried to make a place in the book for the value of necessary rage.