Avani Sambra Interviews Dennis James Sweeney
Dennis James Sweeney is the author of How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses, a guide for writers. His first book, In the Antarctic Circle, won the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize and was a Debut Poetry Book of 2021 in Poets & Writers. You’re the Woods Too, his second book, was a Small Press Distribution bestseller and a finalist for the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Prize. Most recently, The Rolodex Happenings won the Stillhouse Press Novella Prize.
His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, The New York Times, The Southern Review, and Witness, among others. Formerly a Small Press Editor at Entropy and Assistant Editor at Denver Quarterly, he has an MFA from Oregon State University and a PhD from the University of Denver. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he teaches at Amherst College.
From Associate Editor Avani Sambra: The Rolodex Happenings, published in early 2024 via Stillhouse Press, is an inventive novella written by Dennis James Sweeney that blurs the line between truth and fiction. This book explores the power of connections through fragmentary storytelling by illustrating how people, events, and secrets intertwine in unexpected ways. When Guy Sutter Jr. discovers his father’s old Rolodex filled with mysterious names and cryptic notes, he’s pulled into a web of intrigue that forces him to question the nature of performance and the stories we choose to believe. Clever and timely, The Rolodex Happenings is a brilliant meditation on the power of narrative and the ways history refuses to stay buried.
Avani Sambra: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your journey as a writer?
Dennis James Sweeney: My journey as a writer didn't start in college, like many writers I know. I didn't discover it until after. I loved reading fiction when I was in college, but afterward, I was like, I don't want to just read this stuff. I want to make it! I want to be part of this conversation. So I started writing right after I graduated, when I was 22, and just did that for an hour or more a day ever since.
I made all my decisions based on, “How can I get that hour or two a day to write? How can I find community around this thing that I love doing?” That meant getting an MFA after a few years. Eventually it meant getting a PhD. It also meant getting involved with online publications that did stuff related to writing.
I just kept doing all those things over time. And after a while, I ended up having written some books. I thought, “I'll send these books out.” They ended up getting published—after many tries—and then I got lucky and got an academic job, so now I'm teaching at Amherst College. But basically, I just kept showing up, kept writing an hour or two a day, and kept reading. And I got really lucky.
AS: What inspired you to write The Rolodex Happenings, and which of your main literary influences do you feel had the most impact on this work?
DJS: Tim Jensen, who oversaw the composition teachers at Oregon State, where I went to get my MFA, had us read the introduction to the book English Composition as a Happening by Geoffrey Sirc. It talked about how you can bring a kind of “Happenings spirit” to the classroom and make teaching writing way more interesting. So instead of having people sit there and be like, “All right, let's just work through the words, and let me tell you how to do it,” there's a scene about how this teacher turns off all the lights and makes everybody lie on the floor while they listen to a record in the dark. That's how they were going to learn to write.
I thought that was so awesome, because I've always wanted to have that kind of wildness with my teaching as well as my writing. I didn't know about Happenings until I read that. I had heard the word but didn't know what they were, so it got me to research them. Soon after that research process, or really during it, I started writing my own Happenings.
AS: In your previous works, like In The Antarctic Circle, you often explore fragmentary storytelling. How did your storytelling evolve or shift as you moved into this novella?
DJS: Fragmentary narratives are a big part of how I approach things. In The Rolodex Happenings, it's like an iceberg: there's all this stuff that's happening already, and then the “Happenings” that are recorded are just these tips of the iceberg that come above the surface. They give you a hint of all that's below it. Because as you've seen in this book, it's a story of growing up, figuring out who you are, and figuring out what you want to do as a creative person. The happenings themselves are just these brief peaks in that journey.
In The Antarctic Circle was more like random points on a map that are just popping up. I have no idea what the narrative is between them, because that book was more like poetry. The Rolodex Happenings, on the other hand, was such a narrative book that I wanted to ask, “What happens when we try to envision what's going on behind the scenes?” Almost everything behind the scenes is suggested, but I hope that enough things are pointing to what's there, that you can get a sense of the narrative and make it a story.
AS: In the novella, the narrative weaves together themes of family, legacy, the nature of art, and performance, all through the lens of a son uncovering his father’s hidden past. How did these themes shape the story, and how do you see the concept of a “happening” fitting into this exploration?
DJS: I wrote this book originally when I was doing my MFA. I was 25 or 26, I did not have kids, and I wasn't in a long-term relationship, so I was envisioning what it would be like to be experiencing this kind of stuff from the point of view of a younger person who wasn't in a family and who was afraid of getting tied down. Those themes of how creativity fits into a life were mostly coming from being scared that, at some point, I was going to have a family and stop being creative.
I wrote the book, and I was revising it on and off for a long time. But in the meantime, I got married and I had a child. Suddenly, I was coming from the point of view of the older character living in a family context, still creating things. I was looking back on these fears as somebody who had realized that those fears are valid, but they're not going to play out the way I thought they would. You can still live with magic and creativity even when you have kids, even when you're a parent.
Allan Kaprow himself, the creator of Happenings, eventually went from his public Happenings to this silly stuff that he did at home. He would brush his teeth, and then he would write down what it was like to brush your teeth. And that was the performance. That's the kind of experience I keep on having as a parent and as an artist. For example, my kid is three and a half now. He loves telling stories, and so we're telling stories all the time in our household. It's that transition from the compartmentalized Happening—the isolated act of creation—to how it's all bleeding out into the rest of your life. And instead of that being scary, that's okay.
AS: Thinking about how The Rolodex Happenings explores the tension between truth and fiction as Guy Sutter Jr. pieces together his father’s past through these typewritten cards, how did you approach crafting a story where memory, performance, and legacy intertwine? Did you find yourself questioning the nature of truth as you wrote?
DJS: Sort of! I was wondering all the time, “Where is this stuff coming from? Why am I having these scenes occur to me?” They're almost like memories, especially in the second half, which is made up of these captions to photographs that are ostensibly coming from Guy Sutter. They're actually photographs from my family! My parents are in them, there are people I know in them, and I know exactly who those people are, but they are not the people in the story. The story is very unlike my own life. Except that Guy Jr. grows up in the Midwest. But other than that, the story is very, very different.
AS: While reading, I found myself constantly questioning whether the events were real or not. How did the incorporation of personal pictures contribute to the sense of authenticity in the story? And did you include any personal events in this story?
DJS: I think the reason I felt comfortable putting these family photographs in there was that it was so different from my own life. It's not auto-fiction, it's not my own life in any content-type of way. I was okay with including all that because I knew it was so separate.
AS: Many emerging writers dream of breaking into the literary journal world. Based on your experience, what advice would you give to a writer trying to get their work published for the first time?
DJS: My advice for people who are just delving into this landscape is that it can be easy to see literary journals as a scary threshold, this place where there are gatekeepers who are going to select your work and tell you if you're good or not. But I try to see it instead as a place where it's just two people on either side who just want to build a connection. Somebody is reading that work, wanting to discover writing that's magical to them. And then there's somebody writing who wants to connect with an editor who believes in what they're doing.
And so if you can see the work of submitting to literary magazines and journals as an act of connection, rather than an act of trying to get some qualification or trying to gain prestige—rather than seeing it as this impersonal, scary process—it can help you feel better about the process for longer, I think, and help you stick with it.
AS: Final question- what’s next for you? Are you working on another book or creative project right now?
DJS: I have a couple of projects that I'm still revising and thinking about. One is a book of poems. They felt like a transmission in the same way that The Rolodex Happenings did; they came, and I had to revise them and work on them a lot, but I still don't know where they came from and whose they are. So it's cool to work on them because it doesn't feel like my work. I'm also working on revising a novella about Antarctica, which I wrote about in my first book.
I'm excited to go back and finish up those manuscripts, but I'm also excited just to write some new, totally weird stuff. I'm ready to engage the side of my brain that's totally creative, no rules, no restriction, that can just go to the blank page and do whatever it wants. Whether that turns out to be something publishable or that anybody will ever see is another thing. But I love being in that process, so I'm excited to go back to it and just create something.
This interview was conducted via Zoom in March 2025 and has been edited for clarity.
Avani Sambra is a former Associate Editor and Editorial Intern with Haydens Ferry Review; they recently completed their undergraduate degree at Arizona State University.