Dennis James Sweeney [Host: Kristine Langley Mahler]

On today's episode of The Lives of Writers, Kristine Langley Mahler interviews Dennis James Sweeney. Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of three nonfiction books: A Calendar Is a Snakeskin  (Autofocus Books, 2023), Curing Season: Artifacts (West Virginia University Press, 2022), and the erasure essay collection Teen Queen Training (forthcoming with Autofocus Books in 2026). Kristine is the director and publisher of Split/Lip Press. Dennis James Sweeney is a cross-genre writer. 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. ____________ Full conversation topics include: -- slowing production -- reading before bed -- Dennis's forthcoming book How to Submit -- small presses -- hybridity -- Dennis's first books -- Dennis's essay Ghost/Home -- photographs -- Crohn's -- Dennis's new novella, The Rolodex Happenings -- imaginings and inventions and experiments -- performance art -- the gaps in our writing -- artmaking -- the gong moment -- meaning-making -- the real in the fiction ____________ Podcast theme music  by Mike Nagel, author of Duplex and Culdesac. Here's his music project: Yeah Yeah Cool Cool. The Lives of Writers is edited and produced by Michael Wheaton.