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.

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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

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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.