Chris Dennis
@ChrisDnns
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Author of Here Is What You Do. NEA Fellow, harm reductionist, rural gay dad. Work: Best American Essays, Paris Review, Granta, Playgirl, Guernica, McSweeney’s.
Southern Illinois
Joined April 2013
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What in the world. Is it too dramatic to say that my whole life has been leading up to this!? BEST AMERICAN ESSAYIST, who? Honestly, as someone in recovery from addiction, writing about that experience and all the things that led to it, included in BAE. Unbelievable, actually. 🖤
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Oh shit. Sally Field kinda went off here. “The garment you knit for yourself as a child.” Might have to read her memoir now.
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Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s acceptance speech for the Mark Twain Prize is such an important moment in history.
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It’s taken me a long time to appreciate Rothko. I don’t know why. Maybe I was being too impatient. I don’t have feelings about all of them but No. 10 is so heartbreaking to me. Like, where the two shades meet is devastating. How did he, in 1958, even know to do such a thing.
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Love to see library twitter having a moment. My local library is incredible. I slept in a chair, or outside on a bench when I had nowhere to live. I brushed my teeth in the bathroom. The librarian let me borrow her phone charger. lol. Then after I stopped using drugs and my book
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So real. And actually I think John Singer Sargent’s sexual identity was most on display in his portraits of women because instead of being like: here’s a beautiful woman. He’s like: oh yes sis, Elizabeth Winthrop Chaler has seen death.
I went to the Sargent exhibition at the Tate yesterday. No wonder women loved being painted by him; he made them look like people with active inner lives.
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You should probably be alone while reading this letter from Anne Sexton to her daughter Linda.
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came out the head librarian messaged me on Facebook to invite me to read. All the librarians came. It was so special. I live across the street from the library now and they have events almost every night. This week they have a display of bird books for bird day. I just love them.
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I sometimes think that Fran Lebowitz’s greatest gift to us—other than being brutally perceptive and honest and funny—is hearing her talk about Toni Morrison. Like, what it meant to be her friend.
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Thinking of this Munro line again because my mom and I were getting coffee and my mom said to the woman next to us, “You’re so beautiful. Where are you from.” And the lady said, “California but I moved here 3 years ago when my daughter died.” And she began to sob uncontrollably.
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Kate DiCamillo knows how to write an opening paragraph. She wastes no time, doesn’t fuck with sentimentality, goes right for clarity, history, and brutality. A master class.
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Fuuuuck. One thing about a Diane Seuss poem is she’s going to lead you down a strange, specific road and the last line is going to leave you standing at the end of the road holding a wet knife or a toddler or something that you didn’t even know you were holding when you started.
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Damn you, Louise Glück. How are you so beautifully reasonable.
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Official poet laureate of The Upside Down, Richard Siken, giving advice to Richard Siken’s bot is the special talk every writer wants to have with their old self. 🖤
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Can’t wait until I turn 55 and this happens to me.
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I moved into a new apt this year and was basically starting over. I didn’t have a desk to write at because furniture is SO expensive. I told my mom I was dreaming of a really long, narrow desk and she MADE THIS for me for xmas. The top is an old bench from a men’s locker room. 😍
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I’ve been holding onto this rejection letter from
@Harpers
for … 13 years? I’m bad at math but I love it because whoever wrote it told me to be less self-conscious and more confident, which is beautiful advice and I think I took it. Also: “idiosyncratic sense of rhythm.” 🥰
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@JackWilliamRtF
“I had better leg muscles.” lololol. People are really out here thinking they’re in competition with their own children.
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Imagine having your writing habits exposed like this. By the FBI. God I love him.
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Also, has anyone checked on Richard Siken? In a way, Louise Glück gave birth to him.
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Taco Bell Quarterly is prestige. I once rewrote an entire essay just so I could submit it to TBQ. They rejected it. A year later it got published in Astra Magazine and now it’s in this year’s Best American Essays. Be the Cravings Value Menu item you wish to see in the world.
Update: finished reading the submissions for TBQ7! Around 4% of them have made it into to a second round, and less than 1% will be accepted! There's no hope in creative writing. The odds are forever grim and impossible! Rejection is coming for you. Live más!
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Should we? Dare we? My New Yorker rejection is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. Well, top 20. And they sent it in the MAIL. On official letterhead. It was a long time ago, but still. I stood at my mailbox that day, looking around for someone to show it to.
Wait, are we all posting our New Yorker rejections to see who got the coolest one? Is that what you'll are playing right now?
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@justinboldaji
Guy who forces his gf to do things she doesn’t want to do but calls it deprogramming because he watched some Andrew Tate videos.
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OMG. Pick me up off the floor. For a work “that best exemplifies the art of essaying.” I told my friend, “I was just trying stuff out!” And she said, that’s literally what “essay” means. 🥹 Previous winners include: CLAUDIA RANKINE, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mary Ruefle, Oliver Sacks.
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Anne Carson’s Master Class is her sitting in a folding chair, in a beautifully lit kitchen, looking directly into the camera to say, “Just think about something.”
Waking up to Anne Carson & thinking, oh dear god, yes. “People should just quit that stuff.”
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@magicmikewrites
sometimes I just sit around thinking about how incredible Julia Louis-Dreyfus is.
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Then my mom started crying. And I started crying. And my mom just held her for a long time. The lady said she moved to Illinois when her daughter died, to be in the place where her daughter had lived and I thought, god, of course. What else do you do with grief except follow it.
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finally a vanity plate that makes sense. who are you? will you take me in your arms?
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we’ve got a bit of a Shirley Jackson situation unfolding over a Halloween decoration someone put in an old building downtown and I’m obsessed. a demonic portal has opened up, girl. the doors of darkness are open wide.
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excuse me, but is this gentleman getting fingered by the ghost of his own depression? 🥹
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Are you ever just like “Oh my god lit mag acceptance email please come save me from the darkness and cold irrelevance!” Even though you know the moment something is published you’ll just be hungry for more because you’re a bottomless abyss that can never truly feel validated?
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@ratedRIAN
@cmclymer
Tell me why “What the fuck you mean?” is the most beautiful defense of a person’s right to live their life how ever they want. ❤️
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I’ll be 4yrs sober from meth and heroin in Nov. 4yrs ago I’d been high, unemployed, with no where to live for years and now I work as a recovery/overdose prevention coordinator at this rural health dept. with 270 employees and last night they named me employee of the year. 😭
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@reluctantlyjoe
This is exactly what changed it for me! I saw two of them in person and I just couldn’t look away. More feelings kept happening the longer I stood before them.
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When parents and teachers stopped forcing kids to only use their right hand, left handedness increased dramatically. Totally unrelated, but there seems to be more beautiful, out trans people than ever before.
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The mail arrived! I'm feeling
EMOTIONS. Vivian Gornick says in the intro: these essays "fashion a persona out of one's own undisguised self." So moved that my unhinged epistolary essay about drugs has resonated with people. Best American Essays is out Oct
17th from
@MarinerBooks
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As the last moments of 2019 fall away, one must consider: the hundreds of sassy little Garfield phones mysteriously washing up on a remote French beach for the past 35 years.
Under His eye.
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Oh my god. There is just nothing like the comedy in a Joy Williams story. She’s not a surrealist, or an absurdist even. It’s the kind of realism where she’s left the door to some unreality unlatched, a door ajar to the possibility that nothing is real.
This week's story is "The Beach House" by Joy Williams.
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The true hero of this Nickelodeon doc is Drake Bell’s girlfriend’s mom for pulling him into the kitchen and being like, something ain’t right here tell me what’s going. All those adult around not saying or suspecting a fucking thing and she clocked that predator immediately. 👀
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After my conflicted rewatching of Brokeback Mountain, I’m rereading Close Range and holy shit. THE DETAILS *are* the style. Every sentence scans like a song, but the sound isn’t the style, the facts of the story are. “the wind packed enough sand to scour windshields opaque.”
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[Mary Gaitskill looks directly into camera]
One reason I've enjoyed reading fiction by women throughout my life is because they aren't obsessed with sex like so many male writers are.
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My little letter to McDonald’s about drugs and poverty and rural consciousness is now live on
@astra_mag
!!!
💀🖤🍔
Also, it’s an essay about harm reduction, and all the ways we can help people who are unhoused and addicted reduce the harm they suffer.
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When I tell you I’ve been walking through my days STUNNED, dying to say I got a phone call and a little voice on the other end said, “Hello, this is Katy from the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT for THE ARTS.” I said, “No it isn’t!” What an honor. Thank you
@NEAarts
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A high school alt ed teacher came up to me today to say she taught my essay about recovery from
@parisreview
to her class.
I dropped out of high school. She said, most of my students are at-risk and I think your story really mattered to them. Slay me.
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I laughed so hard I thought my eye was going to pop out over
@jimbodragclown
’s impression of Shirley Temple. It was so unhinged and one of the funniest moments ever seen on your television. It just goes to show that people who are mad about drag are robbing themselves of joy.
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Best writing advice I ever received was from my grandmother, who said, “Why don’t you just write a bestselling series like Debbie Macomber, or those Twilight books.”
My writing advice is pull a bestseller out of your ass
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@YuckyTom
Also. Did you know that as the UK transitioned from coal gas to natural gas there was a dramatic decrease in suicide rates.
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Still obsessed with this oil painting of a Big Mac by
@NoahVerrier
that
@astra_mag
used to illustrate my essay. So wet. So tender.
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now queers, hear me out, what if we made this one thrilling amendment to our mascot.
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It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York…
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I adore the story my lesbian mothers tell about their first date, where after eating a bowl of cereal together one said to the other, “Well, let’s get this over with.” Twenty years later they’re still getting it over with. Probably the greatest love story ever told.
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Omg
@maggiesmithpoet
, did you hear Julia Louis-Dreyfus reading your poem on her podcast? She gets choked up while reading it. 🥹
It’s the episode with Amy Tan! The whole series is incredible.
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Literary icon Kathryn Davis once told me that during her first five novels she would sit on the porch each evening and revise whatever pages she’d written that day while enjoying a single cigarette. So now I do that too, except for the writing and revising part.
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We gave out 500 Narcan kits at the state fair and 2 people came up to say they used the Narcan we gave them at last year’s fair. A pastor from Olney, Illinois revived a lady at church and a mom sent her Narcan with her son to college and he used it to save his roommate’s life. 🥹
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I don’t know where I’ve been the past 400 years but Caravaggio really was a sorcerer of light. THAT snake was painted by a very homosexual Catholic whose rent was always due, or a steel town girl on a Saturday night looking for the fight of her life.
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@maryspencerneal
That’s Drew Barrymore. She’s been alive for hundreds of years. Which actually makes sense.
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@starbroken1980
Libraries everywhere have become a safe place for people and it’s incredible how librarians have decided to meet the need. Instead of bearing down on its singular purpose—providing free media—they’ve expended it.
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This seems so obvious but— I listened to Judith Butler’s talk about Who’s Afraid of Gender and she said: the political maneuver of the right is to convince people that freedom is dangerous. And my god. I can’t stop thinking about it now.
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Come closer, dear reader. I wrote about that singular moment in a young boy's life when his father buys him his first Dolly Parton album.
My essay about
@DollyParton
, childhood development, and geology is up today
@GuernicaMag
!
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HONEY. Look what arrived in the mail from
@GrantaMag
with my name on the front! That cover design. This essay is what happens when a gay prison abolitionist opens up about predators and consent. I’ve never felt more thoughtfully edited.
On newsstands July 29th.
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@taliaotg
@metrolosangeles
Yesssss. Go off queen. Addiction isn’t an issue we can arrest our way out of.
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@joelyfitch
It’s Sally Field, actress, sensitive icon. From her episode of the Wiser Than Me podcast with
@OfficialJLD
It’s so good.
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Think that’s called “edging.”
is there a verb for the act of putting something into an online shopping cart that you will absolutely never buy, but you put it in a cart anyway, just to see how it feels
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Julia Louis-Dreyfus gave me my first hit tweet. After all she’s already given me. Been waiting for this moment just so I can say I wrote a book that my grandma called, “Fiction” and “A book.”
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@michelletandler
Michelle, the good news is you’re not the first person to propose a punitive solution to substance use. It’s actually been the primary response in the US for nearly a century. Unfortunately it doesn’t work and we now have decades of evidence to show that.
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@vermillionpearl
It’s hard to articulate. But something about that tiny tributary between those huge blocks of color just seems so fragile, I guess.
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Reading
@lsjamison
and I’m trying to articulate for myself, what is this style? What is this voice? Because it’s so compelling and I think the only way to say it is: it bears the honest, self reflection that often happens when you’ve just woken up from an important dream.
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I started writing about Dolly Parton to say what she meant to me as a kid, but then it turned into an essay about masculinity and how my dad, who noticed how gay my taste in music was, made it a point to show me that my joy was his joy too. A true ally. Happy Father’s Day pops.
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Look at me and my friend Gina at senior prom, 1997. Well, her senior prom since I dropped out the year before. She took me anyway. Still besties all these years later, but it was definitely an era where we agreed never to smile in photos, for emo reasons. 🖤
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l used
@McDonalds
as a harm reduction site when I had nowhere to live. It was a safe place to go and it made the days more bearable.
Don't think I'd ever written about this if
@TBQuarterly
hadn't started a conversation about the strange bonds we all form with corporations. 🖤
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My friend keeps telling me about this collective where if someone dies or becomes disabled, leaving an unfinished sweater or quilt or embroidery (any textile project), they connect you with a volunteer who will finish the project for your loved one. 🥹
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