The Absurdity of Art | An Interview with Courtney Denelle
Interviews
By Kimberly King Parsons
From the first pages of It’s Not Nothing, Courtney Denelle’s smart and heart-scalding debut novel, I knew I was in the presence of a different sort of writer. When we meet Rosemary Candwell—our charming, troubled, brilliant narrator—she is rightfully irritable, homeless but not without hope. Like Denelle, Candwell is wry and witty and a master of storytelling. “The doctors all say, Well said, and I swallow my contempt at their surprise. I resist the urge to tell them, Yes of course. Well said is my thing.” When I recommend this book, which is something I’ve been doing constantly, I’m tempted to mention giants like Amy Hempel, Joy Williams, and Christine Schutt as points of reference, but Denelle’s prose is as unique as it is stylish. She’s a writer who knows precisely what she wants to say, all while refusing the easy, the sentimental, the given.
Denelle and I have followed each other for some time on social media (her Instagram posts are little works of art unto themselves), and I’ve been looking forward to reading her novel for so long. Call it a gut feeling, but I just knew it would be great. Denelle and I spoke over email about dark humor, the virtues of the present tense, finding your way into voice, and more.
Kimberly King Parsons: First of all, congratulations. It’s Not Nothing is stunning, and I know I already said something like this in my blurb, but truly: I kept forgetting to breathe while I was reading. Rosemary’s voice is so special—how did you find her? Was it a line or a gesture or a scene? Did she come through quickly or did it take a while for her to show herself?
Courtney Denelle: I’d been writing scenes and stories, scenes I thought were stories, drafted in the third person, revised into first. I didn’t know it then, but it was an exercise of a sort: burying the exposition, settling into a narrator who didn’t live in her body. But Rosemary’s voice came through well before I knew what to make of what I was making. It was a single line, written on a sticky note as I rode the bus: “What you do is, you start out with the idea that most people are full of shit.” Rosemary showed up angry, engaging with the vagaries of her own discarded life.
KKP: She’s angry, but that’s also such a funny line—humor seems to gather here in the darkest places. That’s one of the things that’s so striking about Rosemary: how sharp she is, how she wields sarcasm to mask agitation, but also how joyous she can be, how buoyant she is. What role does humor play in this book? And what role does it play in your life?
CD: I’ve dumbed myself down to keep myself safe, much like I’ve made myself smaller to the same ends. Rosemary too. Yet her sense of humor is an aspect of herself that pushes back, that won’t be made dumber or smaller. When reality pulls the rug out from under her, she’s the one who saw it coming. So little surprises a person who pays attention, so why not report on that fact?
There’s a defensive measure in her self-deprecation—her way of reclaiming a teensy bit of her power by naming and claiming the punches she endures. And in her sharp wit, too. Wit is cold so wit can be cruel, though not for cruelty’s sake. But what belies all that is a kind of tenderhearted charm, borne of her movement in and out of the dark. It connects her to others.
I’m no stranger to time spent in the dark, so Rosemary’s sense of humor is an amalgam of my own. When absurdity is everywhere, when disorder is everywhere, you’ve gotta laugh—out loud and on purpose, not all of the time but enough of the time, to keep one foot in front of the other, to keep on keeping on.
KKP: It’s Not Nothing is divided into seasons and subdivided further into brilliantly titled chapters, each of which I would happily read as a standalone piece (some of my favorites: “My Dissociative Identity Walks into a Bar”; “I Dream I am Tethered to My Father”; “All Babies Are Not Beautiful”). Every bit of this novel feels taut and pressurized, with an attention to detail I generally find only in my favorite short story collections. No words are wasted. Is compression something you consider when you’re working? Are you a fan of short fiction? How did you know this was a novel?
CD: My bookcase deities are masters of the short story. The lineage of minimalist contemporary short fiction in particular. Writers who center language, who cut along the nerve, who write away from sentimentality. Stories in which there are no gods, no monsters, only mirrors. Contact with that—it steels my resolve.
I’d thought for a while I was working on a story collection. I sure was trying hard. But I had a thunderbolt experience, big movie montage energy, when I realized all the scenes and fragments and snatches of dialogue I’d saved to my desktop were not mere aspects of something I had yet to write. They were the whole shebang. From there, the work had a real careening quality.
KKP: That careening quality—when the assemblage begins—I live for that moment in a project! When you realize all the many voices you’ve been hearing are really one voice, it’s almost like you can just sit back and listen.
On that note, let’s talk about what’s happening at the sentence level here: you have such an exquisite ear. This line comes from the third page of the book, and it’s a beautiful summation of Rosemary as we meet her: “I’ve taken cover in the stations of my own discarded life. Chasing a high time, holding court. I’m awash in the attention of drunks looking to get laid. I hide my backpack beneath my barstool. Out of sight. It’s bursting at the seams with all that I have.” This characterizes Rosemary perfectly, but it’s also such an acoustically deft line. Do you think about sonics when you’re writing? Are you reading aloud as you draft? And do you find that your revision process involves reworking sentences, or do they come out pretty close to how you want them to the first time?
CD: I can’t talk about writing without talking about rewriting. The work comes to life in revision. Line edits are it. The first draft, or what amounts to a first draft, is handwritten. Me, a pencil, and a yellow legal pad. I scratch out some flabby, flapping thing; whatever it is that wants to come forth. The editing starts from word one, as those handwritten diatribes are fed into a Word doc. I write into it, reorder it. I cut and I cut. I read it aloud. I record myself reading it aloud. I listen back, and I cut again. The work is not precious. I love my red pen.
PJ Harvey’s “To Bring You My Love” is my aesthetic True North. So spare it’s audacious, so spare it’s self-evident. You don’t have to get what she’s doing to get that she’s doing it, and that’s what makes it a testament. What’s more: it’s just so fucking good. Not minimalism, as in cold and austere. It’s minimal like a knife.
Compression is what I’m after, which means the fact of myself as a novelist is pretty funny. I wrote a novel—and I couldn’t believe it! So I wrote another one. And now, another. That progress of process has deepened my fascination with compression and cadence: the ways sentences move within fragments, artful use of white space. It’s compelling to me, what happens when those intricacies are spread onto a more sprawling canvas. I’m interested in the picture it reveals.
KKP: I have a deep, unapologetic fondness for novels written in the present tense. One of my favorites is Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever. When asked about the present tense in an interview, Robison said, “I saw no other way. The main character, whose name is Money, really shouldn’t know what’s around the next curve . . . [I wanted to give] an impression that, for the characters, there’s only the moment, nothing more.” Did you choose the present tense for a similar reason? Was this book always written like this?
CD: Oh, it was the same for me and my Rosemary. The novel could only ever be told in the present tense. It put me in a better position to explore perception and denial, how both shape identity—how thinking becomes believing and, there you have it. Narrator consciousness is what I mean. In that way, the decision to keep Rosemary’s traumatic past off-screen was a deliberate choice. This is not a novel about what happened. It’s about the unbidden toll of what happened, manifest within. Rosemary is a woman responding.
KKP: I always like to ask writers if there was some aspect of writing this book that was particularly challenging or a real pain in the ass? Is there some aspect you’re really proud of? (And these might be the very same thing!)
CD: The hardest part was not in the work—I’m not an I hate writing writer. The real challenge was in my way of relating to the work once I was away from my desk. I was absent a peer group, hard up for a first reader, longing for critical feedback. Everywhere I looked I came up short.
Maybe my lonely, kind of insular practice worked to my benefit. Maybe. It’s easy enough to gussy things up in hindsight and impart a sense of inevitability. But history is only interesting because nothing is inevitable.
I’d no one outside of myself to validate me or my work. And yet I kept going. That’s the absurdity of art, I think. It’s something like deep cover optimism. You keep going, trusting that those small steps and small actions, in aggregate, will build and cohere into something new. This novel is my own self-making parable. I made myself a writer because I wrote. Writers write.
Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a debut collection longlisted for the Story Prize and the National Book Award. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and New York Tyrant, among others. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is writing a novel (forthcoming from Knopf) about Texas, motherhood, and LSD.
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