Dennis Must Interview

INTERVIEW WITH DENNIS MUST FROM TheCelebrityCafe.com ARCHIVES

DOM) The book says that the stories are fictional, however some aspects seemto parallel your own life. What is real and what is fiction in the book?

DENNIS) In "Poetry Is A Kind Of Lying," a poem by Jack Gilbert, the last stanza reads: "Degas said he didn't paint/ what he saw, but what/ would enable them to see/ the thing he had." Writing is a process of discovery for me and I hope for my reader. I explore certain events I've experienced in an effort to cause them to reveal what I wasn't able to understand or articulate when they unfolded. Truman Capote believed an experience must gestate in the writer's consciousness at least twenty years before he or she can sufficiently capture its truth. I agree. Yet, when close family members read the stories in BANJO GREASE, a not unusual response is "That's not the way I remember what happened!" Camus' "The Stranger" speaks to the subject "What is real? What is fiction?" convincingly, I believe. Suffice it to say that I do write close to my autobiographical bone.

DOM) You said, "The first one dusted me up a bit until I came to terms with it." What did you mean by that?

DENNIS) To your question "What is real and what is fiction in the book?" I initially wanted to answer "Yes," because often I'm unable to distinguish between the two. Most writers of literary fiction, I believe, would agree.

Let me offer an analogy. One of my grown daughters bought a used Volkswagen Bug a few years ago and firmly stated, "Dad, it's so much smaller than the one we owned when I was a child." The book's characters in truth are much smaller now, too, decades after I first interacted with them. Consider the uncle and aunt in the story "Banjo Grease" who lived year round in a tiny trailer at the rear of a drive-in theatre, and in-season acted as its janitors and concessionaires. They were a prolific source of fascination to me growing up; I wanted to live forever behind that mammoth luminous screen in an old cow field watching Jimmy Cagney and others appear nightly. Now, decades older, I see the pair as much "smaller" and a little sad. These stories are as "real" as my daughter's memory of her childhood Volkswagen Bug.

DOM) It sounds as if recalling the past, for you as with most people can be a bit sad. Do you feel that this is part of the reason that you labeled the book as fiction, to create some healthy distance?

DENNIS) Vladimir Nabokov wrote: "We think not in words but in the shadow of words." I couldn't have called this collection anything other than fictional.But, as you suggest, the label does afford the author a serious "out" if called to task for gritty realism.

DOM) Having also written a few plays that have been performed off-Broadway, do you think any of these stories might turn into a play?

DENNIS) My last produced play, "Nightmoths," was performed at the Westbeth Theatre in Greenwich Village, New York, 1974. A growing family and financial matters caused me to cease playwriting and seek more substantial employment. I didn't write for nearly two decades until the opportunity again presented itself in the mid-nineties. But then I had no access to either a theatre or actors like were available to me in NYC, so I turned to the short story.Writing for the theatre is a collaborative experience; one of the reasons why I enjoyed it so much. If the conditions for doing a play were to present themselves once again-yes, I'd love to turn any of these stories, or others, into a script. How about "Oh, Josephine" where the eighteen-year-old gets circumcised?

DOM) I don't think "Oh, Josephine" and the circumcision scene would entice the lines out the door. If the finances allow it, would you consider focusing on playwriting?

DENNIS) I'd welcome the opportunity to be involved in the theatre again, but not to the detriment of writing fiction. Stories are created and read in solitude, whereas theatre is a public experience both for the playwright and the audience. The crafts are very different instruments and each, I believe, fulfills a creative need that the other is unable to meet. Buddy Hart in my story "Say Hello To Stanley" is hooked on the funky sound of a Hammond B3 but turns to the piano to round out his life.

DOM) But fiction is something you entirely control, playwriting forces you to need to trust the actor's interpretation. Does that ever get frustrating?

DENNIS) To have an actor understand your work then give it life in a way you, the writer, hadn't fully grasped is the ineffable delight that I miss most about working in the theatre. The roll of the dice occurs when the playwright has no say over who is about to interpret her words. It's why I directed my own plays, but acknowledged by having done this, the craps were loaded. It was only in the auditions that I had to grit my teeth.

DOM) What was the process in writing this book? Did you just decide to put the short stories together after having written them, or did you have the sequence of short stories in mind the whole time?

DENNIS) The BANJO GREASE collection was written over a two-year span, 1996-98.Perhaps because I hadn't written for so long, the tales were waiting to be released. All I recall is that they came forward in a flurry . . . as if they were backed up on the tracks. At some point I sensed they were a complete set, and, since most of them had been published in various literary journals, I decided to seek a publisher. It was my urge to explore the rite of initiation that causes them to be interlocking and, I hope, have a cumulative force.

DOM) What do you mean by, "It was my urge to explore the rite of initiation that causes them to be interlocking and, I hope, have a cumulative force."

DENNIS) Coming of age is often referred to as if it occurs at a singular event, frequently around sex, in a young person's life. In actuality the rites of initiation take place in one's life not unlike a ship moving through the locks of a canal to higher water. The primary difference being each event must be satisfied by a ration of innocence. Take the story "The Pruner" where the boy narrator watches his inebriated grandfather climb about in an ancient apple tree in their backyard while pruning it with a dull handsaw. "It will give a better harvest," he insists. The boy marvels at the elderly man's dexterity and how the tree no longer looked "arthritic." When his father returns home from work that night he explodes: "Is he coming back tomorrow to trim the f...ing doors?" And the following spring when the tree remains fallow and has to be cut down, a piece of the boy dies, too.

Most of the stories in BANJO GREASE focus on the various locks of initiation from childhood to early adulthood which the narrators experience. They chronicle in an often serio-comic manner how one exchanges naivete; for worldliness and suggests what price has been paid in the process.

DOM) What did you learn about yourself from writing the book?

DENNIS) I'm still working on this; however, looking back upon the work, it's a kind of mirror in which I see myself and that of the reader over my right shoulder. The tales in BANJO GREASE would be nothing more than amusing, sometimes painful, anecdotes about life and death exchanged over a tavern table moving to outside a factory's entrance in small town America. No worker having a few beers or a boilermaker following a workday with his or her friends would call the stories "provocative." Yet, this label is often used in characterizing the book. I've become more sensitized to the influence of class and circumstance on the manner in which we view experience in this culture, and how starkly dissimilar our readings often are.