Gina Nutt: “Court of Common Pleas” follows a man who has been unfaithful to his wife, and whose only chance of returning home is getting past the dragon his wife has rented. What drew you to revenge dragons? Were they an early inspirational seed, or did another element of this story initially intrigue you?
Josh Denslow: I’ve always been a little obsessed with dragons sitting on top of treasure and guarding it. I think it stems from reading The Hobbit multiple times when I was a kid. In fact, when I realized that I was indeed writing a collection where each story featured a different magical creature (before I ever heard the word COVID or knew what a lockdown would be like), the dragon was the one I was most excited to attack. As you can probably guess, I was certain that a dragon was going to be sitting on something! Guarding it!  

I loved the image of a massive dragon perched on a house in the middle of a normal suburban neighborhood. And since every story in the collection dealt with a couple at a turning point in their relationship, a dragon suddenly seemed like the best way to keep a cheating husband from returning home. Since I don’t necessarily consider myself a hyper visual writer, it’s interesting to think that this one started with such a vivid image. I don’t even usually picture what my characters look like!

But of course, starting with this image made the story itself really complex, because now my narrator had cheated on his wife, which immediately catapulted him to the worst of the narrators in the collection. It was a fun, but challenging, hole to dig myself out of.

GN: First-person narration keeps us close to the incremental shifts in the narrator’s self-awareness as he moves through this story. Could you share a bit about your experience writing—and revising—this narrator’s perspective? Were there specific moments you found yourself dialing into his evolving sense of self, value, and purpose? Did you try any pathways that turned into dead ends?
JD: The first iteration of this story was as a flash fiction piece. I’d been reading for SmokeLong Quarterly for several years, and I was trying to feel my way in that world in my own writing. In fact, when UNO Press accepted the full collection of MAGIC CAN’T SAVE US, it was one of the last remaining flash pieces that had survived all the rewrites. Flash wasn’t a form that I had ever completely thrived in, so this dragon story got to have a nice evolution.

In that first version, the narrator was too flippant. Too non-repentant. The story lurched quickly to the interaction with the dragon, and we didn’t get much of the narrator’s thoughts at all. His indiscretion was relegated to the background to make way for the concept.

But over the years, as this collection had grown and each of the narrator’s inner lives became more profound, I realized that this story in particular had a ton of room for interiority and a fresh direction. I achieved this by literally taking that core original idea of the dragon perched on the house and then starting over completely from scratch. This time around, I wanted to be with the narrator in the moment when he made his decision to cheat. I wanted to know more about where he was in his life. But what truly changed everything for me, was the addition of the son. By having a child caught in the middle, it heightened all the tension while making room for some new moments of humor. 

One of the devices of the collection is that each narrator is unnamed, and all the stories are told in first person. But as I went through “Court of Common Pleas,” I discovered it wasn’t enough to only know what he was thinking in the moment. It became very important to show how he processed his actions. The biggest moment was when he realized how he lied to himself about his actions. That he focused on his good things and pretended the bad things didn’t exist. What I hoped was to have a narrator who does something in my mind that is unforgivable, but somehow not create a monster. The reader can dislike him but still accompany him on his journey. Giving him a strong relationship with his son helped me navigate a few thorny patches. Namely the phone call the son makes to his mother where he reveals everything. The narrator could have tried to intervene or ask his son to lie on his behalf, but he sits by and lets his son make the decision that feels right for him.

Of course, it’s not until the dragon shows up halfway through the story that our narrator truly has to make his case. But this early establishment of the character and his inner life gives more depth to the rather absurd interaction he has later with the dragon.

GN: The humor here is also deeply resonant. Kids saying things their parents wish they hadn’t said. The dragon’s attitude and dialogue. How do you approach and refine comic moments? What does humor open within your work?
JD: I’m going to take this as the highest compliment! Specifically the idea that my humor is deeply resonant. It is exactly what I’m going for. I always want the humor to flow from the characters and the situations naturally. But it’s also important that the humor in each of the stories in the collection help shine a light on the themes tying them together. Most of the time, humor comes out most easily for me in the dialogue. I find the voice and the timbre, and typically, I let the characters talk amongst themselves and the humor appears without me having to try very hard. In this story, and many more in the collection, I imagine the interior thoughts of the first-person narrator as dialogue as well. Then I’m basically transcribing their thoughts, and by thinking of it that way, I find a lot of humor there as well.

The way I approach humor is with as light as a touch as possible. If I begin a story by saying “I’m going to write a funny story” it never turns out funny. I can’t really explain it. I have to pretend I’m not trying to be funny. I come up with an idea, and then I begin writing it in as serious a manner as I can muster. Hardly any of my stories have funny hooks. For example, the “Court of Common Pleas”: A man cheats on his wife, and she then hires an immense murderous dragon to perch on the house to keep him from returning. I don’t expect many readers would immediately jump to the conclusion that the story is humorous. And I don’t typically pitch my stories as humorous either, because I think that readers might then assume I’m not taking the heavy topics I explore seriously. But I am! So the humor lives in there, waiting to be discovered. I want people to laugh, but I don’t necessarily want to be a comedy writer.

I will add that you are exactly right about the son and the dragon’s dialogue adding humor despite the infidelity and somber tones. They are funny because they are unexpected. It’s possible, unless I’m entirely off track here, that humor is funniest when you don’t expect it.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
JD: I love the idea of a creative mosaic. Life is a mosaic of things that influence me every day! Being around my three children could give me enough material to last a lifetime. But I truly immerse myself in music. Music finds its way into every aspect of my life. I don’t  necessarily get into the obsessive aspects of it. The way I accumulated thousands of CDs (back when that was a thing) or how every week I listen to dozens of new releases or how I find people in my life to constantly share music with.

The way music directly affects my writing is in rhythm. I have been playing the drums since childhood, and even when I’m not playing, I feel rhythm inside me. The sound of my feet on the pavement. The sound of the turn signal in my car. The sound of children playing outside. I hate to admit it, but I find myself tapping along with those things which I know can be very annoying to those who happen to be around me. My wife and I played in a band for a number of years and that experience of writing songs and playing shows and promoting ourselves also helped me with those aspects of writing fiction that I sometimes want to overlook.

But the biggest influence music has on me is in my actual craft. I could never write a craft book or explain anything about writing to another human being, but I know when something I have written is finished when the flow that I felt inside is somehow manifesting on the page.