Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Dennis James Sweeney writes about The Rolodex Happenings from Stillhouse Press.

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Our Greenest Days

My research process goes in reverse. I write, that is, before I know anything. During those initial stages, I stay studiously far away from real research on the things I’m writing about. 

Admittedly, my novella The Rolodex Happenings was kicked off by a book called English Composition as a Happening that I was asked to read part of in graduate school. In the book, Geoffrey Sirc describes a teacher who asked his students to lie on the floor while he played a record, burned incense, and lit a single flickering candle in the middle of the room. Sirc argues that composition teachers should question the conventional structures of the composition classroom. Even better, they should consider bringing to their classrooms a “Happenings spirit.”

That image of the students in a dim room with a flickering candle was enough to start The Rolodex Happenings. When I began writing the book, Sirc’s brief, retrospective glimpse of the performance art Happenings that took place in the late 1950s and 1960s was all the research I had. Inspired, I began to write my own Happenings. A cast of characters cropped up. They lay down in city streets. They handed out pamphlets with nothing on them. They had sex in public. More characters arrived and they began building (and breaking) relationships.

As I continued to write, a plot developed in the Happenings’ subtext. The protagonist of the Happenings, a young man from the East Coast, joins a cadre of amateur artists in San Diego. Possessed with the urge to record their shared art, he begins to describe their Happenings in a Rolodex. As he writes and performs more Happenings, the young man begins to discover that his youth is not as essential as he believed. His Happenings are full of community, but they are also full of avoidance. He “grows up.” He watches his friends stay young.

I wrote feverishly during this first phrase of drafting—compulsively, even. After a couple months of returning to the story regularly, the Happenings slowed down. I added a framing story in which the narrator’s son, Guy Sutter Jr., discovers his father’s Rolodex after his death. The son reads the Happenings retrospectively, discovering who his father once was.

Only then, when I had finished the first draft of The Rolodex Happenings, did I ask myself what I had written down.

That’s when the real research came in, because I wanted to understand the historical context, including why the Happenings artists had originally performed them. In the Oregon State University library, I found a giant book bound in burlap, Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings, and immersed myself in its photographs. I learned about Allan Kaprow, who had invented Happenings. I read compilations of Kaprow’s writings and commentaries on his artistic practice. Fueled by these, I wrote a fictional critical introduction to my Happenings. I also found a passage Allan Kaprow had written about simply brushing his teeth—he treated it as art without audience, life as art—that I ended up including in the book five years later, when I was completing its final draft.

A lot changed in those five years. As it turned out, the most important research for the book wasn’t reading. It had to do with who I would become.

When I first wrote The Rolodex Happenings, I had been twenty-six. I was full of inspiration and art and belief. I had an excess of time and energy to give to my writing. I was disciplined and serious. But it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder who I was beyond the work I created. Life was an experiment. That sense of possibility was what gave energy to the Happenings.

It fueled the Happenings’ tension, too. We want so badly to create art, but eventually—frighteningly—our lives aren’t fully ours anymore. I worried, on a deep level I wasn’t aware of but that gave shape to the arc of the book, about losing my connection to art. I worried that our love, our desire, eventually leads us to give up parts of ourselves.

In the years before The Rolodex Happenings was published, however, my worries changed. Like Guy Sutter Sr., I fell in love. I moved across the country to be with my spouse. We conceived and, just as I was finishing the last round of revisions on The Rolodex Happenings, we had a child. Once he was a few months old and the household had quieted a little, I learned to sway him to sleep while using my chest of drawers as a standing desk. I finished the book while he was strapped in a baby carrier, taking a nap on my chest.

That was when the reality of the book came home to me. Here I was, editing a book about fathers and sons. The book was about being young, then becoming old, and hardly noticing the change until you wake in it. Looking back on the person I had been when I first drafted the book, I realized how frightened he had been of giving himself to anyone. Taking the leap of having a child would have felt to him like a lapse of autonomy, a potential compromise of artistic ideals. Now that I actually had a child, I felt something entirely different.

I felt really, really alive. Frightened sometimes, yes, but also at home in the ungrounded chaos of our child’s first months. Deep in the thick, I realized making art and having a child weren’t at all opposed. The fear I had written about and that I found myself editing had been a younger man’s. My heart and my mind had expanded well beyond the bounds of what I could previously imagine. My writing could be good now, I could feel it. Not everyone needs this lesson, but I did: It’s easier for your writing to be itself when it is not everything.

Fortunately, The Rolodex Happenings had begun to accommodate this fact. A few years earlier, an editor who read the manuscript had suggested there was something missing from it. I had followed my intuition to a different kind of research: family photographs. I asked my mom to share our old albums. I took the photos that felt like a story I could write in.

I used these photographs to draft the last section of the book, in the voice of Guy Sutter’s son. In the form of captions to my family photographs, Guy Jr. talks about what it was like to have Guy Sr. as a dad. The captions hint that Guy didn’t give up everything when he had kids. Instead he gained so much he didn’t know he could have, and in a way his Happenings achieved their apotheosis.

I use this Allan Kaprow quote as an epigraph for The Rolodex Happenings: “These are our greenest days. Some of us will become famous, and we will have proven once again that the only success occurred when there was a lack of it.”

For me, researching a book is like that. When the book is green and early, it is the truest version of itself. But it’s not until later—after I have researched, read, and lived—that I begin to understand in a deeper way what I have written. As I revise, I try to let those earliest tensions live. I try to bring out all that my writing knew before I knew it, before I’d ever researched enough to understand.

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Dennis James Sweeney is the author, most recently, of The Rolodex Happenings (Stillhouse Press, 2024), a novella in performance art Happenings. He is also the author of You’re the Woods Too (Essay Press, 2023) and In the Antarctic Circle (Autumn House Press, 2021), as well as four chapbooks of poetry and prose, including Ghost/Home: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted (Ricochet Editions, 2020). His writing has appeared in Ecotone, The New York Times, and The Southern Review, among others. He has an MFA from Oregon State University and a PhD from the University of Denver. Originally from Cincinnati, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he teaches at Amherst College.