Very Normal Characters: An Interview with Josh Denslow, Author of Super Normal
Josh Denslow isn’t just a writer. He’s a musician, a screenwriter, and a father. A lot of us hold multiple roles in our lives, of course, and the characters in Denslow’s novel, Super Normal, do too. But they have an added identity that most of us don’t: superhero. Make no mistake, this isn’t a fantasy or sci-fi book. It is literary to its core, and Denslow doesn’t abandon quality writing for the sake of an engaging plot. The book is less about the superpowers the characters have and more about their relationships with each other.
It’s the classic story of a grown sibling reunion at their childhood home. While balancing their individual and collective neuroses, siblings Beth, Taylor, and Denise return to their childhood home, confronting their past and ongoing grievances. They do this in the wake of learning about their mother’s terminal illness diagnosis while also balancing “normal” things: relationships, jobs, finances. But they’re not normal—Denise can become invisible, Beth can fly, and Taylor can heal people. When the son of a potential beau catches Denise going invisible and then goes missing, the plot takes on much higher stakes. The siblings are forced to confront their familial ties and the question: Can you be super and normal?
I spoke with Denslow via email about his latest book, Super Normal, published by Stillhouse Press late last year. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jennifer Fliss: Beth, Taylor, and Denise all have superpowers, yet that hasn’t saved them from struggling in life. How do you see this parallel reflected in the way average people move through life?
Josh Denslow: I wanted to do a few things with Super Normal, but to accomplish it, I had to create the most believable world possible. These were real people with the types of problems real people have. They lived in our exact world. Nothing was out of place. And they were dealing with broken relationships and parents dying and feelings of inadequacy.
Once that was in place, I wanted to imagine what it would be like to give three characters superpowers and how I thought someone might react in our real world. In this instance, I think they would hide them. They would feel too different. They would be scared to stand out. They would feel compelled to blend in with the rest of the world. So the powers go dormant, or when employed, are done so in private.
In doing this, I wanted to make them more relatable. I wanted people to see themselves in these characters through their fear to take a chance, which comes for us all. In a world where the path for those without superpowers isn’t established, it would take a true trailblazer to lead the way. My book isn’t about trailblazers.
JF: Why siblings, then? What is it about family dynamics that makes things different from, say, friends?
JD: I think what’s interesting about family over friends is that there is this internal pressure to forgive family. That we have to make things right. That any transgression is fixable. Whereas in friendships these things can sometimes be dismissed more easily. In Super Normal, the family has grown apart, but they feel beholden to each other. They feel that they are required to make things right, especially since their father is dead. Their father had been the force holding them together, and as the three siblings return to their childhood home, their sense of loyalty to each other instigates a change that may not have been possible without the pressure of family.
JF: How did you balance literary fiction with what is typically associated with genre writing, i.e., stories that involve superpowers?
JD: I’ll be honest and say I’m not one hundred percent clear on what makes something literary fiction. In my mind, and others may disagree with me, literary fiction has an emphasis on character over plot. Not saying they can’t have staggeringly intense plots as well, but the “literary” part is the creation of living creatures. So if we as the readers are invited to peer inside and we believe, like truly believe, then the plot can have monsters or spaceships or fairies or whatever. The genre is where they put it in the library I guess, but the stories that stand out to me, no matter the genre, are the ones that trick me. I’m not being told a story, plotted in a thrilling way, but I’m being shown a life. So if I go with that personal definition, I can be literary and do anything else I want to do with no repercussions!
JF: This is a short novel. How intentional was the length and what did it do to serve this particular story?
JD: Truly not intentional at all. I worked on this novel for twenty years and had many drafts. The story changed drastically from draft to draft, and many times I just migrated the same characters over into a radical retelling. I completely restarted from scratch four times.
What happened in the end was that Stillhouse Press accepted the third draft during the pandemic lockdown. While Super Normal had been languishing in slush piles, I had completed another novel, one that’s still unpublished. But that unpublished novel was a huge jump forward for me as a writer. It was an exhilarating feeling. When Super Normal was accepted for publication, I read it for the first time in over a year, and even though I knew they liked this draft, I knew that I could do it better. That I could do another draft, starting from scratch, and tap into the direction I’d been exploring.
Sometimes people think I’m crazy when I tell them this, but I turned down Stillhouse and then set to work on the rewrite. The next year and a half saw me taking these characters that had been with me for two decades into brand new situations and mining previously unseen depths. Everything flowed in a way it never had before. I nixed a structure that had been with me from the beginning, and I just let the characters tell me where the story was going; I let them tell me when one chapter ended and when I needed to switch to another storyline. The old structure had twelve chapters of over thirty pages each, while this final version was more playful with chapter titles and some chapters clocked in at only five pages. The rhythm finally felt true: I had the novel I always wanted. And it was only one hundred twenty pages, down over two hundred from the first accepted draft.
I sent it back to Stillhouse and they accepted it a second time. My editor, Carol Mitchell, became the final step in the evolution. Without her I wouldn’t have been able to do this final push. She knew exactly what the story needed. What moments needed enhancing. Her note to add ten thousand words and the subsequent places she thought it could happen were absolutely perfect. I wish Carol could edit everything I ever produce for the rest of my life.
With a bit of struggle over another year, we got the length up to two hundred pages. But the most important thing was that everything added in that final phase enriched the story. And the fact that it still feels short is the best compliment of all.
JF: You do an excellent job of fitting in full lives of your characters in such a short space. Can you talk about ways you do this?
JD: Dialogue does nearly all the work. Internal and external. Listening to the way a character talks with others and the way they talk to themselves can tell you everything you need to know. Dialogue gives us the rhythm of the character. I treat dialogue in my prose writing similarly to in scriptwriting. Often, I’m mouthing dialogue as I’m writing it, as if I’m somehow breathing it into the world. I try to imagine everything else taken away and all we’re left with is the conversation. Would we be able to get a sense of the character’s desires? Would we be able to know who was talking without signifiers? Are we understanding them, getting to know them as they talk? Are we forming opinions? Because as soon as you have an opinion about a character, that character has become real. And then, all of the humor of everyday life can shine through. And that’s when I know it’s coming together. That’s when I know I have something worth continuing.
JF: How does your film and music work inform your prose and storytelling?
JD: I love this question because it forces me to think about things that I don’t think about consciously. A comment I receive a lot, and I always take it as a compliment whether the person intended it that way or not, is that my stories and novels feel like movies. Scripts have their own structure and flow and rely almost exclusively on dialogue to move the story forward. You want the dialogue to give some idea of what a character is feeling and how they’re dealing with problems, and if you’re lucky, to also be funny. It needs to do all that while still sounding as close to how a human being would speak. I think they might feel like a movie because of the way in which they use dialogue. I don’t think my prose feels like it follows a movie plot, but I’d love to turn some of my work into a script!
I think music has a more instinctive influence on my writing. I’m a drummer, and as I go through life, I feel like a drummer more than anything else. I hear music in everything. I love the rhythm of the turn signal in my car. My wife and I play in a band together. I sit down as much as I can and just play. But the thing I do most is listen to music. I get more excited about who the composer of a film is than any other role. I need to know what song is playing in whatever store I’m in. I read about music. I listen to new music every week. I share music with friends. I even used to put soundtracks to friends’ stories online. So in some unconscious way, I turned rhythm into my writing style. I don’t really know much about the theory of writing. I could never write a craft book or anything. I just write, and a story is not done until it develops a rhythm that enhances it. It’s the music of writing, I guess.
JF: Do you see these varied arts as coming together to tell stories or do you see them as separate? (Both on a macro and micro-level.)
JD: I think everything we do in life adds depth to our art. Definitely the time I spend writing music, playing drums, and writing screenplays begins to accumulate. But it’s also the time I spend with my wife, children, dogs, cats, and our friends. It’s the time I spend going to concerts and watching movies and being sad and being happy and laughing and crying and being exhausted and learning a new language—it’s just all inside making me more me than I was before. Because I’m so focused on people and interactions in my life, I tend to focus on character in my stories. I find their rhythm, and then I find their story.
Josh Denslow (@josh_is_lanky) is the author of the collection Not Everyone Is Special (7.13 Books) and the novel Super Normal (Stillhouse Press). Recent stories have appeared in The Rumpus and Short Story, Long. He has read and edited for SmokeLong Quarterly for over a decade.
Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is the writer of the story collections As If She Had a Say (2023) and The Predatory Animal Ball (2021). Her writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She can be found via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.