Ian Denning is a writer.

This is his website.

Ian Denning is a Pacific Northwest-born, New Jersey-based writer whose fiction has appeared in The Guardian, Ploughshares, New Ohio Review, Tin House’s Open Bar, and elsewhere. He was named a Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow in 2020.

Ian has previously edited for The Bellingham Review, Barnstorm, The Lettered Streets Press, and Pacifica Literary Review. He co-curated Continue? The Boss Fight Books Anthology and the reading series Seattle Fiction Federation. He used to serve drinks to writers at Hugo House in Seattle, too.

Welcome to Ian's home in cyberspace. Check out his book, or read some of his other writing.

Ian Denning's newsletter, 99 LIVES

Ian sends out an occasional newsletter called 99 LIVES, about writing, reading, old-school video games, music, dogs, making art, and whatever’s on his mind. It’s short. It's very (very) occasional. It's on Substack. Subscribe here.

What’s the deal with this website?

Being online used to feel much weirder. The internet in the late nineties was this messy, unmediated explosion of digital creativity. There were no rules, no AI-crafted templates, no real concept of what a website should be or look or feel like. Most pages were personal websites—unrefined, unaffiliated with a company or brand, maintained by one person for reasons idiosyncratic rather than commercial.

I grew up building sites on Geocities, Tripod, and Angelfire—all killed by techno-corporate consolidation—and I wanted to reclaim that personal aspect of the internet. So I built this site on Neocities.org. I’ve taken liberties—I used CSS in addition to raw HTML, drew some inspiration from more modern features and layouts, and avoided tables, frames, and other wacky Web 1.0 design hacks.

To me, it’s more than an aesthetic (although I do love GIFs and embedded music players). It’s a little love letter to the way the internet used to feel. Call it a web shrine.

More Web 1.0 design

Visit Cameron’s World, an art project built from assets recovered from old Geocities pages.

Read about One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, an art project centered around restoring Geocities content.

Read “What 1990s Geocities Sites Teach Us About Joyful Design.”

More about Neocities, a self-described “bulwark for the web’s independent spirit.”