Ian Denning

Writing

A small sampling of Ian Denning's writing from around the World Wide Web.

Phantom Limb

This story originally appeared in Five Chapters, which is sadly now defunct, back in 2014. It’s a young millennial love triangle kind of story. A sad pop song.

11 Thoughts about the Internet and Mike Meginnis’s “Angband, or His 55 Desires”

This essay appeared on the Ploughshares blog. Mike Meginnis’s long, experimental essay in The Collagist (also now defunct) fascinated me, and I wanted to write about what its unique presentation had to say about the Internet, recycling dead media, and retrogressive ways of presenting content (if you’re looking at this website, you can see that’s something I’m into).

Inferno: Reading Eileen Myles in Las Vegas

Another one from my tenure as a Ploughshares blog contributor, this essay is about an afternoon I spent trying to find some goddamn peace and quiet in Las Vegas so I could finish reading Eileen Myles’s novel Inferno. It’s also about fake rocks, my brother, and an amazing waitress named Dionesia.

The Deep Wound: On Matt Bell's Baldur's Gate II and Literary Gamers

An essay about Matt Bell’s book Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn that originally appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Happily, this hasn’t aged very well—literary culture and video game culture are closer than ever before—but it’s still worth thinking about how writers’ outré obsessions both define and embarrass them.