ick Flynn has worked as a ship’s captain, an electrician, and as a case-worker at a homeless shelter in Boston where he was reunited with his homeless father. When he received a fellowship at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, he was able to pursue his

writing in a focused environment. He moved to New York and received an MFA from from New York University, then taught in Columbia University’s Writing Project. He is the author of the upcoming poetry collection My Feelings (Graywolf, 2015), as well as The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (Graywolf Press, 2011), Blind Huber (Graywolf Press, 2002), and Some Ether (Graywolf Press, 2000), which was the recipient of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award.

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While well known as a poet, Flynn is also a prolific and accomplished memoirist. Similar to his poetry, Flynn’s memoirs struggle for connection in an often harsh and fragmented world. Readers are guided into realities that have collapsed in on themselves, yet amidst the rubble there is so much to feel, so much sorrow and humanity. This interview focuses on the often unexplored terrain of Flynn’s work as a memoirist. Each memoir explores a different aspect of the writer’s life: his relationship with his father, himself on the brink of becoming a father, and his experience making a movie version of one of his memoirs. While each book has its own voice, its own literary terrain, each stands out as a work of prose infected with a poet’s sensibilities, so that the sentences read like rhythmic blasts. The paragraphs compel the reader to continue until pages have gone by and time has passed and nothing has happened but the world inside the book that we can’t seem to leave.

Nick Flynn is the author of the memoirs The Reenactments (Graywolf Press, 2013), The Ticking Is the Bomb (W.W. Norton, 2010), and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (W.W. Norton, 2004), which received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, has been widely translated, and was adapted into the film Being Flynn. He was awarded the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Amy Lowell Trust. He teaches part-time at the University of Houston and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Sarah Anne Johnson: How and in what genre did you get started writing and what did you do to develop your craft?

Nick Flynn: The first genre I wrote in was prose—a long (fifty-page) mystery set in Egypt and Scotland, the two most exotic locations I could think of. It was modeled after Sherlock Holmes, and written collaboratively, with my pal Arthur Joseph. We were eleven. As far as what it did to develop my craft, I think it made clear that I could model my writing on whatever I was reading, whatever moved me. This first oeuvre also subverted the myth of the lone genius, the individual artist, creating in a vacuum… from the outset I could sense we were all connected.

Johnson: What did you take away from your experience in your student MFA writing program at NYU?

Flynn: I was so hungry when I went to NYU, having been out in “the world,” away from a university, for nearly ten years at that point. But landing in the city was brutal—New York is still a city that could give a fuck about any one person—it reeks with the false sense that everyone is replaceable, at least this is the impression I carried with me when I landed, and apparently twinges of that initial impression remain. But NYU was a refuge, a place to go where this seemingly untenable and faintly

ridiculous pursuit of poetry was honored.

Johnson: You now teach one semester a year in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. How do you empathize with your students?

Flynn: I guess that depends upon the student… for me teaching is really evaluating where a writer is, trying to get a handle on his or her strengths, and then moving into some as-yet-unimagined realm.

Johnson: What are some of the issues you see MFA Creative Writing students typically struggle with?

Flynn: Writing can be such a transitory pursuit—there is no one, really, beside yourself, to push you forward, to even know if you have written a word today, or simply spent your writing time deleting shit from your inbox, unless, of course, you form a writing group—peers that will be excited by what you are working on, and expect you to show up with something in your hand. To be a poet, an artist, is an intense commitment, and it starts with committing to whatever your art is as a daily practice. An MFA program can make that clear.

Johnson: Even from your first book of poems, Some Ether, which deals largely with your mother’s suicide, you present a series of meditations in bursts of imagery, reflection, memory, and dreams. This style continues in your memoirs. You create collage-like portraits that take readers on a search for meaning. Is this a style you’ve developed by intention or instinct?

Flynn: Maybe all writing is in some way the attempt to navigate between intention and instinct… for me, I normally need to find an instinctual way into a poem, or a book, and follow that instinct as long as I can, before I become intentional, if that means trying to steer. In almost every poem I’ve written, there is an “initiating spark.” Carolyn Forché, one of my first teachers, taught me that phrase, which is the central energy, and the rest of the poem gathers around it.

Johnson: Once you recognized this style, have you been able to build on it and spin it out into new ways of exploring your subjects?

Flynn: I try to, and that can become intentional, on some level, stepping back from this initiating spark and whatever energy has gathered around it and seeing if it is coherent, if coherence is needed at that moment, to allow the reader to enter into it.

Johnson: In your memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, the narrative structure contains short chapters with catchy titles. How much of this form do you think sprung from your poet’s mind?

Flynn: Most poems we encounter have titles. For some reason though this isn’t necessary nor universal. In Suck City I enjoyed naming (or finding the name) for each chapter, yet each had to have its own life, its own reason for being. One came from a t-shirt, a version of an art form I really like, the genre that fucks with trademarks. The title is “fucken gonuts,” a play on dunkin donuts—fucken

gonuts is a poem in itself. That said, in my recent book, The Reenactments, none of the chapters are titled, or even numbered—I think titles would interrupt the flow, in this case.

Johnson: You weave in the narrative with scripture, literature from Borges to Shakespeare to Beckett, from Button Man, your father’s unpublished novel, you father’s stories, and other idiosyncratic historical and cultural references that all serve to deepen the narrative of your father’s life, and more importantly, of your exploration into his life and your own. How do you come by these references?

Flynn: It depends. Each comes to me from a different stream (there are many ways to Brooklyn, someone once told me). Often, when I’m in the middle of a big project, it seems that everything in the universe that I come in conscious or even subconscious contact with is speaking to that project, which is likely an illusion, unless there is in fact a web that connects us all, as Stanley Kunitz maintains (Touch it anywhere and the whole web trembles).

Johnson: How does your reading life inform your writing? What are you reading now?

Flynn: I read mostly poetry and nonfiction, mostly nonfiction in the more lyric realm, though of course fiction seeps in. The influence you notice in Suck City, many of them are in the realm of fiction—Moby Dick, King Lear, Endgame, Duras. The last novel that really destroyed me was Salvatore Scibona’s The End.

Johnson: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, named for one of your father’s phrases (he was always good with titles), is told in a linear narrative structure, while the next two memoirs, The Ticking Is the Bomb and The Reenactments swirl around in time and memory. What led to this transition in structure?

Flynn: I thought about structure as I was putting together my first two books of poetry as well (Some Ether, Blind Huber), which came before Suck City… structure, on one level, is about the release of information, which is an odd way to look at a collection of poems, but it’s possible to imagine each poem as both, working to build a whole, and as a journey, as well as a meditation (or series of meditations) which swirls around some central mystery. I used to say that the structure came to me near to the end of the process, which it did for Suck City (and for the poetry books), but in The Ticking Is the Bomb it created itself as I wrote it, and in The Reenactments I imposed the structure upon it from the beginning, not knowing if it would work in the end.

Johnson: You’ve said that your collection of poems The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands was the taking off point for The Ticking Is the Bomb. Can you talk about how your poems led to a memoir?

Flynn: The Ticking Is the Bomb began as little more than a political pamphlet, a rant in reaction to the Abu Ghraib photographs—I was basically writing “torture is bad” over and over. The poems allowed me to enter into the subject in an imaginative way, which necessarily complicated things—once you assume the role of both doer and done to, things come alive.

Johnson: In The Ticking of the Bomb, you reflect on your impending fatherhood, you relationships with your own father and mother, your relationships with women, and the torture going on at Abu Ghraib. What was it that resonated so profoundly with you about the torture at Abu Ghraib that you wanted to explore it in the context of your own life?

Flynn: If I try to imagine the structure of The Ticking of the Bomb I see it as a ball of energy, as a planet, the surface of which is studded with various images—making it a closed image system (to use a phrase borrowed from Sarah Messer). In this case, these images include specific photographs, monkeys, swimming, Proteus, etc. Each image recurs throughout the book, each image has its own thread, which can be followed, traced, from the outer level to a more subconscious level. I see each thread leading to, and connecting, at the center of this ball of energy, which remains a mystery, at least to me.

Johnson: This begs the question: now that you’ve written poetry, memoir, a play, and an educational book, Note Slipped Under the Door: Teaching from Poems We Love, how does writing in one genre influence or inform writing in another?

Flynn: If Kunitz’s web is in fact a reality, then wouldn’t everything inform and influence everything else? If we are not all connected, to each other and to everything, then the way I’ve found to wander through this world will collapse into an illusion, which might not be the worst thing. As for genre, I think it is all writing, and that perhaps genre will turn out to be an even bigger illusion. You might have noticed that certain images, which for me are especially charged, have found their way into what appears to be prose, poetry, and drama—the image of a man putting his body into a trash bag, for example, in order to protect himself from the elements as he sleeps outside. In my personal constellation of images this one, which comes directly from my experience with my father, will likely always resonate.

Johnson: You’ve traveled to Rome, Istanbul, Vietnam, and other foreign destinations. How do your experiences traveling and experiencing other cultures and places inform your work?

Flynn: I find myself acutely alive when I travel to a new place, a new country, where the language is maybe only vaguely familiar, where I have to learn how to say please and thank you all over again. It’s what we strive for, isn’t it, to be that alive, to each moment?

Johnson: Can you talk about how these experiences show up in your work, for example, in The Reenactments? From the first sentence, The Reenactments captivates. It begins: “All hushed, seven of us huddled in a kitchen, stare into a monitor. I just got here, it’s about to start.” Those lines put me on the edge of my seat. What do you think makes for a good beginning to a piece of creative nonfiction?

Flynn: The day that begins The Reenactments was another example, for me, of visiting a foreign country—this time a film set, which was both familiar (a recreation of my childhood home) and utterly

unfamiliar (film people are tribal, they have their own language and customs). This is the definition of the uncanny, a state which (some believe) allows us access to the subconscious. It seemed the book should begin with a sense of the immediacy I felt that day, which was the day Julianne Moore would first appear, as my mother.

Johnson: When did you first know that you would write about your involvement in making the film, Being Flynn? Was it triggered by a particular event, or did you always know you would write about this?

Flynn: Writing is one of my daily practices, and so I always came to the set with a notebook—by the end of the seven week shoot, I’d filled seven notebooks. It was an experience without precedent (for me), to have Robert De Niro embody my father, to have Julianne Moore reenact my mother’s suicide… and so it was always clear I would attempt to transform it, contain it, in language.

Johnson: In The Reenactments, you write:

I began to see the structure of the project as a triptych—flower, film, memory—something that could be carried under the arm, unfolded anywhere, to create an altar. Not one to pray before, but one that asks, What are you feeling right now?

Can you describe how this conceptualization helped guide you during the writing process?

Flynn: I imposed this triptych structure from the beginning, which I didn’t think would necessarily become the final structure of the book. It was a strategy to contain various threads of thought—flower, memory, film—giving each its own “panel,” as in a triptych. In the process of writing it became interesting to see how, or if, these panels could speak to each other.

Johnson: The Reenactments, like Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking is the Bomb, consists of short chapters, most less than a page. What appeals to you about short chapters? What’s your process like for generating these small sections, and then how do you create order from the chaos?

Flynn: Perhaps I have a high tolerance for chaos, or for at least trying to find a way to sit quietly in the midst of it. When I’m in the midst of a longer project it can seem that everywhere I turn a piece of the puzzle is waiting for me, and my job is to gather these pieces together. I do this in notebooks, mostly, and then as they make their way into my computer I begin the process of distilling them down, to some seeming essence.

Johnson: One chapter begins: “On Ash Wednesday we give up something so we can empathize with Jesus, just as we reenact the crucifixion each spring (these constant resurrections, these passion plays), so we can witness, again, his suffering.” This seems to capture so well what The Reenactments is about—“empathize,” “reenact,” “witness,” “suffering.” In fact, these words are repeated several times in the half-page chapter. Comment?

Flynn: We began filming on (or near) Ash Wednesday, and we ended on (or near) Easter, which felt charged, when I realized it (someone came to the set with ash smudged on her forehead). Jesus has cameos in nearly all my books, perhaps because I wasn’t raised Catholic which perhaps leaves me free to endless attempt to reimagine Him, as both an icon and a human. Maybe all my writing is one of trying to understand, to empathize with suffering, and two of the ways I’ve found to do this are through reenactments and witnessing.

Johnson: In The Glass Flowers, you quote Leopold Blaschka, the glass blower:

Many people think that we have some secret apparatus by which we can squeeze glass suddenly into these forms, but it is not so. We have tact. My son rudolf has more than I have, because he is my son, and tact increases in every generation.

In the case of you and your father, you seem to have tact when it comes to writing, and he is the subject of so much of your work. But did his being a writer inspire you to write?

Flynn: Another thread through my writing is trying to understand how one becomes a “self,” this particular and unique consciousness, a body given a handful of years to wander the face of the earth, and how that happens. The Buddhists claim (rightly) that we are the physical manifestations of our parents, which distills a lot of anxiety and struggle down to a simple biological fact. Once you accept this, then you can spend the rest of your life struggling with what that means. It is impossible for me to say why I am a writer, just as it is impossible to say why my father was homeless for five years, or why my mother shot herself. All I can do is track the steps that lead to the lives we had, and try to contain whatever emotional energy those lives generated.

Johnson: There’s a chapter in which you discuss Robert De Niro getting some teeth pulled in order to create the character of your father, Jonathan Flynn. Were you surprised by the director’s and actors’ dedication to replicating the physical details of your actual life?

Flynn: I was impressed, but not surprised—De Niro, Moore, Dano, Taylor, etc.—from the work they have done, we know that each of them take whatever gifts they have been given very seriously. I mean their commitment to replicating life rather than creating a story based on your life.

Johnson: You describe how in Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman, the character Keaton plays makes a film, but when he goes to play it, all the scenes are a “mishmash of double exposures.”

He leaves the screening room as a failure, yet in some ways this seems closer to reality or at least to how we experience it, than the lie that time is unspooling chronologically.

This reflects so well the jumping back and forth in time of your own narratives. Comment?

Flynn: Keaton is one of my heroes—I get giddy pleasure out of watching his films with my five year old daughter these days. He is able to use the medium of film, which had only recently been invented, to bend space and time in ways that mirror my experience with being alive. The scene you mention, from

The Cameraman, is the result of a double exposure, where one scene is laid upon another scene, one day upon another day, which is how memory works.

Johnson: The Reenactments ends with a description of the scene from the movie in which a woman who works at the shelter (played by your wife Lili) taps Paul Dano, the twenty seven year old you, on the shoulder and says “How you doin’ babe?”

Here is the future, tapping my younger self on the shoulder saying, I will be here for you, if you can find your way to me.

There is such power, redemption, and hope in these lines, and in the fact of your story with your father leading to this film. How did you arrive at the ending?

Flynn: The book is bookended by the scenes with Julianne, and her reenactment of my mother’s suicide—my mother is the unseen presence in each scene, the force that animates De Niro and Dano’s every action. But in the end, the book is about moving through grief, about realizing that memory is as much a projection as a film, and that there is a tangible, beautiful reality standing before us that is the only moment we exist within.

Johnson: When asked if you’re worried about how the people in your life will feel about what you write, you have said that when you have concerns, you ask yourself what your intention is. Can you say more about that? Maybe give an example?

Flynn: I allow myself to write anything in my notebooks, any small-hearted, petty, vindictive, crazy, narcissistic thing, but in the editing much of this gets distilled out—not that it doesn’t contain a type of truth, but is it a truth I need to put out in the world, which already seems overrun with it? I try to distill toward compassion, which can be difficult—it was in the case of my father, who I had a great deal of trouble being compassionate toward—but the difficulty suggested that whatever I found when I pushed beyond my resistance would be at the very least surprising, if not invaluable (to me).

Johnson: What are you working on now?

Flynn: I’m answering a series of questions from a writer and human being I admire a great deal.

Johnson: What would you say to new writers working on their first books?

Flynn: Books are dead objects without readers—the reader is the only one that matters, in the end, and what the reader makes of the book. This is to say: respect your readers’ intelligence and ability to make their own meaning of your poems, out of your book… it is out of your hands anyway. Your readers, if you are lucky, are not born yet.

Sarah Anne Johnson is the author of The Very Telling, The Art of the Author Interview, and Conversations with American Women Writers (UPNE). Her novel, The Lightkeeper’s Wife, was published in September 2014. sarahannejohnson.com.

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