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Episode 200: Nick Flynn as Bewilderment
152 Plays5 years ago
Nick Flynn is the author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, The Ticking is the Bomb, The Reenactments, and, most recently, Stay: Threads, Conversations, and Collaborations (Ze Books, 2020).
Follow the show on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook @CNFPod.
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Transcript
Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
Alright, CNFers, you know what time it is. This is CNF, the creative non-fiction podcast where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories, how they became who they are, what they're working on, and how they go about the work. I'm your host Brendan Amara, hey hey. This is a milestone episode, many miles and many stones. Number 200. Can you believe that?
00:00:33
Speaker
Some of you OG CNF'ers will be like, holy shit, that's a lot of episodes and you better believe it. It's an overwhelming backlog, but what do you expect? So, we had to go big for this one, 200, and did we ever?
Nick Flynn and His Works
00:00:47
Speaker
Nick Flynn is here. He's a prolific author of memoir and poetry. His latest book is titled, Stay. Threads, Conversations, and Collaborations. It's published by Z Books.
00:01:00
Speaker
You most likely know him as the author of Another Bullshit Night and Suck City. That book really put him on the map. It was adapted into a film titled Being Flynn. He's also the author of The Ticking is the Bomb, The Reenactments, and his most recent poetry collection, I Will Destroy You. So that's gonna happen.
00:01:26
Speaker
Of course, you can connect with the show on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, at cnfpod and at Brendan O'Mara. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. You dig it? Just subscribe. It's free. And if you're feeling really generous, like, holy shit, happy 200th episode generous, go ahead and leave a review on Apple Podcast. We'd love to crack that 100 threshold.
00:01:51
Speaker
And why not? The people are there. I know you're there. You just got to go out there and do it. If you had a podcast to review, I'd review it. Head over to printlittlemara.com for show notes and to subscribe to the monthly newsletter. Latest one went out today. Did you get it? It's got reading recommendations, riffs, not real riffs, but you know, riffs and what you might've missed from the world of the podcast. First of the month, no spam. Can't beat it.
00:02:21
Speaker
Hey, how can I help you get where you need to go? If you want to get in better shape, you hire a personal trader, don't you? Yeah, it's pricey, but she holds you accountable and whips you into shape and carpe your power, man.
00:02:40
Speaker
You got a book, you got an essay. Similarly, you can benefit from that same kind of training. That same accountability. If you're ready to level up your work, I'd be honored to serve your work. Email a show, creativenonfictionpodcastatgmail.com, and we will start a dialogue. Nick Flynn is here, and that should be all the validation this show needs. I gotta tell ya.
00:03:05
Speaker
When I was recording this interview, I was appalled at how fast the time went. And even in the edit where I sometimes get a little bored, I was floored by how engaging and fun this conversation was.
Inspiration and Influence
00:03:21
Speaker
Nick Flynn at nick underscore legit underscore Flynn on Instagram
00:03:27
Speaker
and at underscore nick underscore flinn on twitter i met nick at hippo camp 2019 and tried not to be some drooling obsessed fanboy i think i nailed it i mean maybe i didn't
00:03:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think I did. His work makes me want to go out and do good work, and maybe that's the best compliment we can pay people we admire, right? So let's give Nick Flynn a huge CNF and welcome, ref.
Meditation and Writing Process
00:04:15
Speaker
I teach one semester a year in Houston. Very nice. So I teach in the spring. This is my teaching semester, but it got kind of derailed a bit. But we rallied.
00:04:32
Speaker
The semester ended well, really, as well as could be expected in this moment. Yeah. Do you teach creative writing or poetry or nonfiction? What's your expertise there? I'm there as a poet. I'm hired as the creative writing faculty as a poet.
00:04:57
Speaker
But I've taught, you know, we had we had a nonfiction line for a while for a few years, but then just for funding issues, we stopped that. But I do teach. I still there's still students interested in nonfiction, obviously, and know that I do it. So I do work with them usually one on one or or one of my classes that I teach since the beginning has been in the
00:05:22
Speaker
interdisciplinary class. So I teach out of the off and out of the art department. And so I have like artists in the class and dancers and theater people and, you know, whoever, but I tend to shape it more for the writers. So I get more writers and more of the PhD or the graduate student writers.
00:05:39
Speaker
So yeah, but we also are in there with other people who are interested in language in some way. So yeah, so some of those people are doing more non-fiction stuff. They just get to move around, do whatever they want to really when they're in that workshop. That's cool. Do you find that teaching is nourishing to your own writing and your own writing process? I mean, well, quite...
00:06:01
Speaker
literally nourishing just or maybe not literally, that might be the wrong word, but uh, just in that I write with them, like we often do writing exercises in workshop. And, and I'll write with them. So sometimes, usually my semester that I'm teaching, that'll be the only writing I'll do also, is working on exercises, I've given them, you know, that maybe something comes out of that, that it will end up one day in a book or not. But it's just sort of to keep my to keep me writing also.
00:06:29
Speaker
What do you find is the most effective exercise that you've given your students but also taken part in yourself that really greases the gears, so to speak, and leads to productive work? Well, it's not like a specific exercise, just sort of the structure of the exercise. I always have them meditate beforehand. We all meditate
00:06:54
Speaker
before we write. So, you know, we'll have some discussion, we'll read a poem, we'll talk about, we'll look at a piece of art, you know, look at a clip of film or something. And then we'll, you know, something will come out of that and usually it comes out of the work they're already doing. So they'll usually extract a bit of language from something they've already been working on and put that on a blank piece of paper. And then we'll meditate and then we'll write sort of
00:07:20
Speaker
into that. So it's a way to sort of grow what they've already been doing. So that's the basic formula for it. We meditate for seven minutes and we write for seven minutes. It just seems like a nice balance. And then we talk, we bring it back and talk. So in like 20 minutes you get like a nice sort of intense bit of writing done. How did you arrive at the meditating as part of the writing practice?
00:07:48
Speaker
Well, it was always, I mean, I had a meditation practice for a while. And about 10 years ago, I taught at, maybe 12 years ago now, a place I'd be teaching at very soon, the Omega Institute, which is in upstate New York, very sort of Center for holistic learning, I think they say, call it. It's very New Agey. And, you know, I wasn't very New Agey when I first got there. But it's,
00:08:16
Speaker
There's a lot of things that I respond to. One of them was I met a meditation teacher there, Thich Nhat Hanh. I worked with him for many years. Over the years, I'd take workshops with him and his group of monks. And at a certain point, when I was asked to teach there, back at the Omega Center, after I'd actually been there often as a student,
00:08:41
Speaker
I realized that the day they work you hard there is a new agey place, but you end up working like all day long. You work like three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, which is usually if you're teaching for a week, you teach three hours a day. This is like double that. So to fill all those hours, I realized I could, you know, there was a very new agey place. I could just incorporate the meditation that I already do in my writing practice.
00:09:05
Speaker
and see how it goes. I just presented it one morning and the first morning I said, okay, we're going to try to meditate before you write. And they're all game because they're already at this new agey place. And we did that for the first couple days. And the third day I didn't do it. I just sort of got into some other thing. And they're like, wait a minute, we have to meditate before you write. They had already gotten used to it. Because it does do something. It really changes your writing. It gets you into the subconscious realm, like rocket fuel or something.
00:09:36
Speaker
I can't really imagine not doing it, actually. It doesn't make any sense for me not to do it. So we all do it. And I don't teach meditation. All I can say about meditation is just to maybe sit up straight, put your feet in the ground,
00:09:52
Speaker
and have a small smile, a slight smile on your face. That's all I say, you know, and then just seven minutes do whatever, because there's all different types of meditation, you empty your mind, or you focus on a mantra, or you watch your thoughts go past. I mean, there's different schools of meditation. They can do whatever they want to do, they can just seven minutes of sitting quietly is going to change you, actually. So
00:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. I think that's something I could benefit from and incorporate just into my own my own daily rhythm, just as a way to kind of tamp down some, some of that monkey brain and hopefully like settle in, settle in a bit better and be a bit more, you know, just calm. I actually, I actually think it's like, usually what I'm doing it, I think like this is actually the most significant thing I'm having them do as artists. Like not the writing, not talking about their writing, not like the
00:10:42
Speaker
you know, even peer, you know, talking to each other about their writing, not sharing their writing. What we're doing right now, which is seemingly nothing, is the most significant thing you're doing for your writing.
00:10:55
Speaker
That's great. Something I was thinking about when I was rereading a lot of your work and what I found particularly refreshing, if you will, is that as a writer yourself and becoming a writer of prominence in the nonfiction circles for sure and certainly in the poetry circles too,
00:11:19
Speaker
You're a relative late bloomer and I think that's really important for a lot of people. I think maybe your first memoir didn't come out until you were in your early 40s, maybe when you were 40. My first book of poems came out when I was 40. Okay, yeah. So that predates Suck City.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yeah, so I like that. I think a lot of people beat themselves up for not accomplishing something before they're 30 or something. So I think to see someone like yourself, you know, have this level of success and prominence in publication and look up to you in a lot of ways, it's encouraging, I think, to the artists out there that, you know, you're not toast if you don't publish something by the time you're, you know, 25 or 30 years old. Oh, yeah, I was a very, you know, I was not
00:12:08
Speaker
fast out of the gate at all. I wasn't a prodigy or anything. In my 20s, there's also a level of persistence. In my 20s, I applied 10 times. Every year, all through my 20s, I applied for one grant at a place called the Fine Arts Work Center. You probably know this in Provincetown.
00:12:31
Speaker
Um, it's a residency for emerging artists. I just knew about it cause I lived in Provincetown and I just thought like, wow, that's like, that's an amazing, they give you a place to live for the winter. And I never knew where I was going to live that winter. Cause I'd be living on a boat in the summer and I have to figure out where to live in the winter. And it's just like, wow, I could just stay here through the winter and they give me an apartment and give me a check every month and I could just work on my writing. So I applied for every year for 10 years, got rejected every year for 10 years. And then I finally got it when I was 30.
00:12:58
Speaker
I think I was 30, at least, yeah, maybe 31. Yeah, so I mean, a lot of that is like, you know, a lot of my younger, you know, my students or even, you know, even workshops, if I have older students, you know, I'll just say like, you just, it's really important to, to just keep at it, just applying, not it's not about whether you get it or not, but just like, just to keep doing it. You know, every year, I'd write new things, I'd be embarrassed at the stuff I had sent the year before.
00:13:26
Speaker
I didn't know who the judges were. I didn't really follow it that closely. And I just assumed I heard once I had heard that Carolyn Forche was a judge, and I really loved her work. And I just assumed she was the judge every year, which wasn't true at all. She was like the judge probably once, but I just had never looked at the letter that closely. I just assumed that she would read my work and just to know that she had read my work was enough to keep me going.
00:13:49
Speaker
And, yeah, but it took 10 times, you know, 10 times, they must have been like, you know, and I realized that there are a lot of the same people on the jury, because I've been on that jury now since. And we remembered, if somebody had applied the year before, or even applied like a couple years before, say, yeah, this person applied before we pull out their old thing, we'd look at it, we'd say like, wait a minute, they
00:14:09
Speaker
their poems have really grown or they, or, wow, they submitted the exact same thing five years ago. That's pretty sad. What have they done in the last five years? That's just stressing. But to see someone who's actually, I mean, my stuff would be completely different every year. It wasn't any good until it got better. It got a little better. It wasn't even great when I, you know, I still took me 10 more years to get a book to come out.
00:14:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's amazing. That's so important, the persistence of it. And what fueled you during those years of rejection and, you know, what gave you the confidence to keep going? It wasn't really confidence. I mean, just like I was writing and I didn't really imagine it. I didn't imagine myself being, you know,
00:14:58
Speaker
getting to publish or going to grad school or anything, you know, I just I wrote and I just knew there was this one place in town. And so I would I would sort of slowly get into like the literary world because I would talk to other writers and we'd maybe take a workshop together or we'd like have a little writing group or we'd go to readings and maybe I think I might have done a couple of readings or something. It wasn't a whole lot of like,
00:15:25
Speaker
What did you say? What was the word you used? I guess just the confidence to kind of put that fuel in your tank too. There was no confidence. There was no confidence and no fuel. It was just sort of what I was doing. I didn't expect anything from it. I didn't expect anything to come from it. I also liked other things too.
00:15:45
Speaker
getting fucked up a lot then. I liked going to hear music. I liked taking photographs. I was in my 20s and I was working with the homeless. There were a lot of things going on. Writing was one of them. At a certain point, it just became more focused. In my 30s, I quit drinking.
00:16:05
Speaker
uh didn't go to as many rock shows I ended up you know to many as many punk shows I ended up going to poetry readings uh it just sort of became a little more the life you know which is the good part and the bad part about getting older you sometimes the synapses get limited you know you're not as open to everything you know which is why like children are so amazing they can like you know put a lot of things together because they you know everything is brand new to them me I was like yeah I've done like
00:16:30
Speaker
I've gone to like clubs every night for like the last 10 years. I'll try something else. You know, so I just, you know, didn't do that as much.
00:16:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I read too in one of the conversations in Stay, you know, in one of the interviews you say how important a writing group was in that nothing gets created by one individual. And I really like that. And like, to what do you owe, you know, your writing to the people that you share it with and the groups you've been a part of?
00:17:07
Speaker
Oh, I mean, everything. I think I do believe that that nothing's, you know, created in a vacuum. And just the whole thing of the heroic artist is kind of bullshit. And I think we're all just helping each other and learning from each other and, you know, giving people support where we can or criticism where it's, you know, helpful or
00:17:29
Speaker
and just inspiring each other just by, you know, what we read and just by their energy that's around them. So it's, you know, I wouldn't say it's just the writing groups, which were, you know, I had a major, a main writing group for like, I went to, I ended up going to the Fine Arts Work Center, like in my early 30s. When I was 32, I got, went to grad school for two years at NYU. And after grad school, I formed a writing group that we met every once a week for,
00:17:58
Speaker
many years, like, you know, I mean, I wouldn't say 10 years, but like, eight years or seven years. In New York, which is immediate, you know, there's no one else I saw every week. You know, even like you don't even see your, you're married, you don't even see your wife every week, like, I mean, you just, it's hard to see people in New York, you know. And we, I just made a commitment that I was going to do that once a week. And it was really, really essential. Yeah, I
00:18:28
Speaker
All that work sort of came about because of having a community and discussions that came out of it. And a lot of people, most of the people in that group also published work and ended up continuing on if that's their path.
00:18:46
Speaker
I love this quote from David Mamet that you cite that says, artists don't wonder what's it good for. They aren't driven to create art or to help people or to make money. They are driven to lessen the burdens of the unbearable disparity between their conscious and unconscious minds, and so to achieve peace. I love the sentiment of that. And when you stumbled across that, what lightning bolts went off inside your head when you came across that David Mamet quote?
Art and the Subconscious
00:19:15
Speaker
You know, well, that's, that's from, you know, his, his great and frustrating book, The Three Uses of the Knife, which is, you know, I definitely recommend to anyone. It's a book about structure, especially Joe dramatic structure of him being a playwright. But he's, he's amazing. He's amazing. But he's very, the frustrating part is like, he's very anti, at least seemingly in that book, anti experimental,
00:19:41
Speaker
work avant-garde he's just he has no time for it and just sort of dismisses it offhand which i just seems seems a little uh annoying to me uh you know because i think a lot comes from i think everything comes from people pushing the boundaries of what can be done
00:19:58
Speaker
you know, to the extreme, like going to that edge. But his stuff about structure, about like classic structure is just beautiful. And also he's really tied into the subconscious realm too, which is sort of surprising with someone who's anti, who seemingly was anti, at least in that book, anti avant-garde. But yeah, just it was helpful. I was also, I can't remember exactly when I read that book. But I've gone back to it and gone back to passages of it. And I teach
00:20:26
Speaker
from that book. I teach certain pages from that book basically about the connection to the conscious mind cannot create art, which also ties into why we do the meditation at the beginning of a writing workshop.
00:20:43
Speaker
I was thinking, too, that for so long, too, as when you're creating stuff or writing stuff in relative obscurity, oftentimes, just in general, you're looking for answers. You're asking a lot of questions because you're kind of lost and you want to get your footing. And then you might have a big success with you when Suck City comes out, and it's this thing that puts you on the map.
00:21:11
Speaker
Suddenly, people are now, I imagine, turning to you for answers and asking you questions. And I suspect you still have questions yourself, but it's just you're on a bigger stage all of a sudden. What was that like for you just to go from that relative obscurity to then all of a sudden maybe being tasked with having the answers to a lot of people who want to achieve what you've achieved? Yeah, I mean, it's such a strange transition.
00:21:43
Speaker
I learned pretty quickly that I still did not have the answers. And I still do not have the answers and I teach students, but you don't have to have the answers to be a teacher. It's to be comfortable to exist in the questions. I think much more important, I don't have an answer to what anyone else should do or what anyone else's path is at all.
00:22:08
Speaker
I don't have an answer to what my what I should do, or if the path I've been on is the right path. It's just the path. You know, it is what it is. So yeah, but I, the one thing that really helped me at that time was I just got together, when Another Bush at Night in Sex City comes out with my now wife, Lily Taylor, who's, you know, who's an actor,
00:22:34
Speaker
And she had been, you know, she had been on a big, bigger stage, a big stage for a long time.
The Artist's Role and Writing Style
00:22:41
Speaker
When we met, she said that like, it's something very became very clear that like people that come to readings, or they come to you know, here you speak, or even to come to your books to like read your books, like that they actually they're not coming to actually learn about you, they're actually coming to learn about themselves, like to have some deeper insight into their own psyches.
00:23:02
Speaker
which is the whole, which goes back to Mamet and Aristotelian structures and about the uses of drama and catharsis. And she just put it that my whole role or the role of the artist is to become a scrim that others can project themselves upon.
00:23:23
Speaker
uh, which I just thought was very beautiful that that's, you know, you're actually doing a service. You're not, you're not there for the glory or for the, you know, whatever praise comes your way. It's, it's, you're, you're performing a service and that the service is to become a scrim for others to project themselves upon. That's, that is the, that's the value of art. Uh, and it has been for, you know, for a long time. It's like to have other people to have, have an experience with it.
00:23:49
Speaker
And I think she added to that in your job is to try to carry that projection with grace in some way, however you can do that. I did it better sometimes than other times, definitely.
00:24:07
Speaker
Yeah, that's such a good point because sometimes if you're writing memoir or personal essay, you really feel like it's this thing for you as the writer to get out and to illustrate this thing that happened and this pain of, I'm enduring and I'm going to show it to you.
00:24:27
Speaker
Like when it's done right and done well, the work then just becomes a conduit for the reader or the consumer to then overlay their own experience on it and suddenly you as the writer dissolve away and then they're thinking about their relationship with their father or their mother or their siblings and so forth. Yeah, exactly. And that feels like the best thing.
00:24:56
Speaker
That's what I get out of art. If I go to art and I can suddenly be immersed in that and somehow have some insight into my own life. And it's also, I guess you would want to redone fiction actually to see
00:25:12
Speaker
someone else's life too. I mean, there are obviously books, you know, that you'd read to like to get insights into another life. But it also it seems to reflect back to just sort of giving us how we can move through the world and in some way.
00:25:26
Speaker
With a lot of your ticking as the bomb and the reenactments, I love the approach that you take to writing and structuring them. Some are longer passages, but oftentimes it's these very short snippets. I like that. It's weird. You would think that it would be herky-jerky, but for me, I'm able to settle into the rhythm of that for some reason.
00:25:53
Speaker
How did you arrive at that as a style for telling certain stories that come across in a few of your memoirs? Sure. And the book Stay, which you mentioned, which just came out, I'm realizing there's even more of that. It's bringing together all the different threads of the writing I've done over the years.
00:26:20
Speaker
putting it together in these short passages, juxtaposing it next to each other. I was thinking about this the other day. A friend of mine told me that there's this, I don't know if it's the world's largest, but there's some enormous kaleidoscope nearby me here. We're in upstate New York and somewhere, I think across the river maybe in Woodstock, outside of Woodstock, there's this enormous kaleidoscope that you can enter into and the whole world becomes a kaleidoscope.
00:26:51
Speaker
I was just thinking about that the other day, and I think that is sort of part of what I strive for, or what the experience is like for me, or maybe what the experience of reality is for me, can be kaleidoscopic at times. And so there's these fragments, these little broken fragments that somehow
00:27:12
Speaker
create a pattern, like when you put them together, they create a pattern, they're repeating, these fragments are repeating, but they're sort of all broken up. But they create this sort of some kind of beauty from just how you fit them all together into one project.
00:27:29
Speaker
Yeah, and I love how stay comes together. It strikes me as this great, to use the term, this kaleidoscopic kind of scrapbook of so many great passages from across all your work and then intermixed with these conversations and of course the collages and photography that you've done and some photography from other people too.
00:27:55
Speaker
So what was the inspiration for putting together, in a sense, kind of like a greatest hits record in a way in this sort of collaborative piece of work? Yeah. It's not just photographs for other people. It's paintings and drawings and there's music and there's collages and there's all sorts of conceptual art pieces. Marilyn Minter's photographs of her mother
00:28:25
Speaker
Um, yeah, I mean, I just, it's, it's part of the whole process of, um, working with other people and getting inspired by other people. Like these are, you know, all the people that are in the book, uh, there's a couple I haven't met, but all of them I've, most of them I've met and had some sort of relationship with and a lot of them I've collaborated with for a long time, like over, you know, for many years or that have become like deep, you know, good friends or friends that became collaborators with me.
00:28:56
Speaker
It's just a great joy. It's like a really great joy to work with other people and to take a poem and run it through all these different ways of it to exist in the world. What happens if it's a song? What happens if it's in a film? What happens if it becomes a sculpture, a room that you enter? It's part of the words of dangling from the ceiling. It's just really fun for me to
00:29:25
Speaker
imagine that. And then it goes back to that it changes the poems himself too, like often, like the collaboration process, like an ideal collaboration process will take place while I am also finding the poems. And the process itself will change the poems because they'll become the collaborative process will become part of the poems themselves, and I'll learn things from them. So an example of that is the last book I came out with before stay was came out in the fall a couple months ago,
00:29:55
Speaker
called I Will Destroy You, a book of poems. And all the poems in that book went through a process where I performed them with a band that that I formed or that I'm part of called Killdeer, which is in myself Guy Barash, who's this electronics sort of eno type guy.
00:30:20
Speaker
who's a dear, who's become a dear friend, we've been collaborating for 12 years, my friend Philip Marshall, who is a more of a like folk punk, guitarist, singer, songwriter, Simi Stone, who, who performs on her own, but also performs with David Byrne, and she's part of the new pornography verse. So we did perform these these poems,
00:30:44
Speaker
for the last five years before the book came out. When anyone asked me if we were reading, I would say, yeah, that's great. I have a band. Can we do it with a band? And it would make things more complicated because suddenly there's more people and there's equipment and there's gear. But it just became really part of the whole process. And the poems all changed because of it. You don't see it. It's just a book of poems. You look at the book of poems, but to me, I can hear the music in each poem that was part of the creation of it.
00:31:13
Speaker
That's cool. That's real cool. In the process of whether you're writing poems or prose, where do you feel most alive and most engaged in the process of generating the kind of work you do?
Writing and Publishing Journey
00:31:28
Speaker
I think I get, you know, at this point, like I get joy out of every part of the process. Like I used to, you know, when I was younger, like writing was it somehow felt like a, you know, like
00:31:42
Speaker
some like getting putting leeches on you or something, you know, to bleed you or something. It was painful and difficult and you go into the psychic realms. I still need to do that. But I really I sort of go to the psychic realms anyway, just with, you know, therapy and just just that kind of work spiritual work. So that's the you know, suffering is around us anyway. And that the writing part of it is actually quite joyful.
00:32:10
Speaker
And not that I'm making something of it, but just that I really like sitting and doing, meditating and then writing and generating like work, you know, spending two years just generating work and suddenly finding like a pattern and seeing like, oh, this is what this is about. Like this is where I am right now in my life and what, you know, that all the writing comes out sort of is that mirror of that, which I couldn't access otherwise, unless I had meditated and written, you know, I probably wouldn't have seen it. And then there's the revision process, which is like, you know,
00:32:40
Speaker
I find actually really interesting too. Part of it is like deep psychic work going into it and asking why, what this means and what is the deeper significance or how does this connect to other parts of the world, the larger world and just the pleasure of moving things around syntactically and trying to get it so that there's some kind of music within it in the language. And then there's
00:33:05
Speaker
the business of it, like after revision, there's like sort of put a manuscript together structuring a whole manuscript. And I just kind of like it all. Like I like, I like the process of creating this stuff at this point. So I can't say there's one part I like better than another. I think, I think it's good. I mean, even if I didn't like it, I would say I liked it because I don't see any benefit in saying, Oh, I hate revision. Like it's just, then you're kind of like,
00:33:30
Speaker
You're kind of stuck because you got to do it all. I mean, you don't really get on this without revising, you know? Yeah. So I mean, a lot of people say a lot of my students, my undergrad students are like, I just hate revision. I'm like, we're going to learn to love it because otherwise you're not a writer. It doesn't happen.
00:33:48
Speaker
And what kind of a discipline or a practice do you put around your writing so you can effectively generate work and get through the various sort of life stages of a manuscript or a piece of work? I don't really have the rigid structure. I think each project sort of seems to determine its own, what it needs.
00:34:17
Speaker
And even like this year, in these 12 months, I will have three books coming out, which is sort of bonkers. I had one come out in September, I Will Destroy You from Norton. I had this book Stay that just came out as the corona swept over the country. So everything was canceled around that. So that book just came out, but I'm doing things remotely with it. And then in August, they have another book coming out, which
00:34:44
Speaker
you know, it looks like we'll probably still be just doing things virtually then too, like it's, you know, which is kind of rough. But those three books came out, and they came out of a period of where I was, if I was asked what my, what I was writing, I would say, I've given up, not that I've given up writing, but I'm not writing, I'm actively not writing. What I meant by that was that I just was not
00:35:11
Speaker
I got tired of like walking around for like 30 years, like always with a book in my head, like I'm always in a project or I'm always translating everything I see into like, how does it fit into this project or, you know, or I was in a book, I was just like inside the book, always like imagining the things. I mean, there have been periods in my life where I've only had dreams where it's just pages of text turning. And
00:35:36
Speaker
I just felt like it was time not to do that. So I just actively didn't write. And writing would come out, but it wasn't like I would be able to walk away from it and not have it just still be me still be in it. And I wanted to see what it was like to be in the world and to be outside of language in that way. And out of it, like all these books came out of it, which is just sort of surprising to me. So I don't know how they came out really in some way. I did really
00:36:05
Speaker
The book is coming out in the summer, which is called This is the night our house will catch fire. I did it in really these like really concentrated periods of writing, right? Just like we write for a month and then not look at it for six months and then write for a month and not look at it for six months. And not think about it for six months, I would just like put it out of my head in some way. And then just get back to it and be like, you know, as if it was something I was just just encountering for the first time. And that
00:36:33
Speaker
That was interesting to do. Yeah. Yeah, that degree of patience is so key. And a lot of people, I suspect, they want things to happen and happen fast. It's not happening fast enough. And they get frustrated. But sometimes the best thing you can do is truly unplug a bit and step away and put things in a drawer because maybe the time isn't right. But if you have that,
00:37:02
Speaker
Kind of that discipline within yourself to, you know what, I'm going to table this thing, maybe just go watch movies for a month and then come back to the writing and then you might come back nourished and more energized to get back to the work that matters. Yeah, exactly. They're not even fallow times, it's just you're living your life.
00:37:24
Speaker
stuff happens there. I think John McPhee, he talks about how his teaching is like his fallow period at Princeton. He doesn't write when he's teaching, he just does that. And then over the decades, his summers have been the time where he's strung together a lot of long magazine pieces in his books. So it's letting the soil replenish itself so it can be more furtive. McPhee also has that crazy computer at Princeton that the
00:37:54
Speaker
You read that article about McPhee at Princeton? Yeah. He has a program, the system McPhee program, and he just submits all his writing into it. And the book comes out the other side. It's so crazy. It's a crazy system. And it works. And you can sort of see it. It works really well. But it is like the McPhee structure is like, you can see it. There's sort of an unnamed
00:38:21
Speaker
like writer that just appears like this sort of narrator that comes in and doesn't really name says they're a writer or anything just like just talking about some other person that's living and you know, the Pine Barrens or something or some some interesting person and then go then get deep dive into like deep, like, you know, what do you call anthropological time? Or is that the word like into the whole structure of the geological time, like deep geological time?
00:38:50
Speaker
It's just interesting and then coming back with this like a turn on it. It's like it's just you can see his piece that alone I love the pieces, but it's so wild. He has a computer that sort of can organize on all that thought into one thing Yeah, he's always been a hero of mine and I know and I and for you who were writers that as you were as you were coming up and developing your own voice that really inspired you and made you just want to pick up the pen and be a poet and a writer yourself and
00:39:20
Speaker
Well, I go back to like, you know, I think what you get exposed to, you know, in your school and stuff is the one thing and then the stuff you find on your own. I did a lot of reading through my, you know, I was an English major, and I did tons of reading through my 20s. I just sort of realized that there's so much I needed to read and sort of stylistically, but I remember early on, like, I was very moved by Baldwin, you know, reading James Baldwin,
00:39:49
Speaker
reading Tilly Olsen. I think of those two right off the bat, who were sort of these political writers that just wrote really beautifully also. There's something about that combined. And then also being exposed to poetry as an undergrad through James Tate. I took a poetry workshop with James Tate, and he exposed me to really some amazing contemporary poets.
00:40:19
Speaker
Etheridge Knight and Charles Wright and all these folks. But the big one that came out of that one was Carolyn Forche. Her book, The Country Between Us was a really important book for me. Then I got to work with her like part 10, some eight years later or something at the Omega Center, the Omega Institute, which I talked about earlier.
00:40:45
Speaker
uh, Carolyn and I got to work together. We worked there for three years. Uh, every year I'd go and take a workshop with her for three years or just like that was really significant, uh, time for me. Um, and, and also they're all, they all had a political, you know, when I think about those, if I think about those three writers, I could name three other writers too. I mean, I could go through and say this whole, you know, existential, uh, you know, thread that was hugely important for me, you know, Marguerite Dara and
00:41:14
Speaker
and Samuel Beckett and you know that stuff that was a whole period you know Newt Thompson and you know reading all that you know getting into other you know other countries literature reading Kobo Abe and but I think it's interesting the first place my mind went to was like sort of Baldwin and Tilly Olsen and Forsheik because they all have this sort of political
00:41:41
Speaker
you know, this beautiful writing that's also like has this political urgency to it. So yeah, I put that in there. Yeah.
00:41:49
Speaker
Yeah, I love talking to people about the things that they like to, you know, looking at your bookcase or something. The books that you like to reread or essays that you pull down or in your case, probably poems too, where you'll be like, you know what, I need that little shot in the arm. So I'm going to like pull this CD down. I'm going to put this track on and listen and get into the words of it. And you know, I just look at my case too. And there are so many that I come down. If I just need that little thing, let me read this little,
00:42:17
Speaker
Let me shotgun some leads as Glenn Stout might say from Best American Sports Writing, just to get that sense of how to start a good story. What are some of those things that you find yourself revisiting from time to time to kind of just get you warmed up or to give you the inspiration, a little kick in the pants to do the work you're doing?
Inspirations and Upcoming Memoir
00:42:42
Speaker
You know, I have my students bring in any workshop I teach. I have them bring in a page of writing that somehow contains some element of bewilderment for them. And I let them, because my workshops are usually called memoirs bewilderment or poetry is bewilderment. And I just sort of leave that open to them and they sort of bring it in. And just realizing, yeah, out of a workshop of like 20 people, someone in one of the last workshops I taught brought in a Baldwin.
00:43:10
Speaker
And I just remembered like, like the pleasure of reading that again. And just like, like on this level, like, like line by line, like it just kept unfolding and turning and, you know, surprise and just it sort of had all the energy to it. He's such a beautiful writer. Just sentence by sentence. And it shows a lot and I spent I think the whole week just talking about that one, that one piece. You know, there's one page of
00:43:40
Speaker
I think was the fire next time. And yeah, so that was that was a real trip. But also, you know, I read Beckett like fairly regularly, like all each one of my three memoirs before the one that's coming out this summer began with an epigraph of Beckett. Because he would always sort of like, shake my mind up in a certain way that was I found important to sort of unsettle me and to so you know,
00:44:09
Speaker
sit and read one of his plays, you know, just sit for an hour. It's like reading a book of poetry, just sit for an hour, just like absorb the whole thing. Yeah, so I love doing that. Yeah.
00:44:22
Speaker
Are you surprised that over the years that these memoirs keep coming to the fore for you, whether it's Ticking the Bomb, Suck City, reenactments, what you've got coming out this summer. Could you ever imagine that you had one in you, let alone all these other ones that keep unfolding before you? I die.
00:44:52
Speaker
I couldn't really imagine any books really. It depends when in my life you're talking about. At a certain point, once I wrote the first memoir, I think there's a certain perverse pleasure in writing a memoir because it's sort of a bastardized genre. It's like a little bit of the Wild West. I mean, it's filled with like, you know, charlatans and
00:45:17
Speaker
you know, posers and, you know, huge egos. And it's just like, it's a weird, it's a weird drive. It doesn't have the, the, the, the cachet of like, you know, that the novel has, you know, that seems like the serious thing. It's sort of a, it's just, there's a bit of a carnival atmosphere to it, which I, which I was just attracted to. It felt like it was wide open, you could do whatever, you could do anything. And then when I did, you know, another Bush and Knight in Suck City, it also felt
00:45:47
Speaker
After that, I felt like I could do I could do a whole nother like, you know, I could do a whole nother book. I didn't really think that, but I realized at a certain point when the book started coming together, the ticking is the bomb, that this book could be in a completely different register than that in the character of Nick Flynn, and it could be a completely different character. You know, I've often said that if you like the Nick Flynn in another bullshit night in such city, you probably not going to like him in the ticking is the bomb.
00:46:17
Speaker
is a different, they're different character, they represent me at a different time in my life, a different aspect of me. So yeah, and, you know, this last one, the ones coming out this summer, you know, this is the night our house will catch fire. You know, it began when my daughter turned seven, she's, you know, five years ago. And I started asking me about what, what I was like when I was seven,
00:46:45
Speaker
And it's just, it's just something I haven't really, I hadn't written about. I hadn't written about that time of my life, like, like, you know, my childhood. You know, I really hadn't written about that. So I just, that's, that's where that book came from. Like, oh, there's this whole other sort of, you know, self that hasn't in a period of time, period of time in American history and in my life and, you know, that I hadn't, hadn't looked at. And, you know, I, oh, I see, you know,
00:47:11
Speaker
The self is just a lens to look at other things through also, you know? Yeah, that must admit, have you, like with the one that's coming out, you know, and being able to dive into your early childhood, I imagine, a bit, do you find that that's really exciting and energizing to be able to, you know,
00:47:34
Speaker
Really zoom in on one particular sort of chapter of your life and really kind of explode that is do you find that really really engaging? Well, I think that's what I think that's the if there is a definition of memoir that's what it is that separates it from you know Autobiography it is it is taken a discrete moment of one's life and exploding it it's not the whole life it's not like a
00:47:59
Speaker
It really is like a period of time and it's a discrete period of time. It's that, you know, you know, this one, the new one bounces between me when I'm seven and also me being, you know, with my daughter when she's seven. So it does like, you know, toggle between those two. But, but other than that, I think that's always, I think that's, you know, if there is a, you know, I'm sure there's this, the good thing about memoirs is I'm sure people can
00:48:28
Speaker
show me many examples of memoirs that don't do that. But that sort of seems like one of the main things. It's at least focused like thematically on one aspect of one's life. You know, if you think about like DJ Waldie's Holy Land, you know, it's about him growing up. So it's a long period of time, him growing up in this, you know, tract housing development. It's all the thing that unifies it is the tract housing development. It's not that, you know,
00:48:57
Speaker
It covers a long period of time, but it's thematically discrete. And what would you identify as something that you struggle with, with your writing, things that you feel like you have to overcome, any shortcomings that you feel like you deal with, whether it's internal or something that other people identify in you as a weakness?
00:49:24
Speaker
I think it, you know, again, it goes back to like the help, like, you know, I really like, I don't think it is a weakness, but I don't, I don't, I don't submit, like, there's certain writers I hear, maybe like a Philip Roth or something, we just submit a manuscript or just done, you didn't edit it, you just like publish it. And I, you know, I always work like very closely with an editor with my agents. Now, you know, those are more like the people I work with, and bring stuff out and read it in public.
00:49:54
Speaker
to get a sense of, in front of like, you know, audiences, like small audiences, as I'm in process of doing stuff, I'll read passages and send things to magazines or, you know, that, and work with editors there to help like shape things. And so, I mean, it's just, I don't think it's, I don't think it's a weakness. I think it's just how I write. I think I overwrite knowing that I'm going to get help on the way, like knowing that I want to have
00:50:21
Speaker
feedback from other people. I'm sorry, that doesn't really answer your question since I see it as a strength. I didn't even mean to throw weakness in there. I meant just things that you particularly, I know there are certain things I struggle with in terms of what I'm trying to get down and things I have to overcome or a different hat I have to pretend to wear to get over something.
00:50:50
Speaker
And it's always – I always like unpacking what it is that various writers struggle with. Some are like, I just can't get leads right. I struggle with leads or it's the middle of the drafts or I'm not as good at endings. I wish I was better at endings. I just not. And so that's kind of where that comes from. Yeah, yeah. I mean I had – when I wrote Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,
00:51:18
Speaker
I don't know if I had a, I mean, I had a lot of problems with that one, like that I had to figure out how to do, like just even like just grounding narrative, connective tissue and grounding elements, just to make it clear to people like where you are in the writing, you know, all the way through it. So they sort of are located in time and time and space. And that one in my first draft that I sent to my editor, it began with in homeless shelter.
00:51:47
Speaker
And, you know, it sort of takes place almost, you know, a lot in all the shelter. And after about 50 pages, my editor read and she wrote in like red ink on the side, like she was just like in desperation. She's like, I have no idea where I am.
00:52:02
Speaker
I had only set it up at the beginning. I hadn't set up a pulse through the book where you could keep coming back to the grounding. Like, okay, we're still in the shelter. This is where we are. This is the date. This is how much time has passed. Just to sort of get that so the reader can breathe and relocate themselves. So that was something I had to learn. And then also in that book too, I'm still not a big fan of like dialogue in memoir, really.
00:52:32
Speaker
Again, I don't think it's a weakness. I don't usually buy it when I see it in memoir. I could buy it a lot more in fiction because it's clearly a fiction. But if you're remembering a conversation you had with your mother when you were five years old, I'm like, yeah, I don't think you do. And so I intentionally put it in another bullshit night city in
00:52:53
Speaker
play format so that it would be clearly an artifice. This is clearly a reconstruction of how I remember the conversation to be. I could say dialogue is a weakness, but I just don't
00:53:09
Speaker
I haven't seen a lot of great dialogue in memoir actually, so I think it's probably better to figure out another way to do it. I hate it when I lose my train of thought sometimes. Oh yeah, it was with respect to you taking your work sort of on the road, and it made me think of how comedians work through their material.
00:53:32
Speaker
and how they build an hour and they're like, all right, I'm going to see if this line of thinking sticks with an audience and go and go with it. So I really love that idea of you kind of like, all right, I'm going to see how this works live and then build it into something bigger. And the book is a book of anything could essentially be like the equivalent of a comedian's hour or 90 minutes. Yeah, there's that. And also there's some passages in the new book also that I wrote for
00:54:03
Speaker
you know, for, for other purposes, like I wrote them for a friend who would ask if I could write a catalog essay for an art opening. And I'd write that. And I think there's like at least two or three, at least two of them, I think, in the new book. I wrote a piece for Jack Pearson. He's been a friend for a long time for for a magazine piece on him. And it ended up like
00:54:33
Speaker
But I was working on this book and so I ended up sort of like it tied into like the book and so I sort of took Jack out of it and there's a ghost of Jack in that piece in the book and then it exists in a magazine with Jack in it. And so I do do that a lot too and there's another one Jim Peters is another artist that I wrote a piece for and it ended up in the book but in a different form like so it's you know distilled so you don't really know that it's you know I give them credit in the notes I say like this was originally written for you know
00:55:03
Speaker
this catalog for Jack Pearson or Jim Peters. What would you identify as something that you're better at today than you were even as recent as five years ago?
Reflections and Advice for Writers
00:55:16
Speaker
Or you can take it back 10 years, too. What would you identify as something you're better at now than you once were? What better at now?
00:55:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny, I have an equally hard time with that as I did with, you know, what's my weakness, what am I better at? I mean, I'm not, I just don't think that way. Like, I just like, I mean, I think the books, I'm always sort of like, like, happy with the book that's coming out. But I don't like, I don't feel bad about the books that have come out. I'm not
00:55:59
Speaker
one of those writers is like, ah, I can't even read from that book again. Like I, I can still like look at another portion of Night in Sex City and like open it to some page that I haven't like read publicly in a while and be like, damn, that's, okay, that's working. Like, you know, like, huh, huh. That's like, you know, or someone, I remember I did a reading somewhere and it was like a very working class town and it seemed like I should read like something,
00:56:24
Speaker
like, you know, it makes no sense really. But like, I thought like, I'll read about sports, you know, and I've only written about sports like once I wrote about the Red Sox, like once. And so I read this piece about the Red Sox, watching the Red Sox, not win the World Series, but go to the World Series, go to the playoffs, watching it with my mother, like in this when she was having a very hard time when I was a teenager. And
00:56:52
Speaker
I sort of thought it was just about the red side. Then as I was reading, I realized it was all about my mother and this relationship. It was really hard. I ended up getting really emotional on stage. I was like, oh, what the fuck have I done? I read this terrible... I totally forgot that this had this other power to it, these pieces. But what am I doing better now? I don't know.
00:57:21
Speaker
I mean, I think there's like, you sort of, you know, it took longer to write the, the first memoir, sort of like more like intensely, but now I just know, I know the steps that I have to go through, I have to go through this deep psychological work, and I sort of know I can sketch things in, and then flesh them out, and I can move quickly through, through drafts, even though this one took me, you know, five or six years also, you know, bullshit night took me seven years, but I think I had to work, you know, like really harder and really like not have a life
00:57:50
Speaker
almost I had to like, you know, you know, I think I went through like, three relationships and writing Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, you know, choose between the relationship with a book and I had to choose the book like, you know, and it was just brutal, you know, it's a brutal thing. It seems like it seems like a brutality to writing. And then now I think I'm just not as brutal about that. You know, I'm still, you know,
00:58:19
Speaker
My family and I are still together, you know, so, you know, through this, you know, so. Maybe that. What, you know, being someone who's so, you know, widely renowned as a brilliant memoirist and poet, what is some advice that people come to you frequently? You know, common questions that a lot of aspiring writers, you know, come to you looking for counsel, if you will.
00:58:48
Speaker
I mean, so much. I teach. I teach, you know, so there's like this whole ranges of young, right? I teach from like undergrad to like PhD students. So there's like sort of such a range of like, I teach like workshops. And it could even be like people like at Hippo Camp this past summer, you're dealing with a lot of people who are, you know, definitely older than, uh, than college age, but all sort of wanting to achieve the same kind of thing.
00:59:14
Speaker
Well, yeah, I think maybe some people get into like the like publishing questions and stuff. I just don't really know about that. All I can say is like, you know, like, you know, in my world, at least it's just all about the writing, like, just make the writing as good as possible. Like, you can't control your career, you can't control, you know, the publishing thing is hard to control, like, but just like,
00:59:39
Speaker
you know, put as much as you can into the writing and make it so that it brings you joy. And it's like your community of writers, that it brings them like, you know, some sort of insights or joy also. And then the rest, you know, you hope for the best, you know, like, you know, that just seems like, you know, to be aware of what you have control over, what you have control over is the care and attention you put into the writing.
01:00:05
Speaker
The other stuff is you gotta like, you gotta let it go and let other people do what they do and hope that they're going to do it with integrity, you know, like your publisher, your agent or, you know, that it'll find a voice, it'll find a place in the world. And, you know, some great things don't. It's just like, it's who knows why, you know, like, you know, some things that seem mediocre get a lot of attention, some things that seem great get very little attention. It's like, you know, but hopefully, like, it'll
01:00:35
Speaker
If you've sort of done the work, it'll, and made it as good as it can be. It'll just sort of level itself out, I guess. Yeah, I think reading your work, your work makes me want to work. I'm inspired by the way you go about, the way your books come together. I'm like, I just want, it excites me to the point where I wanna,
01:01:04
Speaker
write good passages, too. And I suspect that, you know, if you're a filmmaker, you know, you should be watching the movies that make you want to make movies. And so maybe for writers, it's like you need to be reading the stuff that makes you want to pick up the pen and write. And that's that's definitely what your work does for me. That's for sure. That's great. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah.
01:01:24
Speaker
Very nice. Well, I think we're kind of up against our hour and I think your wife wants her headphones back. So, this is so great to kind of talk shop here, Nick, and I've been a great admirer of your work and so happy to have met you over this past summer.
01:01:46
Speaker
and stay with such a wonderful collaboration book to read. And I can't wait for the next one to come out. Maybe we can have another conversation again about your next book. That'd be great, Brendan. Yeah, thanks. It's good to talk. Be safe. Be safe with this whole thing. Yes, you as well, Nick.
01:02:06
Speaker
We did it. We made it CNF-ers. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you're subscribing to the show. Of course, this crazy show is produced by me, Brendan O'Mara. I make the show for you. I hope it made something worth sharing. And if you really dig the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Show notes are at BrendanO'Mara.com.
01:02:26
Speaker
Follow the show on the various social media channels at cnfpodacrossamall. Get that newsletter at my website. Win books, win zines, hang out with your buddy BO. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Are we done here? We must. Because if you can do interviews, see ya!