Shooting the Bull with Nick Flynn: An Interview

Nick Flynn is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Another Bullshit
Night in Suck City (Norton 2004), which, in addition to winning the PEN/Martha Albrand
Award, has been translated into thirteen languages, shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina,
and is currently being made into a motion picture by director Paul Weitz. Flynn also has
two hauntingly beautiful books of poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf 2000) and Blind Huber
(Graywolf 2002). He has co-authored a pedagogical book entitled A Note Slipped Under
the Door: Teaching from Poems We Love (Stenhouse Press 2000) with Shirley
McPhillips. Over the years, Flynn has received prestigious fellowships from a variety of
organizations including The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. His
work has appeared in, among other places, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, NPR’s
“This American Life,” and The New York Times Book Review. During one of his
frequent ventures outside of the literary world, Flynn was credited as a “field poet” and
“artistic collaborator” on Darwin’s Nightmare, a documentary nominated for an
Academy Award in 2006. An exhaustive list of his various ongoing projects with visual
artists, filmmakers, community-based writing programs, and many others can be found at
www.nicklynn.org. I’ve been an avid reader and fan of Flynn’s work since I discovered
Some Ether. I had the pleasure of meeting him at the 2007 AWP Conference where he
was speaking about blurred genres. The following interview is based on our email
correspondence over the course of several months last spring.

SC: You’ve been quoted in several places as saying “Memory is a form of fiction.” Do
you think the increasingly popular Creative Non-Fiction genre is a sign that society is
becoming more or less accepting of this idea? How would you define Creative Non-
Fiction?

NF: I didn’t make up the phrase “memory is a form of fiction,” but it resonates with me,
and certainly was an ordering principle in writing the memoir. I find that as soon as I
delve into the realms of memory, I enter into the realms of the imagination, if only
because it is an act of selection—which memory you select, which part of that memory
you focus on, which part you keep circling. That said, I think it is important to be as
honest as possible within that realm. The interesting thing is paying attention to which
memories find purchase in your mind, and to ask why that might be so.

I’d like to add something I wrote about the “lyric essay,” a term which is sometimes used
interchangeably with “creative non-fiction”:

The lyric essay has the potential to contain a great energy, in that it combines the
limitations of non-fiction with the openness of poetry. It is this tension which
interests me at the moment, this need to grapple with the world as it actually is, or
appears to be, filtered through the transformative powers of poetry. The end result,
 ideally, is the world or an experience distilled to its essence—it can make the world
or an individual's experience matter again. Or, to quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "We
must make living and dying important again."

Perhaps the lyric essay is simply our culture’s latest attempt to do this.

SC: A lot of people ask you about James Frey. During your panel presentation on
“Bending Genre” at the 2007 AWP, James Frey was mentioned by an audience member
and I noticed that all eyes turned to you for some kernel of wisdom. You’ve also been
asked to speak about homelessness in a number of contexts. It seems that writing a
successful genre-busting narrative, partially about homelessness, has positioned you as
spokesperson of sorts. Did you anticipate having to play this role?

NF: Well, that’s a few ideas in one. About Frey, perhaps enough has been said, though I
doubt any lessons have been learned, longterm, by the culture (us) who bought all his
books. I think he made a serious mistake, but I also think his agent, his publisher, Oprah,
and the culture itself are just as culpable. His publisher and agent seem utterly venal, but
many others—Oprah, the millions of readers—wanted to believe his tourist’s view of
addiction, because it was easier than actually dealing with the realities and complexities
and endless allure of it. It seems he chose to create a character named James Frey, a
tough-guy loner, and then he made that character represent the “other,” the addict, the
criminal. He got lost in this fiction, and seemed to actually believe he was this tough-guy.
At this point I wish him the best, and hope he’s found his way to a lot of A.A. meetings.

The thing is, he did what everyone does in writing a memoir—he created a persona—it’s
simply the nature of the creative process, but one should be aware that it is a fiction, and
honest about that, and willing to be flexible within your creation. It would be as if Dr.
Frankenstein kept pointing to his monster and swearing it was him.

Frey and homelessness? Let’s see if I can make a connection. Frey chose to become a
spokesman for how one can give up drugs and alcohol without really getting sober. He
claimed to have answers, or the answer, to a very serious problem. I don’t know, maybe
he has, or had, a messiah complex. I probably do as well, though I’ve never claimed to
have the answer to the problem of homelessness. I do think that to have someone spend
some time thinking about someone who was or is homeless without presenting him or her
as “the other” might complicate some people’s dreams.

SC: Complicate them how?

NF: The idea of “the other” is very powerful in our culture, and it is exploited at various
moments by those in power to manipulate us. Right now the most obvious manifestation
of “the other” is anyone who identifies as Muslim—in my book “the other” is someone
who is or was homeless. So to write about a homeless person in a way that illuminates his
day to day existence seems like it would complicate these unformed and perhaps
irrational fears we harbor.

SC: It seems like you’re constantly on the road doing readings and workshops. Does the
travel tend to fuel or stifle your writing?

NF: I don’t write very well in hotel rooms, sadly, but I can get something done on
airplanes. It might be the limitations imposed by being strapped into those strangely un-
ergonomic chairs. I find limitations somehow freeing.

SC: So do you find freedom limiting? Does it work both ways?

NF: I never thought about it in those terms. The word “freedom” has been twisted almost
beyond meaning, by our culture, by advertisers, by those who claim that “they (the
others) hate our freedom,” so it’s hard to get a handle on what it actually is.

SC: A sense of place is an important and recurring theme in Paper Street Press. Our
writers often explore, on some level, how people are shaped by their surroundings, what
it means to call a place home, etc. Where do you feel most at home?

NF: That’s a tough question at the moment, but I guess it would be wherever I manage to
get some writing done.

SC: Is it easier for you to write about places while you are physically there? Or do you
need physical and/or emotional distance?

NF: I seem to work best with distance, to layer the place with meanings beyond what I
can observe, though pure observation is a very difficult muscle to develop.

SC: In A Note Slipped Under the Door, you admit to being a compulsive list maker,
saying that you make lists of everything from household tasks you need to get done to all
the places in the world you’ve swum. As a compulsive list maker myself, I felt strangely
comforted by your explanation of list making as a form of art. Could you talk a little
about this idea? Any tips for how our readership might use lists as an untapped source of
creativity?
NF: Yesterday a friend referred to me as obsessive compulsive, which I don’t think is
quite accurate, though it is likely I’m located at some point on the continuum toward
obsessive compulsive behavior, the list making being one obvious manifestation. My
brain can end up becoming crowded with dozens of tiny thoughts, which works to a
certain extent, the subconscious trying to make connections and meanings, but at a
certain point it becomes chaos, and I need to make a little list to begin to give those
seemingly disparate thoughts a tangible life. I think any way we can find access to our
subconscious is something we should respect and listen to, and maybe lists can function
in this way, if we pay attention to them.

SC: I know a professor, a psychoanalyst, who claims that compulsive list making is
another manifestation of the death drive. She thinks we create these lists just so we can
cross things off—that crossing them off gets us one step closer to being done with
everything (i.e. existing). Your view is a bit sunnier.

NF: That’s an interesting thought—I guess everything contains eros and thanatos.

SC: One aspect of your work that I really appreciate is that you make the reader work for
meaning. Active involvement on the reader’s part seems like an especially rare quality
for a memoir. At what point in your writing process do you usually start to think about
your readers?

NF: I do like the idea of active reading, as opposed to passive reading—seems much of
the culture leads us into a passive state, and it seems that poetry, in spite of what Garrison
Keillor would have us believe, is not merely meant to reinforce what we already
believe—this is simply a point I disagree with him on. The role of the artist seems to be
to say what the rest of the culture has been unable to articulate.

As for thinking about the reader, it comes very late in the process, after I have wrestled
with the material for a long time, and tried it in as many ways as I can imagine.

SC: Do you have an “ideal” reader of your work in mind?

NF: An ideal reader? I guess it would be someone who would seem to come from a very
different place than me, yet still could find something worthwhile in what I’d written.

SC: I read somewhere that if Another Bullshit Night had a soundtrack, you said it would
be Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around. Do you listen to music when you write?
NF: There are so many levels to the writing process, and some of them make sense to
have a soundtrack, just as some need silence. I forgot I said that about Johnny Cash,
though I did love that album, and listened to it a lot. Seemed like everyone was, for
awhile. I love that the culture seemed to suddenly all hear him at once, especially since he
is constantly pulled between the sacred and the profane, which seems to be the story of
America.

SC: When we met last spring, I told you about the encounter I had while reading Another
Bullshit Night. I was sitting at the edge of a Baptist churchyard in North Carolina and the
preacher came out and asked what I was reading. I showed him and he said, “Is THAT
the kind of stuff they’re teaching in school these days?” I just nodded and didn’t tell him
that I was actually the one teaching THAT stuff…that my students were reading an
excerpt from the book. Anyway, when we spoke, you mentioned that you kind of
regretted the title. Do you still feel that way?

NF: Did I say that? I actually think that at a certain point it became simply the name of
the book, and it was out of my hands. I think it’s the best title for the book, what’s
unfortunate is that many people will never pick it up because of the title.

SC: Did you have any backup titles?

NF: Hundreds.

SC: In addition to collaborating on Hubert Sauper’s Academy Award nominated

documentary Darwin’s Nightmare, you’ve worked on projects with other filmmakers,
visual artists, academics, musicians, writers, and poets. What draws you to
collaboration?

NF: My work on the film Darwin’s Nightmare came about organically—Hubert and I
met through a mutual friend, the filmmaker Rachel Perkoff—I was going to Tanzania to
visit another friend and Hubert was working on this film based in Tanzania, so she
thought we should meet. We liked each other right off and realized we were both working
on similar projects—my book on homelessness and his film on globalization—big
concepts we were trying to locate in intimate stories. So we had many discussions over a
few years, whenever I was in Paris or he was in New York, and these discussions were
invaluable, to my book at least. I also ended up being part of the filming for several
weeks, which was a whole other reality. Writing is a lonely occupation, for one, and it is
a great gift to get to observe another’s process, to have discussions about the struggles
that come up in another discipline, and the solutions.

SC: Community seems so crucial to the process of creating, whether it’s art or film or
literature. That said, it always amazes me that collaboration isn’t encouraged as much in
the humanities as it is in the sciences, particularly in academia. At the University of
Houston, you teach a class on collaboration. Can you talk a little about the class? How
did your students respond to it?

NF: It seems that all creation is based on some aspect of cooperation, that the myth of the
loner is way too privileged in American culture, and has done a lot of damage by this
point. Of course the loner exists, as all archetypes are manifest, but the whole point of it
is someone who is outside of the culture, rather than representing the culture itself. I’ve
taught this class in collaboration for three years now, every spring when I’m in Houston.
Every year is completely different, though I tend to assemble artists and writers who are
interested in collaborating somehow with the larger world, making something where the
audience becomes active participants, in some way. Again, I guess I’m tired of passive
art, television art, numbing art.

SC: Could you elaborate on collaborating with the “larger world.” What kinds of
projects/assignments do students take on in the class?

NF: This past spring I worked with an amazing groups of students—I thought of them as
superheroes, as each had some extraordinary power that complimented what was lacking
in the rest of us. We ended up collaborating with 40 fourth grade students in a Houston
elementary school. It was called “the empty spaces project,” and we passed out cameras
to them, and had them photograph empty spaces they were familiar with or wondered
about. And the photographs were startling, really amazing, weird and beautiful and
poignant. Then they wrote about the photographs in various ways. In the school there was
a green screen, one of those screens that the weatherman uses, where he or she can stand
before a projected image. We made a short film with each student entering into one of
the photographs they took, which really blew us away, for each student really revealed
something about themselves in those few seconds. For the final presentation we all
gathered in a gallery, the students came in a school bus, and part of it was to screen the
film so they kids could see themselves 20 feet tall. Their reaction was another level of the
collaboration.

SC: That sounds amazing. I didn’t know you were still doing work in elementary
schools. What’s it like making the transition from teaching ten-year-olds to teaching
people in their twenties?
NF: Doesn’t seem like that big a leap.

SC: On your website, you’ve posted some collaborative “comix” based on your poems
“Cartoon Physics, part one” and “Father Outside.” What, in your opinion, can the
“comix” form do for poetry? Do you envision a graphic chapbook in the future?

NF: I’m unsure what comix do for poems, though it has been fun to try it. I think of them
as a third thing, not as illustrating the poem, but as something else. I’d do a graphic
chapbook if it happens organically, but nothing is on the horizon. It seems like another
life.

SC: It’s interesting that you classify comix as a “third thing.” What struck me when
reading your comix poems was the way you and your respective collaborators decided to
use space; not only the space that is occupied by images, but the spaces between words
and how those words are positioned on the page and within the panels. A lot of scholars
who study graphic novels have commented on how the spaces and gutters of pages have a
language of their own (I’m thinking here of the way Art Spiegelman uses space and
silence in his work). Because the spatial aspects of poems play a more salient role than
they do in prose, perhaps what poetry does for the comix form is add another dimension
to the language of silence. In other words, the spaces within and between images could
enhance or contradict the meaning that is created by the spaces within and between
words. This is just an idea, but maybe it could help illuminate what you call the “third
thing” or the “something else”?

NF: That’s a great way to think of it. Yes, of course, comix can make silence tangible, in
some way, and the language can actually float in an imagined landscape. Those language
bubbles always fascinated me, to imagine if that was how language came to us.

SC: Do you have a favorite graphic artist(s)?

NF: Well, I’ve worked with Josh Neufeld, who is great. I like Eric Drucker’s work. And
Joe Sacco. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis seemed to push the form to the next level. And I
love Ted Stearn’s Pluck and Fuzz. Fuzz and Pluck? It reads like Beckett on acid.

SC: Fuzz and Pluck, I think. Great title, either way. I can see why you’re drawn to
Satrapi’s work. In a sense, you two are both complicating that notion of “the other” that
we talked about earlier.
NF: She manages to do a lot of amazing work with narrative, which I think really needed
an infusion of energy, and it’s coming now from, among other sources, these graphic
novels.

SC: You’ve cited Emily Dickinson as one of your influences. There are several places in
Some Ether where you borrow phrases from her, but I’m wondering about the “like it or
not” section of Another Bullshit Night. The letter from your father, which deals with
creativity and madness, is quite Dickinson-like, dashes and all. Is your father a
Dickinson fan? Why does Dickinson continue to have such a powerful presence in your
writing?

NF: Early on I somehow heard that, as a poet, one had to choose, between Whitman and
Dickinson, or Williams and Stevens, etc., the inner or the outer. But of course we need
both. I went to school in Amherst, and would pass her house every day, and wonder
about her—behind that fence, buried across the street. Dickinson has access to the
unconscious realms, as much as any poet I know, and that is enough to return to her over
and over. Whitman contains multitudes, Dickinson is multitudes. Whitman enacts
something until he becomes it; Dickinson simply is it. I have no idea where my father got
his love of dashes.

SC: I know what you mean about her house. I’ve made a pilgrimage to Amherst several
times just to visit The Homestead. There is something so electrifying and emotional and
mysterious about that physical space. I always feel inspired when I leave. Have you
taken the official tour?

NF: I feel like I did, I can imagine the inside of the house, but it might be simply from
photographs and readings. And dreams. I can see her very clearly at the top of the stairs,
eavesdropping on the lives being led below.

SC: That’s a little creepy, in a comforting sort of way.

NF: The image of someone eavesdropping seems like a good one for poets.

SC: Any major projects in the works?

NF: Oh yeah, there’s three of four projects circling around me right now, I work on them
in rotation, pick up one, work on it for a few weeks, a few months, then shift to the next
one. It’s good to let something sit fallow for awhile, I think.

SC: Do you feel like revealing any details about these circling projects, or would you
rather keep them secret for now?

NF: if someone is really interested he or she could check my website, but the main
project at the moment is a memoir of waking up in an America that responded to
the Abu Ghraib scandal by essentially legalizing torture (with the passage of the
Military Commissions Act of 2006)—an outcome which utterly bewilders me.

SC: I think we should end with a list. Or two. What are the top five best things about
being Nick Flynn? Worst five?

NF: How about if we end with the list of the titles I didn’t use for Another Bullshit Night
in Suck City?

SC: Shoot.

NF: “another bullshit night in suck city” –alternate/possible titles

(note: over the seven years of writing the book the title became my fetish object,
the thing that could contain all my bad energy and anxiety over the
presumptuous and humiliating fact that I was writing a” memoir”—at best a
bastardized genre in this post-confessional age of reality tv. I would generate lists
of titles when the anxiety would overcome me—nick flynn, may 2006)

(august 2003)

headlong to the palace of nowhere

adrift in suck city

the bullshit king of ireland

my drowning father dreams of life-rafts

my homeless father’s useful hints for robbing banks (subtitle?)

burn down the mission

together, we are going under

the hotel dunkin donuts

the palace of dunkin donuts

the lost kingdom of dunkin donuts

button man

another bullshit night in suck city

why we get lost and how we find our way

let’s sleep outside forever

going under

slow-motion car wreck

father figurine

into what nightmare thingness am I fallen

out all night

(december 2002)

dream-lit snow

the pine street palace

many mansions

just shy of obliteration (oblivion)

that man’s father is my father’s son

useless hints for robbing banks

the cradle of the world’s misinformation

the noise and heat of being (delillo)

something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky (auden)

may the days be aimless (delillo)

after a night of dream-lit snow (delillo-white noise)

two thousand and one nights in suck city

nowhere sleeping

father sleeping

a man cannot easily lay down

everywhere & nowhere

we circle each other like planets unmoored

a man shaped like a bench

time of your life

twentieth century man pretending

headlong

palace of mirrors

trickology

beautiful tree, my tree

a new map of the city

the shepherd cannot sleep

asleep under the church halogen

(august 2002)

the happy-go-lucky stratosphere of this and that.

see, saw, seen it coming.

winter everywhere.

here we are now entertain us

dead or just sleeping

the delicate ruin behind her eyes

waiting for your parents to die in america

poster-boy for dissipation

plenty of place to go, nowhere to be

fingered

short-time

I know so little and all I know is wrong

everyday mongrel americana

mongrel americana

the goo-goo, the ga-ga.

the perfection of a mistake

a bench in suck-city awaits you

this way to your bench in suck-city

adrift on a bench

dreaming of life-rafts

the immanent life-raft

wrong life-raft

wrong question

wrong bench

bench-boy

this bench will be yours

this bench is your future

like rain, like hell

(july 2002)
as if the life-raft was never invented

the opposite of fame

a life-raft never came

the life-raft never showed

go ahead, I’ll catch up

waiting for the life-raft (to be invented)

useful hints for bankrobbers

eleven flawless ways to plunder

the city that always sleeps

have you seen the ocean today?

just drift off forever

another bench, another dream

his bench, his dream

waiting for the life-raft

life after life-rafts

a certain lunatic grandeur

just wander off

wander off forever

nobody everywhere

the ocean almost everywhere

winter nearly everywhere

knew his bench, didn’t want to wake him

a trashbarrel set ablaze

slow-motion car wreck

circle each other like planets unmoored

how to rob a bank (and other fatherly advise)

another night, another bench

the one place I didn’t look

knew where he slept, didn’t bother waking him

saw him nearly everywhere

100% photogenic. smells, everything.

the sidewalk tilts and the lights go out

suck-city, winter everywhere

a man falls from his bed, a bed falls on a man

strange how you never forget a room

stuck in the middle with you

our boat of earthly disasters

this close

self-inflicted suffering

the line between us

(may 2002)

saint this, saint that

god of nickel, god of dime

no devil (just god when he’s drunk)

wrong ocean

the museum of the homeless

salvation, reworked

not waving but drowning

the inventor of the life-raft

the inventor of dynamite

still gone

no jailbird

same again

wrong ocean, wrong raft

father outside

unrafted

drunken life-raft

awful thirst

vodka, stamps, flowers

a man drowning dreams of life rafts

my father as a homeless man

idler scammer father

self-portrait as a drowning man

a drowning man dream of life-rafts, a falling man dreams of wings