A Gratifying Conversation with Nick Flynn

Photo Credit: Alix Lambert

Nick Flynn is an American writer, playwright, poet, and Professor on the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Houston. His poems, essays, and nonfiction have been featured in The New Yorker, Paris Review, National Public Radio's This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review. He is the author of numerous poems and memoirs, and his work has appeared in many anthologies. His poetry collection, Some Ether, was awarded the Larry Levis Prize (Virginia Commonwealth University) and awarded numerous residencies, including the Fine Arts Work Center, Macdowell Colony, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and elsewhere. He was awarded the Austen Riggs Erikson I Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media and awarded both the Guggenheim Fellowship and  Witter Bynner Fellowship. His memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir and was turned into a feature film called Being Flynn starring Paul Dano, Julianne Moore, Wes Studi, Lili Taylor, and Robert De Niro. He was an artistic collaborator and field poet on the Oscar-nominated documentary Darwin's Nightmare. I had the pleasure and honor of asking Nick about the inspiration behind his latest book and what makes a remarkable memoir.

UZOMAH: What surprises you the most about being a writer?

NICK: I love reading other writers, being allowed some access into their inner lives. That others find something worthwhile in my work still surprises me. 

U: What inspired you to write about working at the Pine Street Inn in Boston?

N: The Pine Street Inn is a homeless shelter where I worked through much of my 20s. I only began writing about it ten years after my father walked through the doors needing a bed. It was the right moment, apparently, for the words to emerge from where they’d sunk into my subconscious.  

U: In 2020, you released two books, This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire and Stay: Threads, Conversations, and Collaborations. How do these books' themes intersect, or do they?

N: In Stay I included a few passages from This Is the Night…Stay has excerpts from each of my published books, arranged in a way where they hopefully speak to each other, to create something new. I arranged Stay in broad thematic sections—for example, there is a section on “the father,” where I thread together writing I’ve done around the idea of fathers and fatherhood.    

U: How important are small independent journals?

N: I think they are vital to the literary world, but, sadly, mean almost nothing beyond that.

U: How does linking various genres of storytelling give the reader a more authentic perception of the story?

N: Storytelling is a different art form than the written word…it is oral, it is performative, it needs to take in the audience at an immediate level, it needs to allow for improvisation. Is that what you are asking?

U: Do you have any words of advice for fellow editors?

N: Think of your journals as scores, arrange your selections, imagining a reader fully engaged with each page.

U: As an editor, what do you look for in a submission?

N: I’ve only edited a few things, but I’d say that I think about the project as a whole, and how—or if—that submission fits into that whole.

U: What about musical lyrics makes them poetic, no different than stanzas in a poem?

N: It does seem one can get away with more in lyrics than in poetry—the music covers over many sins. Though my favorite songs do work as pure poetry.

U: What is the difference between writing a play and writing poetry? What also makes the two similar?

N: Both begin from nothing, or almost nothing…. a scrap of language, a passing image, a memory. I’ve only written one full-length play, and the process was similar to that of poetry, except the play needed to be grounded even more fully in a recognizable landscape. 

U: Do you face more challenges as a writer to be creative or as a professor teaching others how to be creative?

N: I think one has to be creative as a professor as well, trying to get inside other folks’ heads, looking at their work, trying to imagine what that work wants to be, how to steer it in that direction.

U: How did you come up with the titles for This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire and Stay: Threads, Conversations, and Collaborations?

N: This Is the night our house will catch fire is a line from the book. The working title was Mister Mann, but the marketers thought they would have a hard time selling a book called Mister Mann written by someone who looks like me, who could be viewed by some who didn’t look too closely as “the Man.” Stay is the title of a piece of art by Jack Pierson…it is included in the book. 

U: In your many memoirs, you discuss similar themes such as family relationships and incorporate them with real pressing issues in society, such as in In The Ticking Is the Bomb, where you explored US state-sanctioned torture while also deciding to have your own family. How do exploring issues outside the home help see how they impact the home and its relationships and how home life affects the world?

N: Nothing we do happens in a vacuum, so whatever is going on in the world is affecting us, and whatever we do in our lives affects the world, in some small way. 

U: What do you think are the core elements in a remarkable memoir?

N: I think the main thing is to know that a memoir is, in an essential way, not about you, but about the experience the reader will have when reading it.  

U: What do you think most filmmakers and writers get wrong when adapting a book or memoir to the big screen?

N: Trying to hone too closely to the source material. It is another medium; it has its own needs.

U: What has been the most surprising lesson you have learned from one of the books you have written?

N: To approach everyone with compassion, especially those who, for one reason or another, end up in one of the books. 

U: If you could interview any artist, musician, or writer, who would it be and why?

N: I’d like to talk to Caravaggio, not on a day he was drinking, but on a day he was trying to atone. 

For more information about Nick’s writing please visit his site. Along with following him on Twitter and Instagram.