Nick Flynn Interview ~ The Yalobusha Review

Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000), and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002), for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, The Paris Review, National Public Radio’s “This American Life,” and The New York Times Book Review. His film credits include “field poet” and artistic collaborator on the film “ Darwin ’s Nightmare,” which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. One semester a year he teaches at the University of Houston , and he then spends the rest of the year elsewhere.

---

YR: You’re an accomplished writer of both prose and poetry. What is the intersection of the two genres?

Flynn: I sometimes think of poetry as “distilled prose,” to use Keats’s term. The way I write I don’t see much distinction between the two, although prose seems more suited to daylight, and poetry to night. I try to cook both down to something essential—by the end hopefully some balance between mystery and clarity remains.

YR: In writing BLIND HUBER, what did you discover of this intersection?

Flynn: BLIND HUBER began in the daylight world of prose, as much of the “research” consisted of reading prose and talking with beekeepers and tromping through fields. But at some point the dreamlife began taking over.

YR: What attracted you to the character in BLIND HUBER?

Flynn: Hard to say why one is attracted to anything— maybe best, at times, to simply follow where the attraction takes you. Francoise Huber, though, in retrospect, does contain many compelling elements—his devotional intensity, his single-mindedness, his willingness to exist in uncertainty.

YR: What kind of research did you do? Do you feel research opened any doors for you?

Flynn: As I said, the research was a lot of field work and library work. As far as opening doors, I found the beekeepers to be an amazing group of people, in touch with certain hidden rhythms of the world, which doesn’t seem like a bad thing to stand close to.

.

YR: In SOME ETHER, which primarily focuses on your relationship with your mother and her death, how did you negotiate the release of information in individual poems without becoming too repetitive or vague?

Flynn: I had an amazing editor, the poet Fred Marchant, who really got what I was trying to do and steered the ship toward it. One thing he offered was to think of the book as a three dimensional object, like a mountain or a sculpture, and to imagine yourself circling around the material, searching out various points of purchases to take it in. That was really the key that allowed me to finish.

YR: What can be done in prose that can’t be done in poetry? Do some subjects lend themselves better to poetry? Non-fiction?

Flynn: Besides what I suggested in the prose=daylight, poetry=night dichotomy, which is obviously a construct and therefore necessary to push against, I’m not sure any material is necessarily better suited to one or the other—it really depends what you want to do with it. I wrote the memoir as prose, mostly, because I was tired of readers naturally assuming that the poems about my homeless father were metaphoric. Everything is metaphoric, on some level, but some things actually happen as well, and should be respected.

YR: How thick is the line between fiction and non-fiction, and how comfortable do you feel blurring that line?

Flynn: In the memoir I tried to be careful to stick to a spine of truth, of what really happened, what can be measured, such as when my father became homeless, how long he was “there,” where he ended up. It is one of the pleasures of non-fiction, being forced to grapple with what happened—great mysteries reside there. That said, there is much of this life that dwells in the realm of the imagination, and I tried to cue the reader when we were headed there. I think if you cue the reader that you are entering the realms of speculation and imagination you can go anywhere.

YR: How did your memoir, ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY, (published in 2004,) become a book-length manuscript? Did you set out thinking of it this way? If not, at what point did it become a larger project?

Flynn: I worked on that book for seven years, and was circling around it for either two years or twenty before that, depending on how you count it. When the words finally began to make some sort of shape I knew it would be a book, but I didn’t know for a couple years whether it would be poetry or prose. I still think of it as a hybrid of the two.

YR: We hear a film is being made from your memoir. What has that experience been like?

Flynn: We hope a film will one day appear, and some days it seems close, and other days far away. I’m lucky in that I like and respect the folks I’m working with.

YR: In a conversation with Carolyn Forché at Provincetown, you are reported to have sworn off lying forever. What prompted this oath, and have you stuck with it?

Flynn: What I remember about that time I spent studying with Carolyn, besides my awe at her brilliance, is that she convinced me to try an isolation tank, full sensory deprivation, which was the most psychedelic experience I’ve ever had—it really opened some doors to my subconscious that I still haven’t fully navigated. As for the oath about lying, all I can say is it doesn’t seem like the worst thing to place the bar high at some points in one’s life, and then to try to find some compassion for yourself when you inevitably fail.

YR: Which virtue do you feel is the most over-rated and why?

Flynn: Over-rated virtues? First thing that comes to mind is greed, which somewhere along the line became a virtue in America.

YR: You’ve traveled extensively. Is there a certain place, other than your own home, to which you return often?

Flynn: I’m been to Paris a bunch, and Rome—cities. I feel a strange and deep connection to the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland.

YR: Is writing more of a food or beverage?

Flynn: Poetry is more liquid, prose is more bread. I think.

YR: Do you have a favorite restaurant?

Flynn: I like any restaurant that treats the help well. I just moved back to Brooklyn, and have gone twice to this faux French bistro on Smith, near Warren, and it is always full of life and everyone that works there seems like they might be having a good time.

YR: In your opinion, what makes an evening romantic?

Flynn: For me, it helps if I’m not alone.

YR: You’re at a karaoke bar. What would you sing?

Flynn: I’m terrible at karaoke, which I guess is the point. I hear “Sweet Caroline” is good, because then everyone else will jump in.

YR: We hear you’ve recently become a father. Congratulations! We know that motherhood changes a writer’s life. Has fatherhood changed your writing life in any way?

Flynn: As of this moment the child has not entered this world, but soon, so I guess I’m a father in training. I expect there are changes coming. Right now I’m trying to finish up a dark project before this ray of light arrives.

YR: Do you feel you’ve covered most familial issues in your recent work? What subjects are next for you?

Flynn: I’m finishing a book on photographs and dreams and swimming and monkeys and the elements and the mythological figure Proteus.