Nick Flynn

Last updated

Nick Flynn
Nick Flynn 2023 Texas Book Festival.jpg
Flynn at 2023 Texas Book Festival
Born (1960-01-26) January 26, 1960 (age 65)
Scituate, Massachusetts, US
Occupation
  • Author
  • poet
  • playwright
  • professor
Notable works
Notable awards
Spouse
(m. 2009)
Children1
Website
www.nickflynn.org

Nick Flynn (born January 26, 1960) is an American writer, playwright, and poet.

Contents

Life and career

Nick Flynn was raised by his mother in Scituate, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.

Flynn had no contact with his father throughout most of his childhood and adolescence as his parents separated when he was six months old. [1] As a child, he was discouraged from pursuing a writing career because his father had identified himself as a writer to his mother when they first met. Flynn claims that, along with his father's alcoholism, a reason for his parents' separation was his father's "delusion of greatness" directly connected to his being an artist. Flynn first became an electrician instead of a writer after graduating high school, because of the stigma associated with the latter. [2]

At 20, he was offered a scholarship to study English at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He studied with Fred Robinson, who was then married to Marilyn Robinson—she would sometimes teach his classes. It was at UMass that Flynn was first exposed to contemporary poetry, in a workshop taught by James Tate. In fall of 1982 Flynn's mother committed suicide. [3] Subsequently unable to continue with his studies, Flynn dropped out of school and ended up working at the Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter in Boston. He took classes at various colleges and universities over the next several years to finish his undergraduate degree, while living in the Fort Point Channel on a boat he and a friend had renovated.[ citation needed ]

When he was 27, Flynn was unexpectedly reunited with his father at the Pine Street Inn, when his then-homeless father showed up as a "guest". At 29, Flynn began therapy, got sober, and began taking poetry workshops, first with Carolyn Forche, then with Marie Howe. The following year he was awarded a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he became friends with Jacqueline Woodson, Tim Seibles, Paul Lisicky, Mark Doty, Stanley Kunitz, Alan Dugan, Carl Phillips, and others. In 1992, he moved to Brooklyn to pursue his Master of Arts in poetry at New York University. [4] At NYU, he studied with Sharon Olds, Phil Levine, Galway Kinnell, William Matthews, and Allen Ginsberg.[ citation needed ]

From 1992 to 1999, he was a member of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, in which he served as an educator and consultant in New York public schools. [5] He left Brooklyn in 1999 for a second fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, where he finished his first book of poems, Some Ether (2000), begun ten years earlier. That same year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, which allowed him to live in Rome from 2001 to 2003. While in Rome he finished work on Another Bullshit Night in Suck City , as well as traveling extensively, mainly to Dublin, Paris, and Tanzania. It was in Rome where he met and became friends with Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper. Flynn collaborated on Sauper's Academy Awards nominated documentary Darwin's Nightmare [6] —traveling to Tanzania for the filming and to Paris for the editing.[ citation needed ]

Flynn's 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. [7]

Since 2004, Flynn has been a Professor on the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Houston, where he is in residence each Spring, teaching workshops in poetry and interdisciplinary / collaborative art.[ citation needed ]

In 2009, he married his long-time partner, actress Lili Taylor. Flynn and Taylor live in Brooklyn with their daughter, Maeve. [8]

Books

This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020) circles around the lingering effects of his mother having set their house on fire when he was six years old. It is a hybrid of several genres, including memoir, fairy tale, theater, police reports, poetry, essay, speculative fiction, and magic realism. It is the sibling to I Will Destroy You (2019), which Flynn revised by performing each poem with his band Killdeer over the five years of its writing.

Stay: threads, conversations, collaborations (2020) gathers together 30 years of Flynn's writing, alongside his collaborations with artists, including Jack Pierson, Catherine Opie, Kevin Jerome Everson, Sarah Lipstate, Paul Weitz, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Sarah Sentilles, Amy Arbus, Ryan McGinley, Zoe Leonard, Mark Adams, Bill Schuck, Guy Barash, Mel Chin, M. P. Landis, Jared Handelsman, Alix Lambert, Gabriel Martinez, Douglas Padgett, Kahn & Selesnick, Josh Neufeld, David Brody, Daniel Heyman, Mischa Richter, Jim Peters / Kathleen Carr, and Marilyn Minter.

The Reenactments (2013) [9] [10] chronicles Flynn's experience during the making of Being Flynn , a 2012 film based on his acclaimed 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. His readings on neuroscience and memory, including books by V. S. Ramachandran, David Eagleman, and Antonio Damasio, helped him to comprehend his experience of being on set for the reenactment of his mother's death by Julianne Moore. My Feelings (2015) is the sibling to The Reenactments.

In The Ticking Is the Bomb (2009), his second memoir, Flynn explored U.S. state-sanctioned torture, as well as his decision to have a child. The title was inspired by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, who Flynn has studied with since 1990. It is the sibling to The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (2011), which continued on similar themes.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), [11] [12] a New York Times Bestseller, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, was a finalist for France's Prix Femina, and has been translated into fifteen languages. It documents Flynn's years working at The Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter in Boston. It uses a form of lyric reportage to examine the creation of homelessness in the U.S., as well as his relationship with his father. It includes lyric fragments, short plays, lists, and documents. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is the sibling to his first book of poetry, Some Ether (2000), which won the inaugural PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry in 1999, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

His book Low was published by in 2023. [13]

Awards

Bibliography

Poetry

Collections
List of poems
TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected
Cartoon Physics, part 1 Josh Neufeld published drawings inspired by the poem in Crossroads magazine, 2001.
The Day Lou Reed Died2013 [28]

Plays

Memoirs

Nonfiction

Hybrid

Forewords

Collaborations and limited editions

Work in anthologies

Filmography

References

  1. Flynn, Nick (2004). Another Bullshit Night in Suck City . W. W. Norton & Company. p.  63. ISBN   978-0-393-32940-7.
  2. "'Being Flynn': When Dad Needs To Take Shelter". npr. February 29, 2012. Retrieved October 8, 2015.
  3. Flynn, Nick (2004). Another Bullshit Night in Suck City . W. W. Norton & Co. pp.  152–187. ISBN   978-0-393-32940-7.
  4. "Nick Flynn CV". fp.my.uh.edu. Retrieved February 21, 2016.
  5. "Library of Congress Interview with Nick Flynn". Library of Congress . Retrieved February 3, 2013.
  6. "Darwin's Nightmare at IMDb". IMDb . Retrieved December 29, 2020.
  7. "Nick Flynn at Litquake". Archived from the original on October 2, 2012. Retrieved February 3, 2013.
  8. Kachka, Boris (January 21, 2010). "Nick Flynn Talks (and Writes) About Meeting With His Actress Dream Girl, Lili Taylor -- New York Magazine - Nymag". New York . Retrieved February 3, 2013.
  9. "The Reenactments at W.W. Norton" . Retrieved February 2, 2013.
  10. Kellogg, Carolyn (January 18, 2013). "Nick Flynn, On the Set of His Life Story, LA Times". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved February 3, 2013.
  11. Elliott, Stephen (September 19, 2004). "Father Limps Back into His Son's Life, San Francisco Chronicle". The San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved February 3, 2013.
  12. Miliard, Mike. "The Prodigal Father, Boston Phoenix". Archived from the original on April 3, 2013. Retrieved February 3, 2013.
  13. "Low | Graywolf Press". www.graywolfpress.org. Retrieved December 11, 2023.
  14. "Djerassi Resident Artist Program".
  15. "Lannan Residency Fellowship".
  16. "Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media". Austen Riggs Center. Retrieved October 25, 2018.
  17. "Atlantic Center for the Arts".
  18. "Nick Flynn - PEN America". pen.org. September 11, 2012. Retrieved October 25, 2018.
  19. "Yaddo".
  20. "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Fellows". www.gf.org. Retrieved October 25, 2018.
  21. "MacDowell Colony".
  22. PEN American Center > Poetry > Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry > Previous Winners Archived March 13, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  23. "Fine Arts Work Center".
  24. "Millay Colony for the Arts".
  25. "MacDowell Colony".
  26. "Djerassi Resident Artist Program".
  27. "Fine Arts Work Center".
  28. Flynn, Nick (November 25, 2013). "The Day Lou Reed Died". The New Yorker. Vol. 89, no. 38. pp. 102–103.
  29. "Ploughshares Introduction" . Retrieved April 1, 2012.
  30. "Cartoon Physics / Sarah Press" . Retrieved December 30, 2020.
  31. "City of Notions / Danielle Legros Georges". July 27, 2017. Retrieved December 30, 2020.
  32. "Girls in Trees / Instar Lodge". December 21, 2016. Retrieved December 30, 2020.
  33. "Lexique Nomade" . Retrieved December 30, 2020.
  34. "Re d acted / Daniel Heyman" . Retrieved December 30, 2020.
  35. "Tables of Contents".
  36. Diario de la Pandemia.
  37. "Renga for Obama" . Retrieved December 30, 2020.
  38. "Being Flynn Credits at Focus Features" . Retrieved February 3, 2013.
  39. "Darwin's Nightmare at IMDB". IMDb . Retrieved February 2, 2013.
  40. "Breathe In, Breathe Out at IMDB". IMDb . Retrieved December 29, 2020.