Interview With Nick Flynn June 16, 2010
Posted by Katie Oh in : Such As , trackbackI attend Pratt Institute, where we have a glorious little literary and art magazine called Ubiquitous. Every fall semester, they conduct an interview and write a profile of the Writing Program’s Writer-in-Residence. I, being an eager junior, offered to write said profile.
I met Nick in Pratt’s Pie Shop one rainy afternoon, expecting a fairly quick question-and-answer with simple answers. Instead, what I got was 35 minutes (that ended up being 7 pages single-spaced!) of thoughts on bewilderment, carpentry, and aging. Because of space restrictions, the whole of this interview couldn’t be published in Ubiquitous. So, here’s my original cut of the interview (with most of our “sort ofs” and “likes” omitted!)
Katie Oh: You lectured [at Pratt] about bewilderment, and I was looking at your website, and that’s sort of, like, the working title of your new project. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Nick Flynn: It was the working title—”A Memoir of Bewilderment,” hopefully that’s just in the book now, so we don’t have to call it that. I’ve just sort of been studying this concept of bewilderment, looking at it for a few years now, to see how various arts relate to it, how bewilderment fits into their practice. It seems to be this sort of key moment in almost any work of art, where the artist sort of pushes beyond what they know to this sort of unknown, to this sort of place that would probably, by definition, be bewildering. And it interests me. It interests me that that’s where art can occur, sort of beyond what we know.
Katie Oh: So this is mostly about the [torture photos of Abu Ghirab]?
Nick Flynn: That was the beginning of it, yeah. What was bewildering to me about the photographs was that there were actually quite a [few] thinkers and writers and all sorts of people willing to come out and say that they supported it. That was what surprised me. I sort of thought, “this is obviously wrong.” And it wasn’t obviously wrong to everybody. It wasn’t obviously wrong to the majority of the country, actually. That was bewildering. That was sort of the bewildering moment in that, it was like I felt so naïve.
KO: How was working with pop culture/current events? Has it influenced your other writing? Or do you sort of try to keep your other projects separate?
NF: It’s strange that it was so topical. Like, it was very strange that every day I could go like read the newspaper—I mean, I like to read the newspaper anyway—but that I had to sort of see what was being said, what was being revealed about/around this issue every day. I don’t know if I would necessarily do it again. I mean, I didn’t choose to do this thing either, so it wasn’t like it was a conscious choice. I tend to like a little bit more time for reflection, to sort of look back and let things sort of get integrated into my life in some way. I think there’s such an urgency with this one.
KO: Do you think you’ll keep working with this idea of US war crimes? Does that interest you at all? Or was it just these isolated events that sort of turned into something bigger?
NF: Yeah, probably not. I probably wouldn’t keep working with it. If you read the book, the Abu Ghirab photographs are just one thread among all these other threads that weave in with it. That was the thing that sort of hijacked me for a while. I sort of know what my next longer, larger prose project is, and then I have poetry projects going on. And neither of them deal directly with US war crimes. It might always come up in a certain sense. I mean, I do have some of these things, like prisons, that are sort of on-going interests for me. And veterans, on some level, have interested me, because they’ve always intersected with my life. I think they will probably always come up.
KO: Do you plan out these projects? How far in advance? How do you keep them separate? Do they end up rolling into one in the end?
NF: They don’t get sort of planned out. Like I said, this one sort of hijacked me, it wasn’t planned. I don’t think I had a sense of that I was going to work on the Abu Ghirab photographs when they came out. The other memoir wasn’t even out yet, so I was still sort of in the midst of doing stuff with that book when the Abu Ghirab photographs came out. Then about a year later, I sort of got sort of hijacked by it. This next book, I worked on a documentary film, “Darwin’s Nightmare” and I sort of know that I always wanted to do a book about making that film. That’s about as much as I know, and there’s always these moments that I think tie into it, which I’ve written out many a time, but I don’t know beyond that, what it will look like or what the form will be.
KO: When you sit down to write, do you sort of say to yourself “oh, I’m working on this [project]?”
NF: Sometimes I do that. Right now, I’m not doing that, I’m working on poems. I actually sort of prefer that sort of unstructured thought, to see where that goes. But even when I say “I know what I’m writing about,” usually when I sit down to write I don’t know exactly how it’s going to go. It’s not like I just have to fill in the blanks, and then I know what’s going to go in the blanks. There’s always a sort of deeply intuitive element to the process of it. Even if you think you know what you’re doing.
KO: How do you define yourself as a writer?
NF: I think of myself as primarily a poet, which is sort of silly, because they’re on the low end of the spectrum or something, in culture. But for me, it’s just the closest to what I do. I get the most out of it consistently. I read a great book recently called “Meth Land”. An immersion journalist went into a little town in Iowa where it was riddled with meth. A really great book. It’s not a book I would write myself. It even lagged in a few moments. I don’t sense the best poetry in it. I sort of like to maintain attention throughout something. He had a lot of information he had to dump on us, and that really doesn’t interest me, to dump the information. Poets really aren’t interested in dumping information.
KO: When you say that poets are the most “looked down upon” people, do you get that a lot?
NF: It’s still pretty funny, when someone asks you what you do and you say you’re a poet. You get a look. It just sounds ridiculous, in a certain sense, to say that. It’s one of the few occupations that, nine times out of ten, someone will say, “oh, I write poems, too.” Like, a lawyer probably doesn’t get that much, brain surgeon doesn’t get that much, like, “oh, I do brain surgery, also,” you know? Poets get that a lot. Poets and carpenters. I don’t think anyone can say they’re a poet or a carpenter. I was a carpenter once, too, so I know that. And I’m not a very good carpenter.
KO: When people say that to you, do you take it with a grain of salt? Do you judge people when they say that?
NF: I mean, ideally, you try not to judge anyone, right? I wouldn’t say I judge them on it. Nine times out of ten, somebody will say that, but, maybe half the time, the person will be in a serious project. Like, someone came up to me at a reading I gave last night in the city—a woman was in the elevator with me and she was holding this manuscript in her hand we talked for a little while and I asked her if she was a writer, and she said “well, yes, I’m working on this,” and she had a deadline for this book, and she took some time off to come to my reading. A lot of people are writing. It’s sort of a wonderfully democratic art form, because you don’t need a whole lot to do it.
KO: Between your memoir and your books of poetry, you write a lot about things with your parents, things that have happened: does time help that? Do you write less about it now, does it give you any sort of distance?
NF: Actually, this new memoir that’s coming out in January, I write a lot about my parents again. It seems ridiculous sometimes, like I can’t believe I’m writing about them again. It’s not actually a matter of getting distance, it’s a matter of getting, hopefully, some sort of insights into something. The strange thing about time is that you become the age your parents were when you were young enough to judge them. Maybe you’re 15 and you look at your mother who is 40, and you think “I can’t believe that she doesn’t have her shit together.” And suddenly you’re 40 and it’s like, “oh my god, I don’t have my shit together.” Suddenly you have a deep compassion for your parents, you know? I find that really interesting, suddenly getting these insights into the various struggles that come with the different stages in one’s life. And I do reflect it through the stories my parents went through. That’s just what I do. Other people, like this guy who wrote “Meth Land,” is reflected through these meth addicts. And occasionally he brings in his own life, so you sort of get a sense of why he’s writing about these meth addicts, which I think actually makes the book more interesting, is to get that sense.
KO: How has aging effected your process as a writer? Does it make things any easier?
NF: Phil Levine, the poet, said that writing poems is the one job where everything you learn means nothing. You wake up the next morning and you can’t take everything you’ve learned and write a poem, you actually have to write a different poem, you have to reinvent it each time you sit down to do it. Hopefully, throughout your creative life, and with anything you do, you remain open to possibilities and pushing into what you haven’t done. Maybe as you get older you get to see more clearly, “oh, this is a thing I’ve done before.” But you have work behind you so you can say “oh, I’ve done these things, but this is the thing I’ve avoided.” So you can maybe move into that. Maybe. Or it just happens. The poems I’m working on now could almost be musicals or something, it’s so odd, it’s like “what am I doing?” And they’re embarrassing because of that. Which always is a good thing for me. It’s always a good thing if something feels embarrassing. I feel like I’m maybe doing something right if I’m embarrassing myself in the process.
KO: How do you approach teaching? I noticed in your lecture that you were kind of a very interactive [teacher].
NF: That’s something about aging, too, getting older, I feel like I know less and less, actually. It’s more about this more collective knowledge. I’m just really fascinated with it in a classroom—my energy is almost nothing compared to the energy of the whole group. And what everyone knows, what everyone sort of brings into that group. That’s, to me, more interesting than to listen to myself keep talking. I’m more interested in a collaborative approach to things.
KO: How did you begin teaching at the University of Houston? Why do you go every year? It’s sort of like this… you teach for one semester and then you go elsewhere.
NF: I have no idea. I can’t tell you. It makes no sense at all. There’s sort of these “outposts” that are like poetry centers, it’s very odd, the sort of place where poetry can take hold. It’s almost the most uninviting, inhospitable places in the world, where it can flourish. Because nothing else wants to go there. Nothing else goes, so the poetry gets to have a foothold in there. People in Houston are very good to poets down there. They respect it, there’s an audience. It’s become like a place with poetry readers and poetry writers. So it becomes this place. Like, Syracuse, New York, Salt Lake City [Utah], Tuscon, Arizona. So, Houston is just one of those towns. I got called to go to Houston.
KO: What was getting an MFA like? How did you make the decision to get it? A lot of people [in Pratt's writing program] look at MFAs. How do you feel about them?
NF: I teach in an MFA/PhD program. I think it’s fine, I think they can be great. People go for all different reasons, too. I sort of like more of the experimental thing, just being open, it’s a time to try everything. It seems like a good use of your time. Rather than, like, I already know who I am, and I’m just going to perfect it. I think you can do that in a lot of other places. In an MFA program, hopefully there’s a range of people teaching. But that’s a part of the whole larger issue, at least with poetry, where you sort of learn from those that come before you. It’s one of the great things about poetry in this country, is that poets are generally aren’t loaded, unless they come from money, and so they have to work, and so you get to go study with your favorite poet. Which is kinda great. Like, fiction writers don’t really get to. The biggest names don’t teach because they don’t have to, because they make a lot of money. With poets, they sort of have to. Occasionally, a fiction writer gets to teach, some great writer, but with poets, they all teach. It’s nice, you can go to readings, they do readings for like twenty people.
KO: So once your next book [The Ticking Is the Bomb] is out, what’s your next move as a writer?
NF: I’m hoping to be in a couple of projects, actually, there’s some poems coming out after that, which I’m sort of working on right now, I am working on. And then this memoir about working [about] this film, this documentary film. Those are what I sort of know. And then there’s all this stuff that I don’t know.
KO: At what point in your life are you going to stop with… Do you think you’ll ever stop being adventurous, and sort of working with documentaries [and things]?
NF: I mean, I just see them all as sort of feeding the same thing. It doesn’t feel like the memoir is very different from the poetry, in a certain sense. It doesn’t read like a straight… I’m interested in the genre of memoir right now, because it just seems so wide open, like there’s almost no rule for it. Although, it’s the same for fiction, actually, there’s all sorts of wild stuff going on in fiction right now. But memoir seems like it’s in its infancy or something, in some way. So it’s interesting. It’s kind of exciting. It’s like the wild west or something.
KO: I know there’s been a lot of scrutiny recently with memoir now. Have you had any trouble with that?
NF: No one’s come back and like said anything. You know, it came out around the same time as the James Frey book did and some newspaper put a thing in, like, “Can you find the biggest lies in these memoirs,” and mine was one of them that was listed. But no one said anything. There was really nothing to find.
KO: And then, the obligatory: do you have any advice for undergrad-aged writers?
NF: I do always like what Grace Paley always said, which was: “Low overhead.” It was the only advice she ever gave to young writers. Just keep your expenses as low as possible so you have more time to write. Which is tough these days, you know? But I think it’s actually really good advice. Like, move to a second city. Find a community somewhere else. I have a friend that’s a musician, she just moved down to Baltimore, because she just finds it more interesting and she can do whatever she wants. There’s not the same pressure. And she’s actually quite a talented musician. She’s like 20 and the stuff she’s doing is great, Thurston Moore just signed her, and she just left New York. She left New York and she was like “I’m going to Baltimore so I can do my art. I can live really cheaply, and there’s a scene there.” Houston is a scene, there’s an art scene there, because it’s like not one of these… it’s not LA, it’s not New York, it’s not San Fransisco, it’s not one of these expensive places where you feel you have to be. You just need time. It takes time. It takes a lot of time to sort of make mistakes and just to figure out what you want to do and try different things.
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