nice angles there, kate.

That was my hair color in high school. I’m not even kidding. I looked like a crazy person. I guess I was a crazy person. Also, I wore that little purple flower clip in my hair almost every day my junior year. Again, a crazy person. You really should have seen my fashion sense back then… I would wear knee-length skirts with knee-high striped socks and ballet flats. Basically, a still-wanting-to-look-goth faux-ballerina. I can’t even really justify it or begin to explain it any way better than that.

But I digress. I decided to make a change. More after the jump, as well as some more [equally hilarious, Myspace-like] pictures from days ~gone by.

So, feeling in something of a rut, I decided to go ahead and make the plunge. I procured myself a tube of dye and a bleach kit and went on my way. I painted in a few highlights [on the top of my head, where I suppose the sun would hit, so as to make them look more natural] and, unfortunately, left the bleach in a bit too long. My hair got BLONDE in 15 minutes [I still have no idea how this happened, but it did, and it was weird] but I proceeded with the dye anyway. It actually looks pretty good!

my eyebrows look heinous.

One of the problems I always end up having with my hair is that, no matter what, I can never get a good picture of the color.

this shows the color of the streaks slightly better.

Luckily, despite my bleaching troubles, the colors manage to work together. I’m actually quite pleased.

Though I suspect no one is really wondering this, I used L’Oreal Excellence HiColor Red in Copper. It’s a dye that’s actually meant for doing highlights on dark hair, so it lifts and deposits color at the same time, which makes life much easier. It can be had at Sally’s for a really reasonable price, which makes it all the better!

And, now, for some more hilarity, here’s some more hair colors I had in high school.

a pink streak, so the "masses" would know i was a rebel.

I’ll tell you, though, my eyebrows look great here.

did you know i had a faux-hawk? i wish i was kidding.

Please note that, in that picture, I am wearing a Bright Eyes shirt. I don’t know what was going on in my head.

more of the red and pink. remember when pirates were the cool thing? ack.

And, now that I’ve sufficiently embarrassed myself for literally the world to see, I am going to go crawl into a hole and cry. But at least my hair will look fabulous!

I’ve been thinking a lot about mine lately, and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve had to try to hammer out. How heavily do I consider a backup plan? How miserable am I willing to be to pay off my student loans? What’s the ideal situation, and how do I take that into account in relation to my backup plans?

There’s a lot of questions to consider. However, I have been able to boil it down to two plans.

The ideal right now:

Now: Apply for MFA programs this fall.

Spring 2011: Get into MFA program with full funding. Graduate with BFA.

Spring 2013 [or 2014]: Graduate with MFA.

Fall 2013 [or 2014]: Come back to Pittsburgh, work job I currently work seasonally, while applying for more jobs.

[At some point] Begin adjunct faculty work.

[All through this time period, be sending things out for, and hopefully getting, publication.]

This would, hopefully within 10 years, lead to my having enough publications [maybe a book deal?] to get a full-time position.

Backup plan:

Now: Apply for MFA programs this fall.

Spring 2011: Get rejected from programs. Graduate with BFA.

Fall 2011: Move back to Pittsburgh, work job I currently work seasonally, apply for more MFA programs.

Spring 2012: Get rejected and keep applying or get accepted, and continue with ideal plan.

People always tell me “I thought if you wanted to be a writer, you just had to write.” This is true in some aspects, but also quite condescending to hear. Of course I write. But I have to be able to survive somehow, preferably without losing my sanity.

You five-year plan really depends on you. I have friends who just aimlessly travel throughout the country and find little jobs here and there. If you’re personable and can thrive in that lack of structure, that is wonderful. I can’t quite do that, I like a plan. It’s been good to get one figured out. Now I just have to do it.

I saw this shirt at Target, on clearance for $5, and thought it would go well with the bag. A bit of shoulder detail that looks more “metal” [anyone remember those pyramid bracelets/belts from their junior high goth years? I think this is the grown up version of those] in contrast to the light softness of the bag.

Unfortunately the outfit wasn’t exactly the best. I think next time I’m going to wear it with a high-waisted skirt [which would hide some of that awkward cling around my belly] and with different sandals. My original plan had been these black, strappy kitten heels that I bought literally 5 years ago, but I couldn’t find them before I had to leave. I also think I might wear some kind of fun-colored necklace next time, too, to add a pop of color. Or maybe I’ll just leave the red lips to do their thing.

I am unapologetically fat. In this new age of weight-loss everywhere, of low-fat, low-carb, no-carb food, I refuse to stoop to the level everyone else seems to want me to. Fat is the last acceptable form of discrimination in American society. “Thin” has a connotation of beautiful, gorgeous, and successful, “fat” signals lazy, undisciplined, and ugly. Maybe some of the criticism of fat people comes from a “good place,” and maybe I’m unhealthy in my fatness. But why is that anyone else’s business? It isn’t. What’s more, I feel some of the greatest critics of fatness are insecure fat people themselves.

I was watching the Biggest Loser, the weight-loss reality show on NBC, as a contestant in her early 20s melodramatically sobbed. She’d been fat her whole life, never got asked on a date, never went to a prom, never had a boyfriend, and she “wanted her life back.”

I rolled my eyes. I was fat in high school, and I had no trouble. I got asked to the prom (though, as a high school anarchist, I chose not to go), I had boyfriends. I couldn’t help but think this crying girl on television was faking. What if she was just a boring person? What if, instead of accepting or trying to change her personality, she blamed her problems on being fat? I wanted to tell her that losing weight doesn’t rid you of all your problems—in fact, she would probably just find new ones.

I hate shows like the Biggest Loser because fat becomes the enemy—the thing about yourself you should hate. If a contestant loses 5 pounds one week instead of the 20 their partner loses, they’re shamed—which only reinforces the problem of the self-hating mindset. They never sit the contestants down for a pep talk about having confidence in themselves at any size. They just keep repeating that weight loss is the only road to self-acceptance, the only way to validate yourself.

I see the looks I get from people sometimes, evaluating my hips and belly, and I wonder if they know that I ran a 5k race at Thanksgiving. But would even that knowledge change their mind? I think people are afraid that if they become fat, they will lose their friends, and all respect from other people. That wouldn’t happen with the people they already know. As for the rest? It’s their loss. Run with me.

I think this would make a good basic school outfit. I don’t own these items, obviously, but I own similar ones. The bag, coupled with the dark jeans, gives off a slightly dressy look, while the shoes and cardigan underscore the comfort and ease aspect.

I often wear a similar outfit to work, with leggings underneath when it’s chilly outside.

What about for a nice night out at a play? I love the ivory color of the waistband on this dress.

Or just a casual dinner out in the summertime.

Okay, maybe it doesn’t go with everything. But I totally wouldn’t leave the house in something like this.

Maybe.

Well, maybe not all because of a bag. But it was the start.

I needed to find myself a good birthday gift. I’m turning 21 in September, and I figured I would get myself something really nice. I didn’t even consider a bag until another member of an online community I’m in posted a link to a set of handbags Coach had some bloggers design.

And there she was.

It sounds so stupid, but it made me realize that I really need to work on identifying who I am as a person. I’m about to spend the next year of my life writing a book and completing my undergraduate degree. You have to know who you are to be able to accomplish something so stressful.

I am, in a nutshell, this handbag. I’m fun, but not too loud and crazy. I make a statement in my own way, but it’s soft. I’m professional, but I can blend into different settings.

I realized that I missed blogging. I miss sharing my thoughts in a public space. I’ve been feeling so much in a rut the past few months, and I think this has something to do with it.

I’ve been thinking about what I want to do with this blog. And it’s a good question. I love food, but I don’t cook or bake enough to run a cooking blog. I’m trying to find my personal style, but there are a million and a half fashion blogs. I’m a writer (or I’m trying to be) but I don’t want to put all my writing out there. So maybe I’ll put all that in a blender and see what I come up with.

Maybe it will be me.

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.

The end of my summer was just that: an end. Unspectacular. No fireworks. I played “Born to Run” and drove 70 on roads with 45 speed limits going home from work and felt at peace when I left Westmoreland County. I will be back.

School this year is perhaps the most intense it has ever been. 18 credits and working part-time for America Reads has made me have two crying spells already.

My subjects:

- Fiction Studio

- Literature of Pop Culture: Harry Potter

- Bookmaking

- Reading & Writing Brooklyn

- The Professional Workplace

- Writer’s Forum

- Independent Study (about the lexicon of feminist journalism)

Harry Potter is one of the best classes, but at the same time, also the hardest. I forgot that the books are, at their shortest, 350 pages. The next one is over 600, and I have a week to read it. Ouch.

I turned twenty a few weeks ago: it was unceremonious. I worked all day and went out for a lovely birthday dinner with my friends. The night before, however, my friends baked me a cake:

That is perhaps the most unflattering picture ever taken of me, but I look joyous. And that is what matters.

I am already surprised at my resilience. I have written several stories and have yet to hit a block. I even have more material started for the future. I know it is not perfect, but I am trying. A writer-in-polishing.

This is all what matters.

I drove out to Cleveland a few weeks ago. Amanda went to visit Adam, who lives in Cleveland like I live in Pittsburgh (close, but not downtown) so I got up much earlier than I normally do and drove. It was relaxing and made me realize that I am truly my mother’s child–I made it from east of Pittsburgh to west of Cleveland in two hours and some change. I drive fast, but cautiously. The best way to describe the place Adam lives in is by the fact that the closest grocery store to him is Trader Joe’s. We went to a Mexican fusion-esque restaurant in a cute little neighborhood and then went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the Bruce [!!!] exhibit.

It was wonderful. The only thing I’m not a fan of is that the building is a large glass pyramid, so all the escalators are sort of suspended in air as you go from one level to the next–and I am afraid of medium-distance heights. I kept my eyes closed a lot. But there were two levels of Bruce, which was amazing. Everything from the clothes he wore on album covers to the dining room table he wrote lyrics at. Amanda and Adam, not being Bruce fans, weren’t as interested, but I was enchanted. Ah! What a man. It inspired me to buy a print of this for my dorm room:

I am excited to recieve it. And hang it, of course.

We went to dinner afterwards, and I must say, Cleveland has amazing sushi. It was just wonderful, in the way that seeing your friends at “home” is.

Although “home” is something I’ve been struggling with for the past few months [years?]–I find myself annoyed, disenchanted with places after a while. Toledo never felt properly like home, Brooklyn is lovely but I get tired of the rat race, Pittsburgh is sometimes a bit too sleepy for my tastes. I feel like a nomad, but attempt to bring home with me everywhere–I carve a niche wherever I go and put my name on it, but it doesn’t mean I’m happy with it. I’ve always kept at least one box packed at every new place.

I haven’t done much back to school shopping–though it is something I love doing–because, for some reason, this year I’m a champion of simply revitalizing the old. Don’t throw it away, heck, don’t even give it away, keep it as long as you can. I bought two bags this summer, which is like some sort of record for me. And they were only 50 cents each at a rummage sale. They’re perfectly good bags.

My family is holding a little cookout before I go away, at my aunt and uncle’s house. They have a pool. I forgot how much I liked swimming until we stopped by one day and they invited me in. It’s awesome. Even if I tend to under-sunscreen and wind up with red skin for a few days.

I am excited for school to start. The classes I am taking this semester are absolutely wonderful. And I have an awesome roommate. In fact, I think I’ll end this entry with a picture of us that Amanda took in Cleveland.

I am excited for this year. Hopefully it will be the best yet.