wesley gibson interviews nick flynn

MARY magazine (www.maryjournal.org), st. mary’s college

february 2007

WG: I was going to send you three series of three questions, some of them very
frivolous, and there still may be one or more frivolous questions, ultimately. I've been
mulling it over and I think I want to start with the poetry since you started as a poet and I
somehow assume that you still consider yourself primarily a poet. I’m only going to ask
one question because it's a complicated question and it will ultimately lead to questions I
want to ask about the memoir. So, here goes.

WG: Some Ether is, mostly, an autobiographical book. The rhythms of it strike me as
being mostly in the service of the narrative. It also seems, in a way, like an elegiac and
romantic book. By romantic what I mean is that in fugue, for example, it's really a
description of sex, but it's a description of sex in which the narrator hungers for
something he wants from the sex that maybe, unexpectedly by the end, he gets. But it
seems that even though it's very much a poem rooted in the carnal, the carnal feels faint
to me, overwhelmed by the spiritual or emotional or psychological quest that is embodied
by the carnal.

NF: If I had to articulate it, I guess I’d say that I sometimes think of sex as a dangerous
element, like the ocean, in that it is best to stand before it in awe and not expect that you
can use it for anything but what it is. When you try to use sex to say, be intimate, it
usually backfires. It is hard enough to simply be present in the face of it, and to avoid
being crushed beneath the waves, and to enjoy the ride.

WG: Let me elaborate with Blind Huber. It’s a radically different book. It almost seems
like it could have been written by a different poet. The rhythms, the words, the lines are
very tight. It is a book, which while it may, ultimately, describe the spiritual, is rigorously
rooted in the physical world; and it is a merciless physical world of death and necessity,
which may describe a kind of beauty, but it's a hard, unforgiving beauty. There doesn't
seem to be a droplet of romanticism in it.

NF: At certain points in the writing of Blind Huber, I was very influenced by the
Victorian romantic notion of being able to name and understand the entire world, in order
to be carried away on some ecstasy of meaning, but it just isn’t my temperament. I seem
to tend much more toward bewilderment than understanding, which is perhaps why I’m a
poet. A writer like, say, Philip Roth, seems to believe that one can nail down the essence
of a person in words, if given enough words, whereas the best I can do is circle around an
unknowable center, describing as best I can how that person moves through the world
and what that world looks like.

WG: Perhaps what I want to say is that instead of being a book of painful longing for
things to be different, it tries to accept the world on its own brutal terms, and to find the
meaning and beauty in that.
NF: I did find a lot of beauty and meaning in studying bees, in immersing myself in that
culture, for the six years I wrote the book. And not just in the natural world, but in the
world of those who studied bees before me, and their obsessive passion. And the
metaphoric levels one can read into that passion, which leads me back to the body and its
dangers.

WG: As I was reading it I was thinking of Lousie Gluck and Ted Hughes. Gluck, in The
Wild Iris, is looking for God in nature, but it is far from a comforting, nineteenth-century
vision of nature, and she seems to want to come to terms with and find salvation in a
natural world that is violent and remorseless. Ditto for Hughes's early work. His greatness
and originality is in his project of trying to accept and record and celebrate a natural
world without anthropomorphizing it. These things, of course, tell us something about the
brutality of our own animal natures. It seems to me that you are after something similar.

NF: I don’t really find the natural world all that brutal, compared with the brutality that
we humans are able to manifest. Nature just is, and we are part of nature, and our
knowledge comes from nature, but we also have this consciousness, which creates all
sorts of projections and small-hearted actions, at times, as well as acts of utter
compassion.

WG: Why the radical change of style and content and even concerns?

NF: I think the concerns of Some Ether and Blind Huber are perhaps similar, only in
Blind Huber there is this thin veneer of persona. This is perhaps the main difference,
aside from the sparseness you mentioned earlier, as compared the ranginess of Some
Ether. The personas of Blind Huber allowed me a freedom to access messier emotional
terrain, like small-heartedness, rage, pettiness. All of these are obviously projections, and
likely have nothing to do with bees. Gluck and Hughes were certainly present in the
background, especially Hughes’ Crow, for it is so clearly a mask talking.

WG: Did this in any way lead you to Another Bullshit Night in Suck City?

NF: I think of Suck City as a synthesis of both earlier books, at least in emotional
resonance, in that the apparent clinical distance of Blind Huber meets the apparent
throbbing heart of Some Ether. On closer inspection, though, Blind Huber may be a more
emotionally present book than Some Ether, in that the narrator of Some Ether could be
read as a bit emotionally disconnected, a bit or a lot damaged, and the narrators of Blind
Huber are really struggling to accept the world as it is. And perhaps both those
temperaments are present in Suck City, especially in that space of slippage between the
(my) father and the son (me), and how their (our) lives are versions of the other.

WG: Does this make any sense or are these the ravings of a lunatic?

NF: Both.
WG: Did you write the memoir because you felt, to tell this story, that you needed a
larger more narrative form than poetry could provide?

NF: When Suck City began it had no form, I had no idea what it would become, what
shape it would take, though it did seem it would need more narrative connective tissue
than usually found in poetry. At certain junctures it really could have been anything—a
play, a movie, a collection of poems. I still like to think of it as a hybrid of sorts, that I’m
tricking people into reading poetry. Also, after writing Blind Huber, I found that I liked
the tension and limitations inherent in dealing with non-fiction, that one is forced to
wrestle with and create from the stuff at hand.

WG: How did you write it? What I mean is that while it has great narrative coherence, it
feels like it was written in fragments. Did you write it as out-of-sequence fragments; and
if so, how did you go about piecing it together?

NF: Ah, yes, the fragments. It was a labor intensive project, involving various timelines,
graphs, scissors and glue. At one point in Rome, where I spent two years finishing the
book, I had to have a map to my apartment, a map to the hundreds of small piles that
represented various beats in the narrative. I developed a great respect for the heavy lifting
that you novelists have to do, carrying entire books around in your heads. As a poet I had
to approach this task in small manageable fragments. And, as I mentioned earlier, then I
had to go back and fill in the narrative connective tissue. Otherwise it would be all poetic
fragments, and the result would be like eating too much cake.

WG: I really like the odd parts of the book, like the Santa’s play, which reads American
Beckett. It almost summarizes the emotional concerns and even some of the facts of the
book. It interests me because it seems to, in some way, address how the stuff of life
becomes the art of life. Why did you want to include these flights of fancy?

NF: I’m really glad you like those parts; it means a lot coming from you. Not everyone
does, and the Santa Lear part especially seems to be one of those lines where one side
loves it, the other side finds it juvenile. Though I don’t see what’s so bad about being
juvenile. I had hope it to be a transformative moment in the narrative, the point of psychic
breakdown without using those words, but having it enacted in a way where the world
become undeniably weird.

WG: One of the things that I like about Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is that I don't
see it as a book of answers. nothing, it seems to me, is resolved, not the relationship with
the father, not coming to some sort of terms with the mother's suicide (the whole idea of
coming to terms with something like that, as if it could somehow be labeled and put on a
shelf and then you sort of clap the dust of it from your hands has always struck me
absurd). I suppose the one answer of the book, if you could call it that, is your own
recovery. But you don't make a big deal of it and I only see it as a minor arc of the book.
If you can articulate it, what are the possible meanings that you want the reader to take
away with them from the book?
NF: Maybe I’ll call my next book “the book of answers.” I like the sound of it. But the
problem with a book like Suck City, one of the problems, is that in the seven years I
worked on it, whatever answers might have presented themselves in various drafts
proved, with time, to be false comfort. Even recovery, as anyone who has stuck it out for
any length of time will tell you, does not guarantee anything like sanity or happiness. I
didn’t focus on it that much in the book because it seemed so many others had written
about it already and, in the end, one addict is like another. That’s the thing with addicts:
we think our lives are wild (and I don’t want to minimize the wild events that can come
from a good long run), but in the end it is all of the same tenor, kind of one-note. It is
only through unplugging from alcohol that I was able to find some compassion with my
still-drunken father—a strange and beautiful paradox.

WG: Is this book as much about homelessness as it is about anything else?

NF: I thought so, but my editor would often write on my many drafts that she was
growing weary of reading about the homeless, which I thought was odd, since I thought
she’d bought a book about homelessness. But I eventually understood, and toned it down
some. I mean, we as a society have developed this blindness when it comes to the
homeless, I mean, the homeless have become virtually invisible, like we’re living in a in
a sci-fi novel or something. So I thought that I should dole the homeless stuff out in small
spoonfuls, so that the readers wouldn’t choke on what is already difficult to see.

WG: I can't resist this one personal question. What did your dad think when he read it?

NF: I don’t claim to know anything about my fathers inner life, though I have been
privileged to have occasional glimpses, or seemingly so, though it is likely merely my
own projections. I handed him the book, reminded him that it was about how we met, that
the title had come from something he’d said, and he seemed impressed, confused, proud,
and defeated. The next time I saw him he pointed out that I’d gotten a few things wrong,
that I’d written that he was not a very good car salesman, when in fact he was the number
one car salesman in New England that year. I apologized, and we had a nice talk, writer
to writer, about the unreliable narrator. By the next time I saw him he’d lost his reading
glasses, and even though I offered to get him a new pair I don’t know if he ever finished
the book.

WG: If a memoir is, by necessity, self-examination, did you tell us the worst thing about
yourself? If so, was it hard? If not, why not?

NF: I didn’t tell you the worst thing, the worst thing is __________, when I _________,
and ended up _____________ . Ah, another book idea: the memoir Madlib. In suck city I
tried to be as honest about my own shortcomings and failings as possible, if only because
I find it false when I read a memoir where the narrator is either a pure victim or a pure
saint. I just don’t believe anyone should carry those burdens.
WG: And finally, a confession. Though you may not remember this, I was the one who
put the dollar; mini-sized spray can of Aquanet in your mailbox at MacDowell, which I
bought at the downtown Ames from those rows upon rows of plastic bins in which they
had things for a dollar. Victoria Lancelotta and I went down there every night and every
night I bought some dollar thing. I gave it to you because I had a colony crush on you
though I am now baffled as to how I thought it might further my cause since a) I put it
there anonymously and b) while Aquanet may have been some sort of aphrodisiac in the
bouffant-inflated sixties it seems unlikely to inspire anything but bewilderment or
perhaps nostalgia (my mother kept a can on her dresser by her Styrofoam heads of wigs)
either then or now.

NF: That was you? Why didn’t you make a sloppy pass? What an amazing group of
people we were with—Victoria! Lily! Stewart! Amy! Kenny! Stacey! Lynn Emanuel!
Claudia Rankine! That was an amazing time, I’m glad you were there. I was riddled with
anxiety most of the time, and swam everyday in that pond miles away just to feel
something that wasn’t anxiety. I probably thought the Aquanet was a product of my
subconscious: my mother also had a big can of it next to her Styrofoam wig heads—when
I was ten I used to light a match to the spray and send a flame across the room. If I was a
visual artist I think my medium would be Aquanet and Styrofoam wig heads. But instead
I write poems.