Jacquelyn Gallo and Casey Haymes
A World of Small Humiliations: A Conversation with Nick Flynn
STREET interviews contrarian, poet, playwright, and essayist Nick Flynn.
Nick Flynn is the author of the memoir trilogy: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), The Ticking is the Bomb (2010), and The Reenactments (2013). His last collection of poetry My Feelings (Graywolf, 2015) seems to match the intimacy of his memoirs. He has three prior books of poetry: Some Ether (2000), Blind Huber (2002) and The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (2011), and another collection slated to come out at some point “before the year 2070.” He’s fairly certain he will no longer be with us by the time it comes out, which would make his draft title, I Will Destroy You, much less foreboding.
12TH STREET: Do you have a memorable rejection letter?
NICK FLYNN: Early on I got a nice letter from The New Yorker, typed and signed. They seemed to have really read the poems and encouraged me to send more. So, six months later, I sent more. When they responded, I opened the envelope and found the smallest piece of paper. It was only big enough for one word, and the word was “No.” I opened the envelope and out dropped this little “No.”
STREET: Regarding writing from memory, how important is it to write “in the moment”? Do you have a preference between writing about something right away versus waiting a year or so?
FLYNN: I used to wait 10 years to write about something—it wasn’t really a conscious choice; it’s just how my psyche worked—but time is more compact now. It used to take 10 years for things to percolate in the subconscious and resurface, but it seems to take less time now. But even as I say that I wonder if it’s true. For the past three years my wife’s been working away from New York, for 4 or 5 months each fall, so I’ve essentially been solo parenting our daughter for those months. During these times, an interesting thing began to happen: when my daughter was 7, I found myself transported back to being 7 myself, so I can’t say if I was, in those moments, in the present or in the past. That whole distinction is almost lost now—past, present. I was caught in a psychic glitch, which was happening in the moment, but it was about something that happened a long time ago. I am very likely caught in it right now.
STREET: Your writing is really detail oriented. Do you use something to trigger memories, such as a song or smell?
FLYNN: One part of my practice involves writing pure descriptions of the world outside my head. For example, if I’m writing about when I was 6—say the night our house caught fire—at some point in the process I find it useful to go back to my hometown and look around. For the past few years I’ve done this with my daughter, to show her the “scene of the crime.” The descriptions that come out of these road trips are, hopefully, more layered than they’d be if I simply wrote from memory. It’s a road trip as a type of research. This summer, I walked her through the salt marsh I spent a lot of time in as a kid—for me, it’s a mythic landscape. The marsh is near the last house we lived in, so I parked near it. A guy was working on his truck in my old yard, and I told him I used to live in his house. He was an Iraq war vet, and had bought the house a year ago. After six months of living in it, he told me the building inspector came by and asked: “What are you doing here? This house is condemned.” I told him I knew exactly how fucked up that house was—it should have been condemned when we lived in it.
STREET: After you decided to write Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, were there moments you needed to rely on your father to tell the story?
FLYNN: I started the book 10 years to the day after he appeared at the shelter—by that time he had been in housing, a subsidized apartment, for about five years. I didn’t know where I would go with the book, or if it would even be a book. I didn’t have a plan. In the initial writing, there were a lot of things I could do without him, but I would, over the course of writing the book, stop by and see him. We’d meet up and I’d ask him two simple questions—How did you meet my mother? How did you find out she had died? But he’d never give me a straight answer, not for years of asking. Sometimes I’d be in Boston doing research and I’d have to go bail him out, to keep him from getting evicted after he did another crazy horrible something. Then, one day, after about five years of this, I found myself driving to Boston one day, only to see him. I didn’t even have a question to ask him, I’d done all my research. At that point I didn’t expect anything from him, the book was already together. It was very unexpected and strange that I just wanted to see him. In the end, the fact that we developed a relationship with each other, ended up being more important, I believe, than the book itself. The stuff I had to do to write the book forced me to have a relationship with my father, and that might have been the subconscious reason I wrote the book.
STREET: You needed the excuse of writing a book to get close to him.
FLYNN: Yeah, I needed an excuse. When he died a couple of years ago, I felt, mostly, resolved, because by then we’d spent as much time together as we could.
STREET: When writing about major life events, it seems hard to figure out how to write about one thing without writing about another. How do you balance backstory and furthering a narrative?
FLYNN: I’d say to just trust your subconscious; it’s going to reveal exactly what you need to write about at that moment. In my writing, at this moment, what I’m circling right now is that fire, something I’ve touched on in almost every book. It seems I have a closed image system with maybe six images swirling around in it—maybe this is true for everyone. For me, there’s a donut in every book, and a fist. These things keep appearing. [laughs] Donuts and fists, that’s a pretty good title: Collected Work: Donuts & Fists. [laughs] The fire is also mentioned in several, maybe all of, the books. One of the dangers of writing is this sense of control that one has. We’re all broken in some way, and we feel that writing it out will somehow make us complete. This might be too much to expect from a story, which is, after all, just this little constructed thing. That’s probably why I don’t relate to a certain type of joke, because it feels like it’s doing the same thing—a way to contain some sort of quicksilver emotional energy, when maybe what that energy needs is to be released. In the past, when I’d tell the story about the fire, I’d tell it almost like a joke. Then, in the past few years, when I’d visited the house, the scene of the crime, with my daughter, that little bubble of story—of language—dissolved. It was very strange to see how I had been trying to master that story—to avoid affect—through language.
STREET: Do you think you’ll ever stop, or want to stop, writing about those bubbles?
FLYNN: I keep thinking I will, but it seems there are endless ways to find purchase on the material. That whole thing about writing to give meaning to chaos—I don’t know if that’s true. At the moment, for me, that seems like an attempt to exert too much control over this enormous and incomprehensible world. It seems there’s always another threshold to cross, which might simply be part of the beauty and the terror of getting older. I hear myself say, “Oh yeah, I’ve already dealt with that thing, that fire, say,” but then something rises up and forces me to realize that I haven’t dealt with it much at all. Right now I’m pretty sure I’m at the end of something, that I’ve come into the last psychic space that’s unexplored, but I’m sure that’s bullshit. In 10 years I’m pretty sure I’ll think, My god, I thought that was it?
STREET: Were there moments in the shelter when your use of language put you at a disadvantage? Did your academic education compromise the education you were getting in the shelter?
FLYNN: I like to imagine that whatever education I had hung rather loosely on me, but it might be that I simply wasn’t that well-educated. I’m not exactly a scholar, or an academic. After high school I didn’t go to college for a couple of years. I worked first as a cooper, on a fish pier, making boxes for the fish, then as an electrician, wiring the fishing boats. Then I went to The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to study English, but dropped out in my final semester. I later finished up my degree in Boston while working at the shelter. In the shelter, I talked like I was from Boston, simply because I was, and to be understood. So I fit in okay. If I didn’t, I didn’t notice. I had other things to think about.
STREET: There are many references made towards pop-culture in your books that might be lost on future generations. How important is it to write for yourself?
FLYNN: The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands has the most pop references—Modest Mouse, Britany Spears. I don’t know if anyone’s going to remember who Modest Mouse is in a hundred years, but I think their lyrics are pretty great. Britney is in the poem with Modest Mouse, because the CIA was using her songs to torture prisoners in Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo. Now, when I visit universities, most young people have no idea what Abu Ghraib is, which is far more troubling than the not knowing who Modest Mouse is. Trump could change that, in that he wants to reopen the so-called “black sites,” those clandestine locations where torture took place. The irony is that the whole idea of a black site is that it’s secret—no one is allowed to even speak of it. But since it’s Trump, he wants them to be Trump Black Sites, which will at least make it harder to deny their existence, and I won’t have to convince students that this is part of what America has been about, since our inception.
STREET: In the interviews with the ex-detainees from Abu Ghraib in your book The Ticking is the Bomb, was there any information that you were forced to leave out?
FLYNN: I was invited to meet the ex-detainees by a lawyer, Susan Burke, who was putting together civil cases to prosecute American companies that were profiting from torture. The questions asked were in a legal format, asked by a lawyer, transcribed by a lawyer. They had to follow protocols in order to submit them as evidence. This was a testimony meant to be presented as evidence in a trial. I was there just to observe, as a writer. I didn’t I have to leave anything out because it was, or would be, in the public document—anyone who wants to can look it up.
STREET: When you made the decision to speak out about Sam Harris in Ticking is the Bomb, were you hesitant about calling him out, as well as notable literary and supposed human-rights organization PEN, for giving Harris an award for a book which advocates the use of torture? Do you think people should be speaking out more often about other writers?
FLYNN: I was shocked that there were these people, many of them quite respected in “liberal” literary circles, who had these stances around torture that were so morally ambiguous. I’m someone who’s very comfortable—maybe too comfortable—existing in ambiguity, someone who questions the limits of what we can know, but it is just so clear that the US government should not be in the business of torturing people. Period. In the years since writing The Ticking is the Bomb, PEN has done great work around the whole issue of torture, while Sam Harris is still advocating that it’s okay to torture Muslims, which is despicable.
STREET: Is indifference the key to your success?
FLYNN: I don’t know if it’s indifference or trying to be authentic in some way.
STREET: Comparing levels of uncertainty in the world, the time period in which you wrote The Ticking is the Bomb and now, do you think there’s more uncertainty now?
FLYNN: It seems like the tide turned a few years ago on the “torture debate,” at least among those who would identify with “the left.” Those willing to embrace torture as an option seem less certain now. That Trump is calling for more torture is to be expected, but since he’s such an ass-clown I don’t think anyone is going to be convinced who wasn’t already still lost in that swamp. Now that we are stuck with Trump—which deeply sucks—it’s interesting to have everything in our faces. The fact is that, under Obama, more people were deported than ever in US history and no one seemed to give a fuck, and now we give a fuck. I think that’s great. Under Obama, no one who profited from, or ordered, US personnel to torture went to jail—only the whistleblowers were prosecuted. It’s insane—tragic—that it took Trump to wake us up, but here we are.
STREET: In a passage from one of my favorite poems from My Feelings, “Put the Load on Me,” you say:
Earlier, a deer stood by the side of the road
deciding whether or not to kill me. I cannot
blame her, I cannot blame anyone—many
animals were hurt in the production of this book
just as many trees were hurt & all
the clouds. Open any book
& the cloud above you bursts into
flame, you know this & yet nothing
stops you, the sky stuck to the end of your finger
as you point to it.
Can you tell us about hurt and creation, and who the deer on the side of the road are in your life?
FLYNN: Hurt and creation…I think for me, if I had to, or could, name that deer on the side of the road, the thing that wants me dead, it would look and sound an awful lot like me. The Buddhists are all about attempting to spread less damage in the world, to walk mindfully, and I guess some of those lines, the ones that come after the deer, are attempts to look at that as well. The idea that trees are killed to publish poetry is an impossible contradiction, yet we write on.
STREET: In Reenactments, there was a Hiroshima pilot who said, “My god what have I (or we) done?” I was wondering if there were any regrets around the movie? Like, as you’re watching it, do you ever think, Why did I let this movie be made about my life?
FLYNN: I don’t think I ever went there, exactly, though there were many dark nights of the soul in the years leading up to the movie being made, stuff about getting too close to the Hollywood machine, which can be pretty brutal. But in the end it was a yes or no question—do I want to see Julianne Moore reenact the darkest moment of my mother’s life, or not. There were things I argued about with Paul Weitz, about his script, in the editing room, and with the final movie, but I think they were productive conversations, and in the end it is his movie. The whole process was incredibly illuminating, and everyone who worked on it had a lot of integrity, which is all one can hope for.
STREET: Did Robert DeNiro vie for having a bigger role than your father did in the book? It felt like competing narration.
FLYNN: In trying to create an arc within a short amount of time, Paul had to dial down Dano’s part and dial up DeNiro’s, so there was tension building between them. When Dano finally stands up to Deniro, when he screams “Go to Florida,” it has a lot of power. Paul’s really smart about that stuff. I’ve done a lot of collaborative work over the years, which is part of what allowed me to be on the set every day, which is unusually for the writer of the book. I was able, mostly, to separate myself from what was happening, as an almost egoless exercise. But, of course, it was also a total mindfuck.
STREET: I think it’s good for readers of our magazine to know. The New School has a lot of screenwriting students who are also taking prose classes. Everybody thinks that getting your book adapted is the be-all and end-all.
FLYNN: You’re entering into a world of small humiliations, every step of the way. You might think, with a book or a movie, “Oh, now I’ve made it,” but there will always be compromises, embarrassments, and humiliations. It’s part of being human. Welcome, here’s your degree, it’s just beginning.