Nick Flynn Interviewed

Nick Flynn is the award-winning author of three books of poetry: Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000), which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002), and his most recent collection, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (Graywolf, 2011). He has also written two memoirs, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and The Ticking Is the Bomb (both from W. W. Norton), and the play Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins. Flynn worked as an artistic collaborator and field poet on the film Darwin 's Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is currently being made into a film set for release in 2012, starring Robert De Niro, Julianne Moore, and Paul Dano. He teaches one semester a year in the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program and spends the rest of the year in Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley, where he lives with his wife, the actress Lili Taylor, and their daughter Maeve. Flynn is known for exploring difficult subject matter, such as the suicide of his mother, his father's homelessness, and military torture, and yet his poems are delicate, unflinching, lyrical, often daring, and always humane. Tara Bray conducted the following interview via email in the summer of 2011.

Tara Bray: What brought you to the writing life?

Nick Flynn: I sometimes wish I had a heartwarming answer to that question - a poem that saved my life, or a moment standing before a work of art where I got insight into some deeper truth, or a family of loquacious storytellers who instilled a love of language in me, but none ofthat is true. I spent a lot of time alone as a child, wandering the salt marshes in my hometown, which perhaps trained me to be okay with the solitude writing requires, as well as an appreciation for what others see as worthless, but that's all I can really point to. Maybe those marshes simply taught me to pay attention to where I put my feet.

TB: Your three books of poetry are varied and distinct, yet seem part of a cohesive work, connected by a network of metaphors,...