Nick Flynn (writer, playwright, poet) has published twelve books, most recently This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020), a hybrid memoir; and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (2019). He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston. His acclaimed memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro, and has been translated into fifteen languages.
“By allowing readers to witness his artistic and psychic efforts, Flynn shows us the hard work of creating, and surviving, at once.” —The Rumpus
“If the battered genre of memoir is ever to regain its luster and intention, its rightful heritage of memory and impression, then Flynn is one of its most passionate and skilled advocates.” —San Francisco Chronicle
someone else wrote the following about me:
Critically acclaimed author and artist Nick Flynn is the author of five books of poetry, four memoirs, a play, a handbook for teaching poetry to young people, as well as a compendium of his artistic collaborations / influences. One of the most inventive writers at work today, his poetry and prose both explore the tenuous membrane that separates our comfortable, everyday existence from the ragged margins of society. The questions he poses are tough and urgent.
His memoirs—published by W. W. Norton—are This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020), The Reenactments (2013), The Ticking Is the Bomb (2010), and the groundbreaking Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), which was made into the film Being Flynn, starting Robert De Niro as his father, Juliette Moore as his mother, and Paul Dano as Nick. His poetry collections—published by Graywolf Press—are I Will Destroy You (2019), My Feelings (2015), The Captain Asks For a Show of Hands (2011), Blind Huber (2002), and Some Ether (2000). The Rumpus writes, “Flynn’s books of poetry…all ask difficult questions and leave us with a beautiful acceptance that there is often no answer at all, that our memories arrange things in ways that may or may not offer closure. There is something about his work that allows us to exhale, to sit in our own messes and be okay.”
In Stay (2020), Flynn presents a self-portrait via a mixed-media retrospective—what Mary Ruefle calls a ‘monumental compendium’—that shows nothing is created in isolation. The constellation of topics that has circled his work ranges from the impact of suicide and homelessness to addiction, political engagement, and the vital power of artistic friendships. It is a collection of threads (ideas, images & thoughts) gathered together from all of Flynn’s published books, along with excerpts of essays & interviews, presented alongside the collaborations that led to—or came out of—these writings. Collaborators include such luminaries as the photographers Amy Arbus and Catherine Opie, composer Guy Barash, actor Robert De Niro, cartoonist Josh Neufeld, author Sarah Sentilles, and filmmaker Paul Weitz.
The poems in his latest collection, I Will Destroy You, interrogate the potential of art to be redemptive, to remake and reform—but first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. Reflecting on an earlier collection, My Feelings, Marie Howe says, “Here he is again, writing as if his life depends on it, using every trick he can find to carve the tunnel through the mountain. Words are what he uses; silence is the sound they make.” And of Some Ether, which won the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, Claudia Rankine wrote: “In their roaming uneasiness, these poems enact the hypodermic activity of grief. We are guided by a stunning and solitary voice into lives that have spiritually and physically imploded. No one survives and still there is so much to be felt. Here is sorrow and madness reconciled to humanity.” The Judges’ statement for the PEN/ Joyce Osterweil Award declared, “Nick Flynn’s subject—a mother’s suicide, a son’s peripatetic childhood—could not be more difficult to approach. If [his] poems stand ‘close to tragedy,’ as Flynn puts it, they also embody the act of survival: syntax and line conspire to pull us past the event, beyond the struggle. And yet the ghost of trauma lingers, ramifying beyond the exquisitely understated endings of Flynn’s poems. Even more powerful than the final line of ‘My Mother Contemplating Her Gun’—‘Tomorrow it will still be there’—is the silence that follows it, the knowledge that nothing lasts. These poems establish their emotional authority through their very movement—their wayward, whispering music. At once reckless and demure, outrageous and delicate.”
Flynn’s 2020 memoir This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire, confronts Flynn’s struggle and his failings―including a five-year affair, begun when his daughter was a toddler―with fierce candor. Alternating literary analysis and philosophy with intimate memoir and the bedtime stories he tells his daughter, Flynn probes his deepest ethical dilemmas. His book The Ticking Is the Bomb (2010) addresses the Abu Ghraib scandal. In Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn recounts his childhood and family life—with the uncanny trajectory that ultimately led his homeless father to seek shelter at the Pine Street Inn—a Boston homeless shelter—while Nick worked there. Mark Doty opines, “Nick Flynn has given us one of the most terrifying families in American letters, though he approaches each character in this ferocious, inventive memoir with an almost radical sense of compassion, as if all that any of us could do were to stumble ahead with the burdens we are given. The result is a book so singular, harrowing and loving as to be indelible.” Another Bullshit Night joins the ranks of a small group of unforgettable late twentieth-century American memoirs, such as Mary Karr’s The Liars Club and Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time.
Flynn is also the author of a play, Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins, as well as A Note Slipped Under the Door, a handbook for teaching poetry to young people. He was an artistic collaborator on the film Darwin’s Nightmare, a 2006 Academy Award nominee for best feature documentary, as well as an executive producer on Being Flynn. He has been awarded fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The Library of Congress, The Amy Lowell Trust, and The Fine Arts Work Center. His poems, essays, and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review. Since 2016, he has been performing with his band Killdeer, a collaboration with Simi Stone, Philip Marshall, and Guy Barash. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
Flynn teaches creative writing at the University of Houston, and splits his time between Houston and Brooklyn, New York.