The Habitual Poet: Nancy Flynn

Installment #34

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The Habitual Poet is an ongoing series of contributor interviews. If you are a Poemeleon contributor and would like to participate copy & paste the Q's from below and e-mail your answers to: editor@poemeleon.org.

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Reading

Q: Where do you prefer to get your books?

A: The inestimable Powells in Portland, Oregon. Or from any one of a squillion used-book purveyors who have their volumes listed at places like ABE Books and Bookfinder. 

Q: How many poetry books do you think you own, and what percentage of these have you actually read?

A: Probably 100 to 150. I’ve likely read about half of them.

Q: When, where and how do you usually read? (i.e. at bedtime under the covers, cover to cover, etc.)

A: I read any and everywhere pretty much daily. On the couch before my afternoon nap. Out on a patio chair in my shady garden. Before sleep every night. In the car when my husband is driving. On buses, trains, planes, streetcars, light rails.

I generally read cover to cover. But since there truly are so many books, so little time, I don’t feel compelled to finish every book I start if it isn’t holding my interest. I prefer to read poetry books in order, too, as the author intended them to be read. But then, I’m still a person who buys the CD to hear songs in order—no random sampling of iTunes for me yet.

Q: What books of poetry have you read this month?

A: In August, only three or four because I was busy skimming the hot-off-the-press, new 16^th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Bellocq’s Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey. Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire. Men Holding Eggs by Henry Hughes.

Q: What other books/magazines/backs of cereal boxes have you read recently?

A: The New Yorker, Adbusters, The Nation, Vanity Fair, a bunch of Cadogan travel books about France and the Basque Country of Spain as I am heading to Paris on Labor Day. The upcoming (currently online) October 2010 Vanity Fair article about the beyond-horrible Sarah Palin.

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Writing

Q: When, where, how do you write, and why?(i.e. at dusk on a dock, longhand in a notebook, because...)

A: I write most days upon waking. I write longhand in a spiral-bound notebook and on my MacBook at my desk, while sitting on my couch, at my dining room table, out in my garden.

Q: How many first drafts do you think you complete in a week? A month?

A: I don’t work in the 9 to 5 anymore so I have time. When I’ve been on a roll, I can sometimes do a draft of a poem a day. Lately, I’m probably doing two or three a week.

Q: How long do you wait before revising a poem?

A: Depends. Generally I tinker with a poem for a day or two once it’s emerged from my QWERTY-typing fingers. I might ask a trusted poet friend for a quick reader’s feedback and revise a bit. Then I let them sit, pretending they are “done” oh, for sometimes up to six months. Even longer. There really isn’t a reason to rush, unless I’m trying to get a book-length manuscript together.

Q: When do you know a poem is “done”?

A: I am still trying to figure that out. 

Q: Have you ever given up an invitation so you could stay home and write?

A:  You’re asking a recluse this question? Socializing is overrated; I love my solitary time.

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Publishing

Q: What is your system for sending out work?

A: Peripatetic and far too random of late. I need to get better at this. Reading the journals, finding my simpatico poets and editors, sending work out. Add to the to-do list.

Q: What have you more recently received: a rejection notice or an acceptance? Was it what you expected?

A: Got a rejection of a short story that I’d already known was coming. The anthology offered feedback which I didn’t necessarily agree with and they also complimented the story as well-written. Hmm. Last week, I got an e-mail that a poem I submitted to a themed anthology has been recommended for a final round of reviewing by a different batch of editors. So not a rejection—yet.  

Q: Where do you generally publish: online, in print, or a mix, and do you have a preference?

A: A mix. Not sure I care one way or another what medium. There is just so much stuff being written today—it can get hard to know and judge what is a “quality” or reputable outfit.

Q: What is the worst (or weirdest, or best) experience you’ve had with a journal/magazine/press & its editor(s)? (No names, please!)

A: Best? An editor tracking me down by phone after his e-mail to me bounced to tell me he wanted to publish two of my poems.

Q: Have you ever received any fan (or hate) mail? If so, what was that like?

A: Yes. I got a fan letter for a letter I wrote to the editor of Poetry magazine. It was published…and the fan tracked me down via my website to tell me she agreed with all I’d said about being a solitary, reclusive non-teaching poet. I also get fan mail through my website sometimes…about my various blog posts, my rants on the state of writing these overly-MFAed days, etc.

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Practical considerations

Q: What is your day job, and how does it affect your writing?

A: For nearly two decades, I worked as university administrator, editor, and publisher. During that time I also went to graduate school part-time; I finally finished M.A. in English and Creative Writing from SUNY-Binghamton in 1994. In 2001, my career job ended and I was lucky enough to have my husband willing to pay the bills so I could return to my first love: writing. How great is that? I currently do volunteer work editing for a friend’s art quarterly and for a women’s writing collective in Portland, too.

Q: How does your significant other’s occupation affect your writing life?

A: He is very busy and often traveling with his demanding grown-up job as a forest ecologist—which pays the bills—so I have plenty of time alone to write.

Q: Have there been periods in your life when you couldn't write?

A: I’ve always kept a journal. Often it was simply a record of overheard conversations or to-do lists or the never-ending quest for true love!  I had a hiatus when I didn’t believe I had what it took to write—starting around 1975 after I dropped out of college. During that era, I was also a single mother with a young son so my days were overly occupied and often stressed! Finally in 1988, I took a writing class while working at Cornell University—it was free for employees. The class was me, a professor my age, and a room full of 18-year olds. It was fun and got me back in the writing groove.

Q: Do you have a “poetry budget”?

A: Last year I blew about $500 on the entry fees for a bunch of poetry book contests. Didn’t win any now I’m thinking that was a waste of money. I subscribe to several journals a year—currently Paris Review, FIELD and Poetry Northwest. I went to the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference in July so that was another “shooting of my poetry wad” cash-wise this year. It was well worth it. I got to work with Dana Levin in a fantastic workshop called “Poetry and the Unconscious.” She is a rock-star poetry teacher.  

Q: Have you ever suffered (or made someone else suffer) in the name of your art? (i.e. picked up your kids late from school so you could finish a poem, forgone lunch to buy a book, left a relationship because the other person just didn't understand, etc.)

A: I make my own stomach suffer many mornings when I forgo breakfast to keep fiddling with the words. Before I know, it’s edged all the way to lunch and I’m ravenous.

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Random nonsense

Q: Do you have any superhuman abilities? (i.e. can you tie a cherry stem in a knot with your tongue, or write a double sestina with both hands tied behind your back?)

A: I can take my daily 10-minute afternoon power nap pretty much anywhere!  

Q: You write a scathing poem about your mother and she learns about it. You:

a.) Move to South America and leave no forwarding address

b.) Delete the poem and insist it never existed

c.) Show it to her (she’s already written you out of the will anyway)

d.) Do none of the above; instead you: _____

A: My mother has no interest in reading what I write. She’s a Keith Olbermann groupie who prefers politics to poetry.

Q: If the best medical specialists in the world told you that if you didn’t give up your poetry habit today you would die in six months, would you get your affairs in order or would you leave that up to your family?

A: Unfortunately, my OCD tendencies would take over and insist upon getting my affairs in order including burning an entire Rubbermaid bin of random scribbles and jottings so my adult son wouldn’t have to be totally horrified at what dreck passed through my excuse for a creative mind. After that, however, I’d sit in my garden and commune.

Q: If you could be a vowel, which one would you be and why?

A: I’d be the occasional vowel Y—a vowel in most languages that use it according to Wikipedia—it’s a tree, two arms reaching up and out, an interrogative adverb—why—maybe even a story or a poem waiting to emerge from a single letter. And in its lower case form—y—a critter with a tail, hanging below the line. It can turn nouns and verbs into adjectives and it also helps out creating pesky adverbs, too. And who doesn’t love the way it looks in this random sampling of fonts?      

Q: Finally, what piece of advice would you most like to share with our readers? (This can be on writing, the writing life, or anything else...)

A: Well,

“It’s never too late to be who you might have been,” according to George Eliot.

And

 “This aggression will not stand, man.” —The Dude

Nancy Flynn hails from the coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania and now lives in Northeast Portland. Her writing’s received the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her poetry chapbook, The Hours of Us, was published in 2007. In a past life, she’s certain she was an art colony bohemian, an Irish peasant, or—why not? —Cleopatra! She recently penned her six-word memoir: Teetered on the precipice then jumped. More about her reading, writing, and publications at www.nancyflynn.com.