Any other questions?
We don't need to ask questions.
If anyone has-- you do?
Another one, OK.
[INAUDIBLE]
How did I-- oh, how did I--
[INAUDIBLE]
I became obsessed with bees.
And I ended up keeping bees like in--
it took me six years to write that book.
When I say six years, they all overlapped.
Some of the books overlapped.
I was working on two or three at a time.
But for those six years, I really
became obsessed with bees.
And I read everything about them, and I had hives.
And like any obsession, it just served me not
to think about something else, you know.
And so-- yeah, and I was horrified by the whole process
of having bees talk in a poem.
It seemed like a really big mistake.
And so shame fueled a lot of those poems--
[LAUGHTER]
--feeling like I was doing the wrong thing the whole time,
which is always--
I recommend to any writers, really.
Like, if you feel like you're doing the right thing,
it's probably not very good.
That's my only advice as a writer.
Any other questions, comments?
When did you start writing poetry, at what age?
[INAUDIBLE]?
I'll start with the second question first.
I can't even see who's talking.
Who's talking?
This one here, OK.
Hi.
You know, I'm from New England.
That's why I talk like this--
very far from here, thousands of miles from here.
And it's closer to Canada than here.
[LAUGHTER]
But I don't sound like I'm Canadian.
And I've forgotten your first question.
When did I first start writing poetry?
At what age did you start writing poetry?
I didn't start writing poetry until I was an undergraduate.
I was at UMass Amherst, and I took a poetry--
reading class.
We read a book a week of contemporary poetry
with James Tate, great poet.
And he had great taste.
And I think at some point, I decided to give, might try it.
And I wrote a terrible poem, like really terrible poem.
I had been listening to a lot of music.
And I thought everything had a rhyme, like rhyming couplets
and stuff.
And so I had to go back and work on it.
[INAUDIBLE]
OK
[INAUDIBLE]?
I was-- you know, I started out what
they call a counselor, which is sort
of like a glorified security guard,
and then became a caseworker, so I had actually clients.
It was sort of a job that was invented as we went along.
Because homelessness was sort of invented when I
started working there, really.
Homelessness, we know, it didn't really exist like it exists now
until like the mid-1980s when suddenly--
before that period, it was like the stereotypical homeless.
It was the marginalized outcasts, and then the hobo,
whatever the archetypes are.
And then it became much wider.
Suddenly, every little town in the country
opened little folding cots in their church basements
for the homeless people.
And because it was-- suddenly, the problem
got bigger and bigger.
So we got to invent the job as we went along.
So then we started calling it caseworker, because that
seemed more effective.
We wanted to actually do work with people more individually.
Are you done?
Was that--
[INAUDIBLE]
OK
[INAUDIBLE]
Yes, sir?
I read that your father has read all your books.
And he is a writer as well. is that right?
He is a writer, yeah.
What did he think of [INAUDIBLE]??
Yeah that might have been--
I might have said that he had read the book,
but I don't know if he has.
I think at some point I thought he had read it.
And then I-- I'm not sure if he has actually read it.
I think it's actually a little hard for him to read.
He's read bits of it.
He did read a few pages of it.
And the first page he read, he felt compelled to point out
that I had made some grievous errors on that one page
he read, that I had said that he wasn't a very good car
salesman.
And he pointed out that he was the number one car
salesman of that year.
And so I think it would go like that,
I think through the whole book, probably.
But since he is a writer, I managed
to commiserate with him on how hard it
is to get the facts down right and how difficult
on how you shape things in writing and stuff.
And so he understood that.
So he understood.
Yeah?
My follow up question is I read an interview that you gave
that a lot of people ask you why you would take him
in when he was [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah, yeah.
So I wanted to continue that tradition [INAUDIBLE]..
Sure.
You know, it's funny.
I actually-- I brought that question up
to the juvie hall kids.
And the juvie hall kids all shook their heads
and said, why would you bring him in?
They were like, bring your father in?
No way.
Different audience.
So are you asking me why I didn't bring him in?
See, that's sort of one of the central mysteries of the book
actually.
In writing the book, that was a question
that came up early on in writing the book.
I had a passage about what I thought
was a forthright Alaskan.
It seemed like a trait that an Alaskan would have,
being very forthright.
He was the only one who came up to me said, why didn't you
bring your father in?
And I was like, well, it was complicated.
It was-- you know, there was this and that.
But it seems like the essential question of the book.
And I actually have intentionally
left it unanswered in the book in order to--
for one reason, 'cause I don't know.
And for another reason because I wanted
it to be almost more for the reader to experience
it themselves more.
So if I gave--
if I was too definitive about this
is what you should do when your father becomes homeless,
that didn't seem like actually it'd
be serving literature or art in a way, which is really
what I was trying to do in order to open up to a larger mystery
and to greater questions, and not
to have like a handbook of when this thing happens to you,
this is what you should do.
Does that make sense at all?
Not a lot, [INAUDIBLE].
It makes sense that you didn't know.
Because I didn't know, yeah.
OK, that's OK.
We can leave it at that.
Yeah.
I have one more question.
OK, let me get this one over here.
We got a guy here.
Let me get this-- yeah, and then we'll get back to you.
Is there a difference for you when you sit down
to write a poem than when you had set down to write a memoir?
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, they're very different.
Yeah.
No, they're really different.
The initial process-- for a couple
of years when I worked on the book,
it was pretty much the same process.
I write in notebooks.
They don't really look like poems
when I write in notebooks.
And then I sort of craft them into poems.
And that was the same with--
I didn't know what the book would
be when I first started it.
For the first two years, I didn't
know it would be a memoir.
And then it just sort of seemed to make more sense just
looking at it to make something--
I think it's actually more of a hybrid than prose, really.
A lot of the passages feel very poetic to me.
I used to read them before people knew I had a memoir out,
and before I had a memoir out.
And they would assume it was just poetry.
But then there had to be at a certain point, a time
to write more connective tissue, narrative connective tissue.
Because you can't just have all--
or for this kind of book, it didn't make sense
to have just all sort of poetic lyric passages
without any connective tissue to know where we are.
So that took a lot of work for me,
because I wasn't really used to that.
Like having to-- being a poet, I much more liked
the lyrical stuff.
So then I had to spend quite a while getting the story down,
sort of like just telling a story in a straight way,
and also making it interesting for myself.
So different in that way, yeah.
Is that good?
Yeah.
OK.
Yes, this one here.
[INAUDIBLE]?
My year in P-town?
I've spent many years in P-town actually.
[INAUDIBLE]?
Yeah, yeah.
I've been there.
There's a place called the Fine Arts Work
Center in Provincetown.
It's a fellowship program for young artists.
And I was fortunate enough to have a couple
fellowships there, once in the early '90s and once
in the late '90s.
You can do a second year or two.
One of the great things about it is just the first time,
it just gave me this sense of what it meant to be a writer.
To have the entire day to write was sort of a terrifying thing
suddenly.
You know, I'd been working, doing different jobs
and things.
And so suddenly-- and to be surrounded by people--
some of the people I was with, had books out
or had already gallery shows and things like that.
So they already had established themselves
as artists and writers.
And so just to be around them, and sort of-- it's
almost just to see how one could live that life
was really important to me.
I didn't get a lot of poems written, really, in some way.
I wrote every day.
But I didn't--
I can't really point to very many poems
that I walked away from.
The one Rodney read, I think, might have come from that time.
So that was the big thing.
The biggest thing was being around other artists
and young artists in their community,
and the idea of a community for me.
Was that good?
Can I ask about the place itself.
Oh, the place itself.
Have you been there?
What do you think about the place?
You like it?
Yeah, it's a special place.
This is a pretty special place, though, too here.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, there's another good place.
No, you know, Provincetown--
I grew up in a town much like it actually.
I mean, not that there's any place really quite
like Provincetown-- but physically like it.
I grew up just south of Boston on the coast.
And so it was familiar to me, the Atlantic Ocean, the salt
marshes, and things.
I like that.
[INAUDIBLE]
You know, I think New York City is more isolating in the winter
myself.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, I think so.
But that's me.
I think it's easier to have dinner with--
I like a place--
Provincetown is a place where you could--
I don't know about now.
But you could just go to someone's house
at like 8:00 o'clock and say, what are you having for dinner?
And if you did that in New York, people just like
are so offended.
They're like, do you think I don't have a life?
And I work much better with a place like that,
where you can just show up at like-- you
can call someone at 8:00 at night
and say, what are you doing?
So to me that works better.
Yes, Penelope?
You seem very successful with taking the poetry to
[INAUDIBLE].
I was very successful with it?
The way you explained [INAUDIBLE]
the young man [INAUDIBLE].
And woman, yeah.
Did you ever thank of doing the poem on alcoholism
with Alcoholics Anonymous?
Because I think it would work very well.
What do you mean do it with Alcoholics Anonymous?
Reading that [INAUDIBLE].
To go to a meeting and read that poem?
[LAUGHTER]
I think that it'd work.
We can talk later about it.
But I've been to a few meetings in my life,
and I've never seen anyone read a poem at it.
I just never--
If you saw yourself as going, understanding it
from your poet's viewpoint, speaker--
very touching [INAUDIBLE].
To read that piece?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I'm flattered that you think it might work.
But I've just never seen anything like that.
So--
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, yeah.
I thought I worked really well with the kids,
talking to these kids about it.
It was sort of a good captive audience.
Sorry, sorry.
That's probably good.
One more question.
Do you want to ask your question, and then we'll--
Let's see if I can remember it now.
It's going on forever.
I remember it.
Are you teaching or doing any workshops outside
of the [INAUDIBLE]?
Yeah, I-- I teach at the University of Houston
in the spring semesters, some there.
And I also do certain little workshops.
I have a website, nickflynn.org, and it
lists some of the things I do on that, so yeah.
OK, that sounds-- good place to stop.
[APPLAUSE]