Nancy Flynn

“I hail from the coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania where somehow, at an early age, I fell in love with words instead of into a sinkhole or the then-polluted Susquehanna River. I attended Oberlin College, Cornell University, and have an MA in English/Creative Writing from SUNY/Binghamton. In 1998, after many years living on a creek in Ithaca, New York, I married the scientist whose house once hosted parties where Vladimir Nabokov chain-smoked cigarettes. We packed up our Conestoga Volvo 850 and headed for the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range, finally settling in Portland in 2007. More about my past lives, publications, and alter egos can be found at www.nancyflynn.com.

What keeps me moving forward as a writer?

The malleable, mercurial, and surprising properties of the astonishing English language! The daily doing of the work—showing up and bearing witness to present, past, my farfetched notions about and hopes for the future with the words.

Like many who say they want to write, maybe even have a talent for it, for many years I think I only talked about wanting to be a ‘writer’—the noun—rather than doing what was necessary to really embrace the verb, to ‘write.’ To hunker down, surrender to the unglamorous showing up at the page—all that scribbling, fiddling, crossing out, re-thinking, revising, tossing drafts into the paper recycling bin.

Now, at fifty-six—with time running out even more than ever before—that verb has become my imperative. I write to remember and reclaim, to reconnoiter and restore. Words help me cast the net wide, maybe a wee bit wider. I write in search of what I know but keep forgetting. And I keep writing because, more and more, words are all I have, as Samuel Beckett once said.”

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