PRINTFollowing Flynn’s thread
Brooklyn author brings memoir of torture and fatherhood to Columbia
Courtesy of Nick Flynn
Nick Flynn describes his latest book, The Ticking Is the Bomb, as a “map of the individual subconscious.”
February 11, 2010 | 12:00 a.m. CST
The infamous 2004 photo of a hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner standing on a box was the first of many images that inspired Nick Flynn. The Brooklyn-based author, poet and professor at the University of Houston describes the photos as “snagging his subconscious.”
In 2007, wanting to discover more about the stories behind the people in the pictures, Flynn, 50, traveled to Istanbul with a lawyer who was gathering testimony from ex-detainees. “You can choose to either follow a thread or not,” Flynn says, “and I chose to.”
Nick Flynn
Where: Reynolds Alumni Center
When: Feb. 18, 7:30 p.m.
Cost: Free
Call: 884-7773
Flynn will read from his new book, The Ticking Is the Bomb, on Feb. 18.
In Istanbul, Flynn met some of the ex-detainees and delved deeper into their stories, including the prisoner who appeared on a leash in the photograph with U.S. soldier Lynndie England.
These stories – woven together with his memories of his childhood, his struggle with drugs and alcohol, his estranged father, his desire to connect with his mother who committed suicide and his impending fatherhood – became Flynn’s latest memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb. He describes the book as a map of the individual subconscious that explains how larger social questions have an impact on personal choices. On Feb. 18, Flynn will share this map with Columbians during a reading at the Reynolds Alumni Center.
Invited by MU’s creative writing department, Flynn was chosen by the faculty because of its admiration for his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a movie starring Robert De Niro and Casey Affleck, set for release in 2011, Flynn says).
“The fact is that he is quite simply one of the very best memoirists working in the U.S. today,” assistant professor of MU’s creative writing program E.J. Levy wrote in an e-mail. Flynn’s work has previously appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review. He has also received fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress.
Regarding Flynn’s new release, Levy says she admires that Flynn once again juxtaposes public issues with his own private life. “This is daring, funny, powerful, gripping prose, so I hope students, faculty, staff and the community will come out to hear a great reading, by one of our very best contemporary writers,” she wrote in an e-mail.
Nick Robinson, the nonfiction doctoral student chosen to introduce Flynn at the reading, respects his unflinching honesty and lyricism and agrees, “We’re lucky to have him.”
Although Flynn plans to read from his latest memoir, he says that what he reads will depend on what the audience feels like hearing. In regard to what readers should take away from the new book, he hopes each individual will have his or her own experience.
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