Nick Flynn - Stay

STAY

threads, conversations, collaborations

Nick Flynn

PUBLISHED BY

ZE Books of Houston, TX
in partnership with Unnamed
Press of Los Angeles, CA

3262 Westheimer Road, #467

Houston, TX 77098

www.zebooks.com

CREDITS

Amanuensis, Unknown, Confessional, and The Unclaimed from I Will Destroy You. Copyright 2019 by Nick Flynn. Bag of Mice, Sudden, Father Outside, Her Smoke (her trick), and Emptying Town from Some Ether. Copyright 2000 by Nick Flynn. My Joke, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Put the Load on Me, AK-47, and The Day Lou Reed Died from My Feelings. Copyright 2015 by Nick Flynn. water, saudade, seven testimonies, and harbor from The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands. Copyright 2011 by Nick Flynn. Hive and Swarm from Blind Huber. Copyright 2002 by Nick Flynn. All used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org.

Material in this volume adapted from Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Copyright 2004 by Nick Flynn. The Ticking Is the Bomb. Copyright 2010 by Nick Flynn. The Reenactments. Copyright 2013 by Nick Flynn. All used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

PUBLISHERS NOTE

Each book in this series brings together in one place the work of a writer or artist who has some relationship to visual culture. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

BOOK SERIES DESIGN

With Projects, Inc.

www.withprojects.org

ISBN

978-1-7335401-1-7

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First ZE Books Printing,
March 2020

Library of Congress Control No.
2019948593

Typeset in Janson and Univers.

Printed on 55LB. Rolland Enviro 100 Natural.

Printed in Canada.

Copyright ZE Books

for my collaboratorsimpossible without

BOOKS BY NICK FLYNN

Alice Invents a Little Game & Alice Always Wins
This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire
The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
A Note Slipped Under the Door
The Ticking Is the Bomb
I Will Destroy You
The Reenactments
My Feelings
Blind Huber
Some Ether
Stay

Threads

like meteor showers all the time, bombardment, constant connections.

Begin

MANIFEST (O)

Each artist, each human, contains within them a closed image system, a handful of scenes they return to, again and again. Jung called them symbols and believed that as long as they were alive they kept spinning off meaning.

In hindsight I can see that in each of my books there are certain images that keep showing up, repeating. Lets call them threads of thought.

A man putting himself into a trashbag.

A mother contemplating her gun.

A child in pajamas on the lawn outside a house on fire.

These are some of the images, mostly from my childhood, still lodged inside me. Perhaps the reason they keep appearing when I sit down to write is that I have not found a way to contain them, a way to get them out of my body. Part of our work as artists is to get as close to the source of these archetypes as possible. To deny them seems fruitless.

Donuts. Orange plastic pill

bottles. A saltwater marsh.

This book is an attempt to bring together these threadsthose that have stayed with me, that have led me to write the books Ive written, and to collaborate with the artists that have found me. This book also includes some of my collages, some of which were made when I was wandering, some made more recently, many as collaborations with my daughter, age five, six, seven Within, you will also find fragments of sources, influences, conversations, and other travels in the collective unconscious.

a version of a conversation with patricia weaver
francisco & christopher vondracek, hamline
university, 2016

nick flynn, dark thought, 2014

nick flynn, weld, 2006

ON EPHEMERA

When I find myself in a new city or town, at least until I know where I am, I give myself a daily task. Each day I must locate three (sometimes more) pieces of ephemeraa scrap of paper, a gum wrapper, a shopping list, a childs drawingwith the intention of making a collage. Ideally I will finish the collage by the end of the day, and the next day I will begin a new one. To call what Im looking for trash is accurate, as it is usually something that has been discarded, hopefully even walked on, definitely exposed to the weather, but not for too long. I like the effects of weather on paper, how it seems to contain time. I dont pick through trash binsI have to find it underfoot. Ill spend the whole day searching for these three scraps, with a simultaneous task of finding a piece of cardboard to arrange them on. I also have to locate a stationery store, where I can buy rubber cement, or a glue stick. Its preferable if the cardboard has an image printed on ita label indicating what the box once held (oranges or safety pins), a number or a logo. The scavenger hunt helps me get through the first day or week. I get to know the city this way. I get to find out where or who or what I am.

first published in nowhere, 2008

nick flynn, scream, 2015

Sleeping Beauty (The Mother)

josh neufeld, bag of mice, 2007

BAG OF MICE

I dreamt your suicide note

was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag

& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag

opened into darkness,

smoldering

from the top down. The mice,

huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag

across a shorn field. I stood over it

& as the burning reached each carbon letter

of what youd written

your voice released into the night

like a song, & the mice

grew wilder.

from some ether

ON GHOSTS

Q: Can you talk a bit about your mother, place her in the frame of your story? Do you recognize her in yourself?

A: My mother is a ghost presence in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, simply because that book focuses on how the trajectory of my life and the trajectory of my fathers life led us both into a homeless shelter for a few overlapping years. Yet my mother is the question behind everything we both do, hovering, both in her presence and in her absence, over us. Maybe there was no other place my father and I could have wrestled with the ghost of her but in that shelter, on those streets. And the question of how much of my mother I see in myself, I imagine we all hope that only the positive genes are passed on, but I dont think it works that way.