Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown

2024 Summer Workshops

Nick Flynn Memoir as Bewilderment August 19 to August 24, 2018 Tuition: $600 Workshop: 9am-Noon Discipline: Nonfiction/Memoir OPEN TO ALL On-site Housing Available

Frost once said, “poems are about what you don’t mean as well as what you do mean”—this could apply to the contemporary concept of memoir as well. When we first approach the idea of writing a memoir we generally write into what we believe is our individual and unique autobiography, but as we press on we find that our story is connected to everyone’s story, and only then can we access the deeper mysteries of life. In our weeklong workshop we will wrestle with these deeper mysteries, as well as the concept of “bewilderment,” and how we can embody both in our memoirs—either through syntax, our access to the duende, leaps into the unconscious, or simply circling around what is unsaid, unknown, unrealized. We will look for those moments we begin to stutter and stumble when talking about our projects, for that is the threshold beyond which is unknown, beyond which is the white space on the map. Please come with a willingness to push a little deeper into this shadow world, and an openness to questioning why you tell the particular stories about your life that you do.

The workshop will be generative, in the sense that we will deepen work we have already done, and so please come with 10-20 pages of work in progress, in various states of completion, from polished to rough sketches.

Biography

Nick Flynn has worked as a ship’s captain, an electrician, and as a case-worker with homeless adults. He is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently I Will Destroy You. He is also the author of a play, Alice Invents a Little Play and Alice Always Wins, and the memoir trilogy The Ticking is the Bomb, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Reenactments. He has two books forth-coming, the multi-media retrospective Stay: A Self-Portrait (March 2020) and the memoir This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (August 2020).