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WELCOME TO NOTES ON BEWILDERMENT!
I published my first book when I’d just turned forty. It was Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000), winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Since then I’ve published twelve more. My bestselling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004) was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro (Focus Features, 2012), has been translated into fifteen languages, and won the PEN/Art of Memoir award. Other recent books include: Low (Graywolf, 2023); This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (Norton, 2020); and Stay: Threads, Collaborations, and Conversations (Ze Books, 2020), which documents twenty-five years of my collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. I’m based in Brooklyn, and I spend each spring in residence at the University of Houston, where I’m a professor in the Creative Writing Program.
I see this substack thing as a chance to work through some ideas I have about the creative process.
At the University of Houston I often teach a workshop in interdisciplinary art, where we get a chance to put our writing through different medium, to see what other energies can be released. For the past twenty years I’ve also taught 5-day workshops outside a University setting, from California to Ireland. These workshops are titled Memoir as Bewilderment (sometimes Poetry as Bewilderment). I often start by introducing the archaic root of the word bewilderment:
BEWILDER: 1684, anglo saxon, from verb to wilder, to lead someone into the woods & get them lost (sounds like a solid career choice, no?).
When a workshop begins, it does feel like we are gathered on the edge of a deep wood, hoping (and simultaneous resisting) to find the path that will lead us into it. It seems important to remind ourselves that it is our job, as artists, to enter into this unknown realm. Is it a choice? I’d say yes—there’s a million other things we could do, yet we have, in fact, chosen to be here. Or (not to get too wu-wu) been chosen? What we do know is that the woods are dark and deep, and that we will need to help each other to find our way through, or at least to find a way to get by while we are here.
Much of what we encounter when we are in the midst of a project is bewildering (why do I keep returning to that bit of wasteland behind my old high school? what is it about donuts that is so compelling?). The more we look the more patterns are revealed, yet we need help to see what is right in front of us. To do this, we need a common language—this is where the concept of bewilderment comes in.
WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY:
To start out, I’ll post something I’m thinking about and try to connect it to a creative practice. It might be a passage from a book (a rough draft) I’ve been working on for the past year or so (tentative title: soon we will all once again be ocean), alongside a brief comment / note on how that passage came into being; it might be some encounter I’ve had with a film or a poem or something I heard on the radio—this will lead to an exercise you can try at home (or wherever it is you create). I imagine this will branch off into other discussions, into other examples, of work that moves me (have you seen the film Anora?). Some projects I’ve worked on lately can be found at nickflynn dot org.
RADICAL REVISION:
I am not a fan of what are called “prompts”—they often seem random, and not at all arising organically from whatever it is we are working on. Most of the exercises I’ll propose will be aimed at deepening writing we have already generated (in this sense it is a radical revision workshop), though I do see the benefit of the occasional aleotoric / chance curveball, just to disrupt any of our well-worn patterns. The work of other writers / artists will often join us for this ride, as examples of what is possible.
WE ARE FAMILY:
When corona hit a few years ago several of my closest friends decided, seemingly on their own, that it would be a good time to hunker down with that long-delayed writing project. When the fifth such friend approached me, asking for help, I formed us into a weekly zoom group that meets to this day. In an ideal world, anyone who subscribes to this substack become part of a new group, one that posts on our discussion board and asks questions). Some will (ideally) form their own group, and use what they find here as a map, and this map will lead them to discover things we cannot yet imagine.
BACKSTAGE PASS:
At some point some content will be moved to behind the dread paywall, accessible to paid subscribers. This is simply to separate the wheat from the chaff—those who want to scroll past from those who want to dive in. This content will include many of the exercises, as well as the forum for questions and a discussion board. This discussion board will be where we (i.e. the community) will be able to interact with each other. If this paywall is a burden but you would like to be part of this community, just reach out and I’ll give you a free subscription. I’d love to have you along, seriously, no matter what.
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