Links Mentioned in This Episode:

Boundless by Carolyn Dawn Flynn (Memoir)
“The Sixteen Superpowers of Memoir Writers” (Article)

Carolyn Dawn Flynn’s Website

The Resilient Writers Radio Show: Interview with Carolyn Dawn Flynn – Full Episode Transcript

Intro:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas. And this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love. 

Because let's face it, the writing life has its ups and downs, and we want to not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page. 

This podcast is for writers who love books and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who want to learn and grow in their craft and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them. Writers who want to spend more time in that flow state. 

Writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community, in this crazy roller coaster ride, we call the writing life. We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, Writer. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.

Rhonda:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm here today with Carolyn Flynn. Carolyn is an eight-time published author. She's a TEDxWomen speaker, and she's winner of the 2014 Rick Bass Montana Prize for Fiction and owner of The Story Catalyst at Soulfire Studios, which nurtures authors, business-minded artisans, and creative entrepreneurs.

And she's also a book developer and elevates people through the power of words. She's also the author of Boundless, which came out in the fall of 2024. And it was long listed for the 2021 Mslexia International Memoir Prize. And it started from a creative nonfiction prize called “Resurrection” that was published in Fourth Genre.

So I'm really interested in chatting with you, Carolyn, about memoir today and about your, in particular, your memoir, Boundless. Can you tell me how, like, when did you decide that you were going to take an essay that you had written and turn it into a full book?

Carolyn:

It only took me 10 years to figure it out. That's all. But yeah, thanks for having me on. And I'm really looking forward to talking about Boundless and talking about memoir and how they come together. It's just a fascinating process.

So yeah, how did it go from an essay that was in Fourth Genre to um this is gonna be a full book? I really thought I was done when I wrote that essay. And at the time I was actually in the, I was in Spalding's MFA in Writing program. And when I entered, they said, hey, would you like to do a creative nonfiction the first year? We've got a lot of fiction people. I had applied for both. So I said, okay, fine.

What happened is that I did do creative nonfiction that year and then fiction and I fell in love with creative nonfiction. we have, you know, the past 25 years, we have seen so much exploration, creative exploration around what a memoir could be.

And I think the genre kind of fascinates me. I keep getting pregnant with memoirs, even though I'm a fiction writer. I don't know how this happens. I don't know who slips in the bedroom at night. I can't. But ah yeah, you were asking me another question there, though. I want to get looped back to I was interested in sort of, you know.

Rhonda:

Something starting as a small piece and then you deciding, oh, no, actually, I think this is a full book. What are the factors that go into sort of deciding you've got a full book for you?

Carolyn:

This one found me. But I do think that I had kind of a methodology already in place because I really started out learning fiction by writing literary short stories before I moved to novels. And an excellent way to begin.

So when I look back down, was the most obvious way to begin in creative nonfiction is to write essays, short creative nonfiction pieces. And I still believe in the power of the essay. It’s great laboratory for working on some of your first ideas.

Yeah, but I didn't see that this was a book until all the things happened to me in 2017, which became the book. of life that made it just come to me in a brilliant inspiration like this is a book. This is a book.

Rhonda:

Tell me a little bit about Boundless. Like how would you describe it to someone who's thinking about picking it up and reading it?

Carolyn:

Well, it's a tragic comic memoir. they'll have moments of tragedy, by moments of absurd comedy. And it's largely an empty nest memoir. My guiding question was, when you have become no one, how do you become someone again?

In my case, I was a single mother of twins. So they were graduating at the same time from the same high school, going to college is a different stage, but basically two thirds of my family was leaving at once. Same time that as a journalist, I was making this transition from being a journalist to the book coach and developmental editor that I am now.

But I still didn't want to leave that profession. was sort of making it very hard for me to stay, but I did leave. And so two core pieces of my identity were just really going to mean not just slowly fading away, but they were really going to be stripped from me.

Rhonda:

Right.

Carolyn:

In May of 2017. Wow. was experiencing a colossal failure of the imagination as to what would be next. I knew a lot about reinvention or so I thought because most of my book development, my other books are all about self help, nonfiction and my big core by book development coaching is with people who are reinventing themselves and they're resilient and they're writing a book about their resilience and here I was.

Rhonda:

Right.

Carolyn:

I don’t know.

Rhonda:

The thing it’s hard, it is, you know, nobody really talks about it, but it is a hard phase in life. That empty nest, who am I kind of, you know, space. So yeah, absolutely.

Carolyn:

Yeah. And I also, but I learned, but I learned that you can regain your emotional agility at midlife. And in fact, it's almost necessary to do that.

Rhonda:

Right.

Carolyn:

And what happened to me, there's a moment in the book where my sister who had, she had had as her email address, the date, but at which she would become empty nested, which was in the future, about four years in the future.

So she was kind of, you know hoping for that moment of freedom. And I'm over here like it's I'm just drowning in a notion of freedom. And she goes, have the most freedom that you ever had in your adult life. She was it just the idea was so juicy to her. I think if I had seen her like we were on the phone, if I could have seen her, she would have been drooling at how juicy the idea was. I said, freedom is confusion.

Rhonda:

Right?

Carolyn:

It's just confusion. So it's probably a story about how to regain your emotional agility and reinvent yourself.

Rhonda:

Right. Oh, I love that. So necessary for so many people at exactly that phase of life, you know. So I'm interested in. So you've been you're now a book coach, a developmental editor. And so let's talk a little bit about when other people come to you and they're wanting to write memoirs. You had a great Substack article about the superpowers, the literary superpowers that you need to write memoir. Can you talk me through some of those? I would love to talk about that. Yeah.

Carolyn:

Well, yeah, it's called 16 superpowers of memoir writers. these are things to just sort of know and kind of install on the front end before you begin. It will help you all along the way.  Probably one of the first ways to think about memoir is that the art of it is in the selection of events. We'll say, they think more in like autobiography. Oh, I'm writing about my life. I've had such an interesting life. I've got so many good stories. My kids say I need to write a book.

What memoir really is is something that gives meaning to a sliver of your life. So that's where the selection of events comes in. And so you select from all the things that have happened to you. The ones that give the most meaning. What really gives them more value is that reflection.

There are two voices, there's always two voices in memoir, in any kind of creative nonfiction. There's the now narrator, who's the remembering self. And then there's the then protagonist who is experienced, who's getting into all kinds of trouble and doesn't know how to get out of the trouble and doesn't even know what it means experiencing self.

And I think that's one thing to know on the front end of life. oh Because you probably have a deeper theme calling to you if you're being called to write a memoir. And that sort of meaning that you're giving to it, which you look at all of the events, so you can leave some out.

The hard one of the hard parts about writing Boundless is that I was entertained by my own stories from my own life because I enjoyed them. That's normal. And but then I felt like just because I enjoyed them and I can get a laugh or I can get something literally page about it does not mean it belongs in this book.

Rhonda:

Oh, wow. So how did you make those choices? Like, are you are you someone who tries to kind of lock down the thematic boundary of a memoir like before you go in and then that helps you say okay this is in but that's out.

Carolyn:

When I did that I had one big question. I often say that theme is not theme so much as what you learned in English class. A thesis. It's easier to think about theme in the terms of main dramatic question. What is the main dramatic question which is when you have become no one how do you become someone again?

And I tested that question on everything. But the thing I did is I time boxed it. Because sometimes memoir can get really sprawling if it's your whole life. I said, no, it's from March 2017 to October 2017.

Rhonda:

Oh, wow. That's pretty tight.

Carolyn:

It's pretty tight, except it really is, within that I have flashbacks. I have some flash forwards as well. But the flashbacks, are hooked to those present moment events of 2017. And what they add up to is a picture of kind of accumulated grief.

Because I think at midlife, we tend to have accumulated a few griefs and losses. Maybe we've lost, in my case, both parents, the profession I loved, the grieving of my twins, leaving the family.

So some of those old griefs came up when I was grieving the most immediate grief of such as my mother. So there's, she died four years before that book, but she's all over it. But that time box really helped me write it just and may help me make it tight.

Rhonda:

Yeah, I love that. So what are some of the other superpowers you think that writers need to bring to memoir?

Carolyn:

Okay, this is a big one. I'm so glad you asked a follow up question because get a therapist.

Rhoda:

Oh, wow. Okay, tell me why.

Carolyn:

Because there are going to be parts for a memoir to be successful, you need to be vulnerable and you need to be the most vulnerable person on the page. And everybody else in the book is going to look better than you do.

Rhonda:

Right. Yes.

Carolyn:

Now, do you know why I say maybe somebody but I also say you should get a book coach and a therapist and the therapist will help you support too when you go to all those vulnerable places and will help you make sense of it too. Mary Karr, who wrote The Liars’ Club, she's big on having a therapist supporting her for all of her writing. That's my other 16, one of the 16 superpowers.

Rhonda:

Yeah. Oh, I love that. I think that um one of the things I see in my students when folks are working on a memoir is they kind of come up against, writing away and then all of a sudden they trip over something that's a little more raw and unprocessed than some of the other things.

So I could see where talking to a therapist about that would be really, really helpful. Why do you say you should also have a book coach? mean, lots of folks think you just sit down and write the damn thing.

Carolyn:

Yeah. I've been doing this for 10 plus years now. Can head off a bunch of problems that make the revision tough. And if a revision is tough, what happens to it? You keep it in the drawer. But one of the number one things that a book coach can help with is really help you identify not just the theme or the main but the scope of the book.

An it help you validate things like your tone. Is the voice right? Is the voice even there? Do I have a voice? What's my voice? And answer questions early on. This was not a book coach who shared this with me, but it was a publishing consultant who read the first few pages. And she said, your children are distinct from one another. They're twins, they're boy-girl twins. they're just that way, but she says they're distinct in terms of their personality and just the first 30 pages, not even the first 30 pages, first 10 pages.

A book coach or someone, a professional can give you validation and go, I'm on the right track with the way I'm depicting the children. I am on the right track with the way that that has an effect there are things that you just don't know what the effect is.

Writers biggest question is, how is this coming across to you? And the book coach is that first fresh read. I did say go get a therapist and I think I do believe that. But there are times when you mentioned sometimes when people are writing a memoir, they hit this real rough spot.

Yeah, there's some block in there. And I will tell you that I, I do a lot of emotional support. My book coaching strategy is intellectually rigorous and emotionally supportive. And that combination has really worked well for so many of my author clients. But I've seen this happen so many times when somebody writes a memoir is that they have seven eights lived the story. There's another little.

Rhonda:

What do you mean by that? Say more about that. Seven eighths lived.

Carolyn:

There's another little piece that has unanswered questions that they have by activating the memoir writing a draft, investing in a book coach, just investing in a writing program, writing classes, somehow investing in it and committing sort of brings up that one eighth part that you need to look at and finish.

It could be that you think you resolved that relationship, but you didn't. I had one memoir writer I'm thinking of now and she really needed to see that man one more time.

Rhonda:

Oh, okay.

Carolyn:

To meet in LA and have that one more conversation and be on the beach and for it all to be clearer to her. And once that happened, she could, yeah, but somehow, yeah, but I think that's the best place to start because it's alive.

Rhonda:

Right, right. So Carolyn, how do you think about structure in memoir? What are the questions that come up for you when you're thinking about structure in memoir?

Carolyn:

Well, I actually used… This is funny because people have read it have said two different things. One person said both things. But I actually took, had this wall in the back of my garage that I had painted with chalkboard paint when the time and it's 21 feet long, nine feet high. So it's huge, huge. That is where I mapped out the structure of Boundless.

Rhonda:

Oh, wow. Love that idea.

Carolyn:

But I used the hero's journey as my guide, as my stepping stone, as my prompt. I asked myself a million times, what's the inciting incident? It's the question you really do need to ask yourself a thousand times. You drill down into it deeper each time you ask yourself the question.

But I used other prompts, like there's a step on the hero's journey called crossing the threshold. Step on the hero's journey called fertile confusion or the going into the innermost cave before you go out and have the final culminating. I don't want to say battle because it's so old male hero's journey thing.

The final culmination, the apex of the story, but the inner work is going into the innermost cave. Those are all prompts for me. And I felt like I had, oh, not only did I have something that I lived through that was profound, I have something that has a story spine to it. Like a spine of the story. Yeah. And stepped back from that chalkboard and I said, “Good. So all I need to do is stay present to every scene I write”.

Rhonda:

Right.

Carolyn:

All I need to do is stay present to every scene I write. There's, what the therapist comes in. uh

Rhonda:

I can totally see that. But also I think, you know, one of the important things you're saying there is it's so important for most of a memoir to be written in scene so that, you know, it's not like just telling what happened. It's writing it in scene. Can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah.

Carolyn:

And that's a lot of my book coaching is getting people to the scene. And the wonderful thing about scene is that it shows so you don't have to say, oh, by the way, did you see how I was really sad there? I'm exaggerating, of course.

But by doing it and seeing you actually evoke more empathy. That's why, you know, all the studies say fiction is just one of the best things for empathy. Memoir is not too far behind that. the obstacle that memoir has is the eye it really is.

You know, you have to this. There's something about like if it was a named character and just a she. you might actually have more empathy for that person than the eye. So by showing that scene, it gets the eye out of there you just show that that's the person who's lying on the floor crying. Showing that they're crying and then getting up and going to Macy’s, or which is something that happens in the book. Yeah, I think that's it.

And I also just have a laugh for the power of scene because they can encapsulate so much. They're not just, a scene is never just about one thing that moves the plot along. It's external action. So yeah, something has changed. They were driving to California, California, but there's an internal change as well. So scenes are emotional change, their atmosphere, what's being said, what's not being said.

Rhonda:

Yeah, absolutely.

Carolyn:

The superiority of that character. So, scenes actually, because they can encapsulate so much, actually help you write a shorter book.

Rhonda:

Oh, okay. Do feel like a memoir has, like, what would you say is the ultimate length of a memoir? Like, what if I'm, I'm gonna sit down now and I'm gonna write a memoir about, you know, this period in my life that all comes together around a theme. What should I be aiming for? Is it 300 pages, 250 pages, 70,000 words? Like, what am I?

Carolyn:

80,000 words.

Rhonda:

80,000 words, yeah.

Carolyn:

And particularly for any first time writer, whether it's memoir or fiction, you want to be well under that 100,000 mark. Oh, yeah. It's very hard to get your first book out there if it's more than that. But 80 is about the sweet spot.

Rhonda:

OK. I love that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So talk to me about the other forms of writing that you do. you won the Rick, I'm very jealous about this, by the way, the Rick Bass, Montana, was it called? The Montana Prize for Fiction, because I love Rick Bass as a writer.

So you're a big fan of short pieces, both creative nonfiction and the short story. And I think, you have, you have a...You've published several fiction pieces, like short stories in different literary magazines and so on. So do you have a favorite genre? Like is there one that you, when you sit down, it sounds like it's memoir, but I don't know. I don't want to assume.

Carolyn:

I know. I might be somebody who has a husband and a mistress. Wait, that's wrong. I might have just used some gender words there. Mistress is still female, isn't it?

Rhonda:

Yeah. Yeah.

Carolyn:

Why don't men have a word? Well, let's move on. I think I love them both. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I love fiction because it just it's the freedom to just make it up em with a character that is, you know, little bits of people you've observed, is its own unique thing. love it when they just go flying off the page and you go, I didn't know we were going to New Orleans and you go and the character goes, well, yeah, we need to be there. It's obvious that I can't live my story unless I do this and I say this and I'm here and you're like, okay.

Rhonda:

Do you also, do you know, like when an idea comes to you, do you know, the genre that you want to take it into? Like, are you like, for sure that's creative nonfiction or for sure that's, you know, memoir, a form of creative nonfiction or for sure that's fiction. How do stories and pieces, creative nonfiction or otherwise come to you?

Carolyn:

Yeah, that's a really good question. ah Sometimes I just know and sometimes I have to sort it out. I think the fiction that I'm working on now, is one that I started, kept trying to write as memoir. And I just said, okay, it's not gonna work that way.

Rhonda:

And why wouldn't it work that way? Like, tell me a little bit about why it couldn't be memoir and you needed to fictionalize it instead.

Carolyn:

Well, I think part of it is in that case, it is other people and scope of the story. And so I thought like, oh, this is a better story when I've got a distinction, because it can focus in pretty tightly on the relationship between the father and the daughter.

It gave me a question. I different siblings. I them permission to have different husbands than the husbands I've had. At first, I was like, oh, well, of course. Her story is she gets married when she's 21. And then when she's 31, she gets divorced. And then I went like, no, she doesn't.

If it's fiction I could do this this other way because the heart of the story is father. That's decided on that one. And I want right now that is just a hybrid. I think oh you've somebody that I listened to a couple of weeks ago who was writing autofiction. And I was I love that podcast because I was like, this has given me permission to write.

Rhonda:

Yeah. Yeah, I was calling it, um, autofiction, but, um, she didn't love that term. She, she was just sort of messing around and calling it hybrid, which I love. So let me ask you, uh, you've written, um, seven nonfiction books on topics like creative visualization and mindfulness. How does that connect with your, your fiction in your memoir work?

Carolyn:
How does it connects is probably that probably two ways. One is that they're just great practices for a minute mindfulness meditation is really good for just being able to have a calm, clear mind. I say the most precious thing a writer has is your mind. And the most precious thing you have is your ability to observe the world and observe it really unmediated.

Unless you really meditate, we don't have very unmediated observations of the world. uh So it's a way to protect your originality. So it's really the practice that's beneath everything. the visualization piece is that you visualize it and you act as if. Book is a long haul. It takes a while. It takes a while to revise it, takes a while to find its happy home for publishing.

So that visualization technique is a way of just sort of building, it's like you build a mosaic on the mind and you just keep filling in all the beautiful tiles. There's a good practice for that and it probably, both of those keep me pretty grounded in a spiritual belief system that helps me a wise person necessary for a writer to be a wise and interesting person.

Rhonda:

Yeah, and to kind of feel, I mean, for me, it's how I manage my creative anxiety, right? So it's really natural for all artists, including writers to have creative anxiety, because we know we want to create this thing, but we don't know if we can get there, you know, usually. And so it just, you know, triggers your parasympathetic nervous system and just calms you the F down, right? So that helps a lot for me, the mindfulness piece for sure.

So thinking about Boundless and your own experience writing Boundless, what advice would you give to someone who's like, oh, I think I have a memoir in me. I've been thinking about it for a little while. And yeah, I think I want to write a memoir.

Carolyn:

Yeah. I would recommend probably all those 16 superpowers to skip that.

Rhonda:

I'll link that up in the show notes.

Carolyn:

Yeah, good. Thank you. And I would recommend, I think you know I'm going to recommend getting a book coach. It just shaves off the time. It really does. It shaves off all of the dead alleys you might go into. And what I do is I preserve that untamed part of the writer, that wild beauty that got you there in the first place. I'd work with a book coach who lets that unfold, as it will.

Um, but the other one is read like a writer. Really? So I usually pick two, I call them scripture books. Scripture, like some serious written stuff here, some serious wisdom, but usually I two books. are my scripture books and those books either have a sensibility tone, structure, or point of view.

For instance, if you know you're going to write a third person point of view, for fiction or if you know you'll be writing in the eye perspective for memoir, then read books written with that point of view. So I'd like to have a few more sort of about bits and pieces of them and read like a writer. How are they producing the effect that you are feeling? Actually, they're on the page that makes you love that writer so much.

Rhonda”

Yeah. I love that. I think sometimes writers think, oh, I shouldn't read other writers, you know, when I'm working on my book, because I'll be overly influenced. But that that hasn't been my experience. Has it been your experience?

Carolyn:

No, no.

Rhonda:

And the inspiration is always good.

Carolyn:

Yeah. But I read promiscuously.

Rhonda:

Yeah, I do,

Carolyn:

So so that probably helps. If you read just one book, you may be risking the danger of following too much. That's what another reason I do say choose two scripture books, because that will be like an automatic insurance that you're not gonna one or the other. Like right now my two scripture books for the new one I'm working on are, um You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith. She's a poet. Yeah.

Everything Happens for a Reason by Kate Bowler. They're very different books. I she Bowler's hilarious. So she appeals to my tragic comic side, but she also writes so well about spirituality and divinity and theology and of course health and life. And she's just delightful. But those two very, very different books are the ones that I go back to like, okay, what did she do with her structure? How did she do that?

Rhonda:

Yeah, I love that. I love that. um I just, yeah, I can't say enough about reading while writing. As you say, reading like a writer. It was so great to talk to you today, Carolyn. Thanks so much. And we'll put a link to Boundless in the show notes so people can find it. But I just really appreciate you chatting with me today. Thank you so much.

Carolyn:

I appreciate it. Great questions.

Rhonda:

Thanks. Talk soon.

Carolyn:

OK, thank you.

Outro:

Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes. 

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