First, you don’t even know you’re writing one. Or perhaps you think you’re writing another book entirely.
Maybe you’re avoiding writing any book at all.
As writers, we’re good at that.
As Pam Houston (Cowboys Are My Weakness and the rest), recently said at The Lighthouse Book Project intensive opening keynote, “No one wants you to write.”
Oh dear, the naked truth.
This is why we don’t know when we’re writing that we’re writing a book.
A becoming-of-age memoir
Here is how I begin to tell the story of the path from lived experience to a book for my becoming-of-age memoir, Boundless, coming Fall 2024.
When you have become no one, how do you become someone again? That’s the question at the heart of the narrative memoir Boundless. My existential question, as journalist and magazine editor Carolyn Dawn Flynn and a single mother of Irish-Ukrainian-American twins. The book was longlisted for the 2021 Mslexia Memoir Prize.
You’d think that would be some mighty encouragement.
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Boundless is available for pre-order!
My memoir about how we are always becoming someone new is arriving with perfect timing -- on a day of rebirth, Winter Solstice, which happens to be my birthday. Mark the date -- 12.21.2024! Read about it here. Get on the mailing list here.
Order it here!
BOOKSHOP - proceeds go to Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque
Come on over to carolynflynn.com and sign up for the mailing list to get news about Living Boundlessly, Story Catalyst writing craft classes and Uncommon Hours productivity for creatives. Get a free downloadable book club discussion guide for Boundless at carolynflynn.com.
The shot I call “Ladder to the Moon,” in honor of Georgia O’Keeffe, from my back patio in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Full moon rising.
My Anne Lamott phase
At first, I thought I was writing a very funny Jesus-y Anne Lamott book that I called Straight to Heaven because it is said that God lets mothers of twins go straight to heaven. Exhausted me very much liked the idea that something on the back end of life would, for once, be easy. This idea promised that after all the double-diaper disasters and Goldfish cracker fireworks, my last breaths on this earth would not be labored. I could skip a few steps, cut some corners and simply be there inside the pearly gates bathed in white light.
This project was going to be like Operating Instructions, but about being a single mother of twins. I got into the Spalding MFA in Writing program in 2008 on the merit of my first writings. (Spalding is now the Naslund-Mann School of Writing, named after the two great women who founded the program, Sena Jeter Naslund, who was a mother figure to me, and Karen Mann, who is everyone’s dearest friend.)
Notably, no one told me I sounded like Anne Lamott.
My first mentor was a curmudgeonly nature writer—think “stern Barry Lopez”—who dismissed me as an Erma Bombeck—humorous, accomplished, but not the look I was going for.
My ‘high tide in Tucson’ phase, my ‘living out of grace’ phase
I persevered. I produced a polished essay for my grouchy Barry Lopez who seemed to care more about the fossils of crustaceans than the messy, sweet children I was writing about. I hoped to reinvent myself as a humble Barbara Kingsolver, a fellow Kentuckian who hailed from the very same county my mother hailed from. She was an environmentalist and had once been a desert dweller like me (she, Tucson; me, Phoenix and now Albuquerque). She wrote about children and food and gardens (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life).
That essay was “Resurrection,” a meditation about living out of grace as a single mother who gave her twins over to the other parent every other week. “I have no ritual for this,” I say in the first line as Good Friday arrives and I am to spend Easter weekend alone. I explained my family this way: “I have the kind of family in which, when the father has the children, the mother is ejected out of the orbit.”
Almost right away, that essay got traction.
In 2013, it won second place in the Pinch Literary Journal creative nonfiction contest, judged by Abigail Thomas, author of the acclaimed memoir A Three Dog Life.
In 2014, “Resurrection” was a finalist for the Steinberg Essay Prize and the Sustainable Arts Foundation fellowship.
In 2015, “Resurrection” was published in Fourth Genre, one of the leading CNF journals in the country. I owe everything to the fine editor, Laura Julier, who guided me in for the landing.
You may order a downloadable PDF of “Resurrection” from Fourth Genre here for $7. It has a super-cute photo of a live cat and a ceramic cat on the cover.
But as a writer, I had moved on. “Resurrection” had once been part of something. Now it was just its own thing.
Maybe we had entered a Grace (Eventually) phase, a more evolved Anne Lamott, but honestly, I was flattering myself. It is notable that my son, Paul, found Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Gilbert so hilarious at an L.A. book event that he fell out of his auditorium seat because he laughed so hard.
Maybe that was the moment when I quit trying to be Anne Lamott and just be myself, something I was trying very hard not to be, as you’ll see…
Leaving New Mexico for my “reverse Manifest Destiny” moment in June 2017, thinking I was really leaving the place. I got a speeding ticket — a sign to slow this down. To hear this and feel this moment, listen to the Albuquerque indie band, The Shins, “New Slang” on my Spotify.
My “you’ve gone too far” phase
In 2017, the events occurred, and my dear friend, Peg, gifted me with a title I thought I would work with: You’ve Gone Too Far.
Now seems the time for a quick synopsis of Boundless, so you know what I’m talking about:
SYNOPSIS OF BOUNDLESS, a becoming-of-age memoir
For 17 years, I raised twins as a single mother. Three weeks and counting to their high school graduation, I unexpectedly land a job that at last will allow me to shatter the glass ceiling in print media, a world already in a death spiral.
To take my chance, I must move two thousand miles away. The twins cast their college choices to anywhere-but-here. I dismantle their childhood home. Death comes to the mom-van. I reverse-Manifest Destiny from the Rocky Mountain high desert mesa of New Mexico to the healing waters of Saratoga Springs, New York. Within weeks, the dream falls apart, leaving me searching for a way to get back to a place that is no place like home—or a new place entirely.
This story is set at the intersection where the youthful coming-of-age narrative collides with the vanishing horizon of middle age—that’s why I call it a becoming-of-age story. As I seek to revive my dreams, I must protect the hopes and dreams of my twins. The true test comes when every part of my identity as mother and journalist is stripped from me. As I am consumed with panic attacks and thoughts of ending my life, I discover that you can do the True Self no harm and then begin to find the path to reinvention.
This title can mean, speaking to another person who has violated your boundaries, “You’ve gone too far.” (Certainly, that year, I got pretty trampled on, all at once.)
It can mean: a message to yourself when you’ve hit the upper limit of what you thought was possible. It can be your False Self trying to keep you safe and within your limits. It can reveal that you have an upper limit on your happiness and success, one you have been avoiding all along. (For more on the Upper Limit Problem, read The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks.)
But it also can mean, once you have liberated yourself from all the trappings of the False Self and you come to the knowledge that you can do the True Self no harm, there is no going back. “You’ve gone too far.”
My “get-it-done” phase
In 2018, I noticed how long it had taken me to not-write the collection that was trying to be Straight to Heaven, so if I was going to return to memoir, then I wanted to fast-track it. I entered The Lighthouse Book Project, where I worked with Erika Krouse and Emily Rapp Black as my mentors. Bill Henderson is the head of the Lighthouse Book Project.
In 2020, I graduated from the Book Project, and every member of my family was invited to the zoom, during which Erika spotlighted me, describing my book and praising the writing.
This was during the pandemic, which had returned the twins and their significant others to my house, where they could finish up college by zoom. Grace and Paul, now 21, “attended” my graduation from the opposite side of the house.
One of the most precious moments was when both of them came into my room from which I was zooming and wanted to be near me and hug me while Erika made her tribute to me. It made me just love them even more.
In 2021, Boundless was longlisted for the Mslexia International Memoir Prize. This was an earlier version, which was then titled, You’ve Gone Too Far.
In 2021, The Colorado Sun published an op-ed that was a spinoff from Boundless, featuring a gorgeous photo of Grace (her book name), published with her permission.
“Opinion: Coping with virtual graduations and pandemic depersonalization | When you go to college in a laundry room and you graduate on a front porch, you don’t know how you are supposed to feel”
Looking north from the ‘House of Two Sunsets,” where we can see four mountain ranges on any given day — the Santa Fe Mountains, the Jemez Mountain, the Sandia Mountains of course and the Manzano Mountains. For the three of us—myself the single mother, and the twins—it was always about endless horizons.
My ‘Boundless’ phase
By the next year and rounds of revisions, the book had become Boundless,a line taken from the chapter after the climax, when I must return home with the elixir of my newfound wisdom.
The line rose organically from the page. I realized that horizons were laced all through this story, as the twins are making their way and I am seeking mine. From that title, I decided to promote the book with these hashtags:
#BoundlessAreOurDreams
#BoundlessIsOurLove
In 2022,Boundless was longlisted for the First Pages Prize. In 2022, Under the Gum Tree, one of the nation’s leading CNF journals, published an essay, “What Happens Next,” a spinoff from Boundless.
How Boundless got published
I met my future publisher before I ever started sending it out to agents, only I didn’t know it then.
In March 2020, one week from pandemic lockdown, fear was in the air, with much uncertainty about whether there would be an AWP Conference in San Antonio. About two-thirds of attendees, panelists and book fair vendors canceled, which meant that when I did attend, I got to have longer conversations with just the right people.
Still, I didn’t think about that, and I started sending Boundless to literary agents, who were quite favorable. I heard from one esteemed agent that she was intrigued with the becoming-of-age memoir as a genre. I’m especially proud that the agent of Elizabeth Rush (“Rising,” a 2019 Pulitzer finalist; “Quickening,” published in 2023) fast-tracked it. Several literary publishing houses considered it quite seriously, including Black Lawrence Press and a few university presses.
Come March 2023,I was still looking for the perfect match. Only just one problem. Two weeks before the AWP Conference in Seattle, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. My future publisher met with me at Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, and I had a contract.
But I had a life-threatening diagnosis. I was facing breast cancer surgery in April 2023, and I had just been called back for a second MRI about another suspicious area in my breast, that could mean that the disease had metastasized to other organs of my body, such as my liver, lungs, brains or bones.
I would not be making any decisions soon.
My breast cancer phase
My breast cancer practitioner had granted me permission to go to Seattle in the first place, even though the MRI was showing suspicious things. First, I went to Pasadena to see my son because I needed to lay eyes upon him. We walked through the rose gardens together at Huntington Gardens, and he said he wanted me to come back in May when the roses were blooming because he would take pictures of me. From Burbank, I went to Seattle.
After meeting with the publisher at AWP, I had an offer. I decided that I would get through breast cancer treatments, and then if I was still alive on July 31, I would honor that day with a decision. That was the day my mother died in 2013.
I have always defined that day as "my mother would want better for me than this." I make bold decisions on that day.
The day I had to begin life again as a daughter without a mother in this world is the day that gave me the courage to leave a dying business in 2015. (I chose July 31, 2015, as my resignation date from the Albuquerque Journal after 23 years, and I chose Sept. 3, 2015 -- the anniversary of Grandma Lela’s birthday -- to launch SoulFire Studios LLC d/b/a The Story Catalyst, which has proved to be my better life.)
Fast forward to the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death, now 2023. I am still in the middle of radiation treatment for breast cancer.
I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to wait. They were blasting my chest with sunshine, hoping to shine the cancer out of me and send it away.
That’s what gave me the courage to sign a contract on July 31, 2023. It’s coming Fall 2024. Get on the pre-order list now at www.carolynflynn.com.
The Story Catalyst is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
AMAZING. I see your bravery and persistence. A superwoman.
What a brilliant and heart-felt essay, Carolyn. Yes. Boundless. I celebrate you and your journey. Pre-ordered, my friend. Brava.