Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Writing”
It boggles the mind, my mind, that it has been twenty years! since I first launched this website, www.nancyflynn.com, with the graphic design wizardry of my dear friend, Cynthia Frazier-Rogers. In 2004—when W. Bush was the President, when we were mired in that tragic folly of the Iraq war, when I was still in my freaking forties!—I remember regularly monitoring the ICANN domain name registry. I was waiting to pounce on and (hopefully) reclaim the .com version of my name…
Sometime a poem can emerge from something as mundane as the cleaning out of a cluttered desk drawer. Cataloguing the objects found, remembering the reason why (if any) a particular item—a ticket stub, a stray button, a silver-dollar coin from the 1890s—got stashed away, somehow deserving to be saved. How to then build a poem from a group of seemingly unrelated objects? What through-line could work to ties such disparities together into a kind of whole?…
Sometimes the questions get asked and asked and never find answers. Sometimes, time does its magical work and makes the asking of the questions less than urgent, even relevant. What is below was written a good while back. I would like to think I have made peace since then with some of this angst and churn. And age fifty now begins to seem like a long time (nearly two decades!) ago…
…
To celebrate twenty years of the Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic in November 2024, Printed Matter Vancouver and Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic co-hosts Christopher Luna, Toni Lumbrazo Luna, and Morgan Paige have collected poems from ones read by Ghost Town readers over the years for their third anthology
…
When I first returned to writing poetry, way back in 2005 and 2006, I took a series of classes through an organization called Writers on the Net. I was incredibly lucky to stumble on an outstanding teacher, Bob Haynes and his courses, Daydreams I and Daydreams II…
My poem, “Lamentation: A Cento,” has been published in Issue #14 of The Poeming Pigeon: A Journal of Poetry and Art. After ten years, this will be the final issue. I wrote this poem as part of a cento-centric project during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic
…
I am writing by hand now every day. Have been since the middle of August, my mad money spent on postcard stamps. Pick up the pen, find the message that goes on the card I am scrawling for a voter in a state that is not this one, and get to work
…
My narrative poem in syllabics, “Old, New, Broken, Blue,” was published in the Traditional Form issue of Blast Furnace, Volume 2, No. 2 in Spring of 2012. The pattern is this: Each stanza has lines bearing five syllables followed by a final line of two beats…
Is it, perhaps, the most famous cursive signature in American history? And, now that I think about it—and given all the other handwritten flourishes that graces the documents created by the so-called founding fathers—why was John Hancock the one who had his moniker celebrated above and beyond all the rest? The history books offer something of an explanation but who knows if it is even true
…
The opening poem in my poetry collection, Every Door Recklessly Ajar—“And I Will Tell You a Story”—was recently re-published online in Fall 2024 at Poemeleon: A Literary Journal. It previously appeared in print in the journal, Gold Man Review, out of Salem Oregon.
