The Apostrophe Blog
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 from the realtor in Massachusetts who had it first. Her claim to it expired on the first day of 2005; I never knew why that other Nancy Flynn didn’t simply renew it and keep it for herself. Looking back two decades, I can’t scare up how I knew all this at the time—maybe Cynthia was mentoring me in the technical aspects of the website creation process?
Mine is a site that had to be reconstructed from scratch then re-launched after the entire site went missing in 2023 thanks to a combination of hosting technology platform changes and my own attempts to alter the service as well. I think this is what happened: Somehow, when I made a change in February 2023, the new company then lost the code for my website and was unable to recover the files in spite of the fact that the site was there in the internet’s Wayback Machine. So when anyone went to visit my site, all it said was something like “new website coming soon.” In July 2023, I reached out to Scott Docherty of Redhare. Thanks to his smart and elegant work, my website was expertly revamped and voilà! Scott was even able to bring my previous site “back from the dead.” And the electronic mail address associated with my site, nancy@nancyflynn.com, began working again.
Twenty years ago, the homepage of www.nancyflynn.com didn’t read too much differently from what it says now:
Words are all we have. Samuel Beckett said that. For as long as I can remember, I have longed to live in a world where everyone thrives–where lives have dignity, dreams count, and stories matter. The possibility of this falls shorter and shorter of its mark with each passing 21st century day. So I turn to words: to remember, to lament, to protest. I write to make sense, to find words that speak to a livable version of the truth. I write to chart a path into the forest through the trees. I write to celebrate and charm, to honor and mourn. I write because I finally accept that I have been blessed with an ability to craft words into language that has verve and honesty, cadence and singing. I write because, at long last, I believe that what I’ve borne witness to in my half-century of living is worth sharing with the world. Words are what I have. The Buddha’s last words, recorded by his followers, were: Transient are conditioned things. Try to accomplish your aim with diligence.
In this website’s original incarnation, I had categories for current projects, my writing teachers and mentors, my past lives in the world of work, book and movie lists, writing samples, awards and publications, and my hobbies and distractions. I linked to favorite websites like the Academy of American Poets, the Paris Review Interviews, and the Poetry Foundation. I recycled imagery from my freelance writing business as well—see below.
And, just like my newly updated site, I included photographs of everything from daily life to records of my travels from the get-go as well. In fact, these five thumbnail photos were the anchors for the page elements of the original site way back when; you can still read all about the why of them here today. And, over the past twenty years, I have also experimented with a handful literary journal/blogs on my site: Anthracite Diaries, Scroll and Stylus, and Stream of Consciousness were the first three I posted to before I settled on Apostrophe, the one that is still on the site today.
About five or so years ago, I started getting electronic mail about real estate in the Phoenix, Arizona area. I soon realized that somehow, somewhere the Massachusetts realtor who had the nancyflynn.com domain name before I snagged it had (1) probably relocated and (2) inadvertently? given MY web e-mail address to her colleagues and business associates. OK. For a long time, I simply deleted all the communications much as if they were spam. When I started getting confidential mortgage application information for clients, I reached out and let the powers that be know that they were writing to the WRONG Nancy Flynn.
It is probably a bit incongruous that someone who is as much outside the dominant, consumer culture as I tend to be most of the time—writing poetry fergawdsakes, which (as we all know) is definitely not a money-making enterprise—has the .com domain for a website for a name that is not only fairly common in the United States but was also in a James Joyce short story in The Dubliners as well. How can I explain that, twenty years back when living in the Coast Range outside Corvallis, Oregon and trying to find ways to launch and celebrate my return to a creative writing life, that when the opportunity arose, I felt the urge to seize it and never let go. Its (alleged) current value on the domain name marketplace? A whopping $1171. That sum is more than I have ever made from poetry to date.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
- Celebrating This Website’s China Anniversary - January 4, 2025
- Tangling Up in Blue - January 3, 2025
- The Scattering and the Shadows - December 31, 2024
