Student Work: Terrance Flynn’s PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship

Terrance Flynn, veteran of Chris Daley’s WWLA non-fiction classes, recently finished a prestigious PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship and will soon begin a residency at The MacDowell Colony.

While updating us on his whereabouts, Terrance gave us a taste of his “darkly comic” - and emotionally moving - style.  His answers to our catching-up questions turned into little personal essays in their own right.

Terrance will read with the rest of his PEN Fellows on Tuesday, July 16, at 7:00pm, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

How did you feel when you were selected as one of PEN’s Emerging Voices Fellows?

I was holding my friend’s new baby when I got the call, so I handed her off, then answered my phone and heard congratulations, but not much else. I tossed my friend’s baby very high in the air. It was a great moment.

What were your expectations for the program, and how did the master classes, readings, etc. either defy your expectations or fulfill them?

I should first mention I caught my friend’s baby.

The Emerging Voices Fellowship has been an ideal opportunity. Last summer when I applied, I was myself emerging from a kind of writing coma. I don’t mean that in a precious way; there is a medical component. I had been given a new heart two years previous, which pumped sufficient oxygen to my brain, as healthy hearts do. More on that later, but the point is, before my heart transplant I was mired in the mental sluggishness of the congestive heart failure caused by a virus that attacked my heart. Oxygen deprived people don’t have many interesting things to say, much less write. I know of no good parties held at the top of Mount Everest or at the bottom of the sea, and certainly not in the waiting rooms of heart failure clinics. But when people get back down to base camp or make it up to the ship—if they ever do—they regain their access to more provocative thought. Then it’s all, “I’m going to write a book,” and I was so hungry on that mountain I could have eaten you, etc.…

In my case, after I was lucky enough to get a new heart, My brain had enough oxygen to articulate my observations and quirks of the amazing and appalling time I spent tottering between life and death while watching the birth of my daughter. More on that later; the point is after transplant, I had a great story, and the refreshed urge to write. Still, readers don’t care if you can’t tap into something both universal and specific enough for them to keep reading. This is where the fellowship helped me so much. Chris Daley, PhD (WWLA nonfiction instructor) informed me about the EV application, and I worked very hard on the essay questions (a great writing exercise by the way). Chris also wrote a letter for me, and introduced me to Sacha Howells, a talented fiction writer and 2012 EV who also encouraged me to apply.

One of my favorite elements of EV is the mentorship. Libby Flores, the program manager for Emerging Voices (and The Mark program) does an amazing job hand picking a mentor for each fellow based on his or her project. She hooked me up with Mark Salzman, a Pulitzer Prize nominated Guggenheim fellow, a writer of five memoirs and two novels, and (not for nothing), a former model for Dewars Scotch who also happens to be one of the most humble, literate and articulate people I have met. Mark continues to challenge me to uncover the more subterranean themes of the memoir. Alienation and belonging. Not just in terms of sudden, chronic illness or the reproductive challenges of two gay men (my partner James and I), but more universally in terms of how each of our hearts is flawed and damaged by love and loss whether or not the physical pump has to be replaced.

I write about family. How its support sustains and smothers. The mentorship, and the fellowship in general have brought all these themes into sharper focus. Mark was also crucial in my receiving a residency for this fall at The MacDowell Colony. I’m telling you, if you have any inclination, apply for the EV fellowship. The community of LA writers into which it launches a new writer is so dynamic and welcoming.

What kind of tools did the program equip you with for going forward with your writing? Did you work on any specific projects while a fellow?

Some I’ve already mentioned, but each fellow has a current project. EVs are prodded to develop a logline. It’s a painful process, but one that has given us practice speaking with concision about our projects to agents, publishers, and published authors—people who, for the most part, have not written their own Wikipedia entrees. Just to name a few, we sat down with David Ulin, Jonathan Lethem, Aimee Bender, Bernard Cooper, Samantha Dunn, Emily Rapp, David Francis, poets James Ragan and Douglas Kearney, Jon Sands and many more. As accomplished as these professionals are, it was refreshing to hear them mention issues writers face at all stages in the game: developing a practice, facing rejection, day jobs, being inspired, and the pain in the ass of structure (as well as the freedom it provides). We sat down with these authors every Monday. Each time, I had the chance to clear my throat, look into their eyes and croak:

Dying to Meet You is a darkly comic memoir that relates the year I underwent a sudden heart transplant six months after watching my daughter’s birth. After waking up on Thanksgiving Day with a stranger’s heart, and a six month-old daughter to raise, I struggled to make sense of the complexity of gratitude.

My logline remains a work in progress, I know. But you get the idea.

So many of the elements of the EV fellowship have furthered my writing goals. I love the public readings. PEN does an amazing job promoting them, and while I am at it, the PEN staff is a group of fierce, dedicated people, many of them writers themselves.

What was your favorite part of taking Chris Daley’s WWLA class? Favorite assignments or aspects of her teaching style?

Talk about a fully perfused brain. Chris Daley, PhD (as I address her) has the ability to coax her students’ pieces from inception through revision to final draft, and then tell you exactly where you can submit them (though no one has to submit, as she reminds the class). Chris is able to verbalize details from a student’s writing that may be from three revisions earlier. I love how she has designed these one-page writing assignments that manage to be as encouraging as they are challenging. I have used them to start whole chapters in Dying To Meet You, a darkly comic memoir that relates the year I underwent a sudden heart transplant…Sorry. Habit. Anyway, I have been taking Chris’s class every session since I met her almost two years ago. I know for a fact that my fellow advanced nonfiction classmates consider Chris’s class, as I do, to be a driving force in the progress of their writing.

Oh, and I also love how Chris loves LA, particularly the vibrant literary culture of which she is an important part. She is a working writer and writing professor who moderates multiple panels at the LA Times Festival of Books; she is a judge for the 2014 LA Times Book Prize for Fiction and First Fiction categories, and she is the co-founder of WordCraft, a writing consulting collective in LA. Yet with all that going on, her written critiques of WWLA student’s work read like she has gone over them three or four times. She also has a great sense of humor, a great asset in teaching writer of creative nonfiction.

Are you excited for your reading at the Hammer?

Am I?!

Please come. Comfortable seats. Cool museum. Cash bar. Very proud to be reading alongside my fellow EVs, a talented bunch of writers of varied genre, reading from their current projects: Kima Jones (poetry collection), Tommy Moore (short story collection), Elle Brooks (memoir), Lilliam Rivera (YA fiction), and Krisserin Canary (fiction).