An Interview with Carolyn Dawn Flynn

Memoirist, novelist, and essayist Carolyn Dawn Flynn is the author of the memoir Boundless and seven books of nonfiction. Boundless was longlisted for the 2021 Mslexia International Memoir Prize and the 2022 First Pages Prize. Her work has been published in Fourth Genre, Under the Gum Tree, Arts and Letters, The Colorado Sun, The Tampa Review, The Whitefish Review (Montana Prize for Fiction), Albuquerque Journal, Sage Magazine, Albuquerque the Magazine, and Wilde Frauen.

Carolyn is a single mother of Ukrainian-Irish-American twins and was the longtime editor of a life-giving magazine called Sage. In her TEDx Women talk, “Tell a Better Story, Live a Better Life,” she has inspired countless others to live their sacred yes—even in a world that may split open, as the writer Muriel Rukeyser once famously said, if one woman spoke the truth.

She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is a hiker and a pilgrim and a desert dweller who is an appreciator of horizons.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

Boundless was not the original title. I find the most evocative and startling titles have to bubble up organically from the story. I was lucky that my working title was provocative, and that fueled me as I was drafting and revising the memoir.

The original working title came naturally from a conversation with one of the characters in the memoir, who said to me, when it was clear that I would not go back to my old life even though my new life had fallen apart. She observed, “You’ve gone too far.”

You’ve Gone Too Far became the working title, which could mean several things:

My enemies have gone too far. Amid the onslaught of perils, I felt besieged. Too many violations, too much stripping away of my identity—it had all gone too far.

I’ve gone too far—I burst through my upper limit, which was what I was trying to do.

Or, it could mean, that having burned away the outer layers of my identity, I knew my True Self, and when I looked at going back, I realized I’d gone too far. I was beyond that old False Self. I was so far beyond where I used to be that I could go anywhere from here.

The true title came out of a scene when I am leaving behind another media opportunity, rushing to a plane in Minneapolis, furiously filling out my application to The Living School, the two-year spiritual study program at the Center for Action and Contemplation, founded by Father Richard Rohr. As I leave the prairie to return to the high desert mesa of Albuquerque, New Mexico, I know I will leave journalism, and I will take the journey to the unknown.

Here is the excerpt:

“I was on the final question, which asked me to describe an experience when a shift in my perspective enabled me to let go of my ego and allowed a more Spirit-centered self to emerge. The True Self was the self who lived here now. It had doubts about the unknown too. But it was not afraid of death. I had been there and back. I typed my answer: What died in me was not all that. What remained was Love, which needs not hide or be protected. Instead of sacrifice, I lived in a new economy of grace. The True Self was the game changer. It had shown me the absolute freedom to love. I was transfigured.

From the plane, I turned my face to the sunny wide-open skies of the prairie. I could say goodbye to all that. And say hello to this horizon. It is boundless.”

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

This was my eighth book, and I’ve been writing and publishing all my career. Yet no words can describe the surge of happiness I felt when I saw this beautiful book cover in my hands. I knew the cover would need to express the idea of endless horizons, and the final design was beyond my wildest dreams.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

I am a reluctant memoirist. For a long time I have viewed Boundless as the exception, not the rule. I write fiction—not memoir! Just this one story, only this one. It had to be written, and that’s because every time I thought about the story, it unstitched me.

The idea that I would have to be—not just the participant, but the agent of—launching my children and sending them off into their future AWAY from me—it pulled me apart at the threads. I kept writing anyway, even as I unraveled.

I wrote it because I wanted to write a story about the fragility of life. I knew the grief. It announced itself early. At 18 months old, the twins came to the brink of death on one fell swoop of a day, it was always baked into me that our lives were precarious, Boundless opens with my babies in my arms, in an ambulance, as we race down Interstate 25 to a hospital that I hope will know how to get the poison out them.

So I knew early, maybe earlier than most moms, that I would need to be present for every moment, even as the moments raced by.

In this Substack post, I explain why Boundless would not let me go.

In this Substack post, I explain why the self is the highway to our stories.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

Before I turned my attention to writing books, I was a journalist and magazine editor for many years.

My life plan was to become a novelist, but at 17, reality landed like a massive black grand piano on my head, and I realized I needed a writing career that would pay a bit better. I noticed that there were these huge manufacturing plants called presses attached to these buildings that had newsrooms, and they needed words, lots of them!

So I double-majored in journalism and English, intending to be a journalist for a little while, then become a novelist.

Highlights of my career: I was editor of a magazine called Sage, which was for women and which had a theme of empowerment. One of our guest speakers for our series was Gloria Steinem, and part of the contract was that we would have dinner with her the evening before her talk.

Two weeks before I met Gloria Steinem, I left my husband. Steinem had famously resisted marriage for 50 years, saying marriage was when “two people become one and a half,” she had shocked everyone by marrying at age 66, saying “I didn’t change—marriage changed. We changed it.” I was about to meet her and her newly wed husband, David Bale, over dinner. I was about to do what countless women had done before me—lay all the questions of feminism at her feet.

Maybe, I thought, Gloria Steinem can tell me what it is about marriage that I don’t understand.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

How readers are responding. They are engaging in conversations with me about the empty nest and sharing stories about how they got through that time. They are enjoying the tragicomic humor—and finding it memorable. When I ask them, where are you now in the book, I get answers like, “I’m on the ‘Murdering My Brand’ story,” or “I’m on the part with Sad Auction Lady.” They are seeing the spiritual message flooding through the story. One reader told me, “I see the Divine flowing through you on every page.”

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

Such a fun question! To launch the book, I posted Twelve Songs of Boundless on my Substack.

Music runs all through the story because I passed on my great musical inheritance to the twins. The soundtrack is the music I listened to as I wrote the book.

“We Move Lightly” – Song #1 – Dustin O’Halloran

“Song for Zula” – Song #2 – Phosphorescent

“Lonesome Dreams” – Song #3 – Lord Huron

“Divenire” – Song #4 – Ludovico Einaudi

“Saturn” – Song #5 – Sleeping At Last

“The Yawning Grave” – Song #6 – Lord Huron

“Hero” – Song #7 – Family of the Year

“New Slang” – Song #8 – The Shins

“Beautiful Baby, Beautiful Child” – Song #9 – Joy Harjo

“Hearing” – Song #10 – Sleeping At Last

“The Mighty Rio Grande” – Song #11 – This Will Destroy You

“Meet Me in the Woods” – Song #12 – Lord Huron

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

Love more deeply and live more lightly. When you are living from the True Self, not the False Self, you can live boundlessly because you can do the True Self no harm.

So many people have been my steady and noble witnesses along a path that made it possible for me to find rejuvenation after the loss of seemingly everything. They watched me reinvent myself. They helped me regain an emotional agility that many of us think vanishes with youth. I now hold the “pearl of great price,” the one worth selling everything for.

What new writing projects are you currently working on? Or, other projects that are not writing?

I’m writing Dear Grace, another memoir, that I describe as Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I Love meets the poet Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. I look at the DNA of femininity through the lens of a year with breast cancer, tapping into my women ancestors for wisdom about marriage, childbirth and motherhood—and all the glorious things the female body can hold and become. I go way, way beyond the typical illness narrative to examine why a woman must always make a careful choice with marriage (my engagement comes to a shattering end during treatment), and then I examine what grace truly is through letters to my daughter Grace and my grandmother Grace. I explore these themes through my Irish and Scottish ancestral line by traveling to those countries, arriving in the end to my Cherokee ancestor in Kentucky, the one I call “The Girl with the Rainbow Hair.”

A close friend has told me she will get Boundless in front of an A-list Hollywood producer, too big to name here, and so we are working on a film treatment.

There will be an audiobook release of Boundless, come summer 2025.

How was working with Atmosphere Press? What would you tell other writers who want to publish?

My publisher, Atmosphere Press, has surprised and delighted me with the level of excellence and care, every step of the way, from the developmental editing. to the cover and interior design, from the publicity strategy and support for author events. I received more care and attention with Atmosphere than I did with my Big 5 publisher for my previous seven books. Everything about Atmosphere is first class.

Are you a writer, too? Submit your manuscript to Atmosphere Press.