Welcome to carolynflynn.com

AUTHOR + JOURNALIST + WRITING COACH & CRITIQUER + WORKSHOP LEADER
carolyn@carolynflynn.com

Enliven your fiction with sharp dialogue, authoritative storytelling, compelling details and urgency.
Class meets for six consecutive Thursdays
Taught by Carolyn Flynn, winner of numerous fiction prizes, Spalding MFA candidate and editor of Albuquerque Journal’s SAGE magazine

7 to 8:30 p.m. Thursdays April 29-June3
Borders at Cottonwood
10420 Coors Bypass NW
$97

Final class features a reading of your work!
featuring discussion about these authors
ANN PATCHETT Bel Canto
JHUMPA LAHIRI Unaccustomed Earth
MARGUERITE DURAS The Lover
MONA SIMPSON Anywhere But Here
ARTHUR PHILLIPS Prague
JOAN DIDION Goodbye to All That
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ 100 Years of Solitude

To sign up, email workshops@carolynflynn.com

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Tampa Review to publish ‘Pound of Flesh’

“Pound of Flesh,” my creative nonfiction piece about the impoverishment of the life spirit, will be published later this year in The Tampa Review.

This welcome news flash came while I was at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Denver standing in line to get a latte (which is, I assure you, my only vice) and playing with my iPhone (my other only vice).

“Pound of Flesh” was short-listed in 2009 for the Tom Howard Prose Prize.

“Pound of Flesh” opens with a scene during the performance of “The Merchant of Venice” at the Royal Shakespeare Co. in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, which I saw during the brief residency of the Spalding University MFA in creative writing program.

But I wrote the piece after mentor Bob Finch made me do it. He had tired of reading chapters from my memoir, “Straight to Heaven,” and told me to try something completely different. And so I did!

Read my blog about England, the “London Calling” series.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

First place in ABQ the mag short story contest

It’s on the stands now — I won first place in the Albuquerque the Magazine short fiction contest with “Blood,” a demented little story about a paranoid schizophrenic character. The full piece appears in the issue. You may order an issue online at abqthemag.com.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Danahy Fiction Prize | I’m a finalist!

I learned today that I’m a finalist for the Danahy Fiction Prize from Tampa Review, a literary journal housed at the University of Tampa. The story is “Pretend,” the one that I brought to workshop in Barcelona, Spain, during the brief residency of the Spalding University MFA program, working with mentor Robin Lippincott and all of my writer friends in the mentor group. Many, many thanks to all of you!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

MINDFULNESS TAMES THE HEART

My co-author, Anne Ihnen, tells me she keeps hearing from her colleagues in the therapy world that they find “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Mindfulness” very useful in their practice. JoAnne Ceccarelli-Egan, a marriage and family therapist in Connecticut is among them. She recently added the book to her Web site under recommended reading.

Mindfulness is the antidote when times are hard and the news is bad. Find out how mindfulness can help you cultivate serenity in the face of uncertainty. “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Mindfulness is here, and it’s been getting great reviews. Find out more about mindfulness here.

REVIEW ON MOM’S FAVORITE STUFF BLOG
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Mindfulness - “As a trained psychologist, I’ve learned all about being observant of behavior. I learned how to see things through a clearer pair of eyes. However, when it comes to my own life and my own family, I find that my goggles get a little fuzzy. This book really helped me to “recenter” my thinking and reminded me that I need time to clear my mind and just live in the moment. My children will always be my most important priority but sometimes I find myself worrying about laundry, work, etc rather than just being with them. Practicing some of the mindful activities from this book has really helped me to clear my head in ways I wasn’t sure how to do.” – Mom’s Favorite Stuff

One of my 9-year-old twins is an early riser. Paul is up the minute the sun pulses over the mountain. Grace, on the other hand, likes to sleep until the last possible moment. It takes some doing, but once she wakes up, she’s drenched in beauty, dewy-eyed and radiant. You wouldn’t think by looking at her that she might need the five Tibetan rites, the five yoga movements that some have called the fountain of youth. Click here for full article.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Find out in this radio interview about “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Mindfulness” with CRN Talk Radio.

CRN talk radio interview

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

OTHER PLACES YOU’LL FIND CAROLYN FLYNN:

>mindfulwriting.org
>mindfulwriting.org
>>mindfulwriting.org
facebook.com/carolynflynn
>myspace.com/carolynflynn
>twitter.com/carolynflynn

The Five Tibetan Rites

One of my 9-year-old twins is an early riser. Paul is up the minute the sun pulses over the mountain. Grace, on the other hand, likes to sleep until the last possible moment. It takes some doing to wake her up. But you wouldn’t know she’s a groggy-head in the morning by looking at her. She’s drenched in the beauty of childhood, dewy-eyed and radiant. (Maybe it’s all that beauty sleep she’s getting!) So you wouldn’t think that she might need the five Tibetan rites, the five yoga movements that some have called the fountain of youth.

This morning, she asks me, “Mom, what are those exercises that help you wake up?” Earlier this year, I scheduled one-on-one time with Grace for the very purpose of showing her a morning routine that blended in a mindfulness practice. I had found that too many mornings we were rushing out the door in a multitasking frenzy. We weren’t always dignified about this. We weren’t always kind to each other. But we did get to school on time.

I wanted to show Grace a better way. It’s important to me to start my day with a form of mindfulness practice – meditation, yoga, journaling or writing practice. It was time to teach her what I knew. The benefit, of course, was that I was going to gain someone to practice with.

That morning I showed her the five Tibetan rites from yoga. Today, she asked me to do the routine with her. So there we were, spinning clockwise, together, two fall leaves whirling in the breeze. Paul came in and joined us for the second Tibetan rite, which builds abdominal strength, or as he put it, “six packs.”

The five Tibetan rites build serenity into your day, and it is said that practicing them for 15 minutes every day adds longevity to your life. The exercises build flexibility, and they ground you. They improve eyesight and activate the metabolism. You may do them simply as exercise or as preparation for a meditation session.

Each rite is repeated 21 times.

FIRST TIBETAN RITE | Clockwise whirling

Stand with your feet hip distance apart, feet firmly grounded with toes spread and weight distributed through all four corners of your feet. Raise your arms out from your sides, shoulder height. Fix your gaze on a central point. Whirl clockwise 21 times, returning your gaze to the central point each time you pass through.

SECOND TIBETAN RITE | Leg raises

Lie on the floor or your mat on your back. Fully extend legs, with feet flexed. Fully extend arms, placing palms on the floor. Inhale as you raise your legs vertically until they are perpendicular to the floor, raising your head at the same time. Keep legs straight. As you exhale, lower your legs and head, keeping your legs straight and feet flexed.

THIRD TIBETAN RITE | Camel

Kneel on your mat with knees hip-width apart. Tuck your tailbone in, and square your hips. Curl your toes under. You may place your palms on the backs of your thighs, your shins or your ankles, depending on what’s comfortable. Inhale, arching backward. Exhale, bringing your chin to your chest.

FOURTH TIBETAN RITE | Reverse table

Sit on floor with legs stretched out, feet flexed. Sit up tall, tummy tucked and shoulders down. Place hands, palm down, on the floor next to your hips. Tuck your chin. As you inhale, raise your torso so that you make a flat tabletop. Your knees are bent, and your arms remain straight. Tense every muscle in your body. Exhale, lowering yourself to the floor. Tuck your chin to your chest.

FIFTH TIBETAN RITE | Down-faced dog, Up-faced dog

Take a good down-faced dog pose. Start on your knees. Place your hands on your mat with fingers spread, rooting the ball mound of your fingers into your mat (especially your forefinger ball mound). As you inhale, push back, arching your back and lifting your hips in the air. Let your heart melt. Stretch your spine. As you exhale, swing your torso forward, arching your back slightly. Move back and forth rhythmically with your breath 21 times.

As you can see, this is an all-around workout for the body, strengthening all muscle groups and enhancing flexibility of the spine. The chin tuck of the camel and reverse table activates the thyroid. This is why these rites are now Grace’s wake-up exercises. And mine, too.

As for Paul, we’re still working on Mr. Six Pack. He still defines a wake-up exercise as throwing the puppy on Grace’s head.

Star-Crossed | An excerpt

Rob and I were as different as night and day. He was East Coast traditional, I was West Coast, not-quite conquered territory, looking another direction. I was fond of reminding him that 100 years ago, my side of the country didn’t belong to his, and was still not quite have-able, mail-order bride to a colonial groom. This was Rob: opera, a roaring rush of sound, thick and throbbing, something that soared out over the open ocean. This was me: poetry and piano, glass beads of sound, dropping into a stream, a source water yet undiscovered. Deep in the forest, the sound of water gliding over stones, a breathing thing that you hear before you see. I lived my life noticing all of its ripples and small reverberations. Rob was flying high above the clouds. He was air.

– “Star-Crossed”

Self-Help

During the sermon, I try to decide what it is about Mom that Dad doesn’t like anymore. Mom is still beautiful in her floral sundresses and white sandals, I think. But she doesn’t seem to be the same person in the old photographs Dad took before I was born, where she is standing behind Tod at his first birthday, holding him up before the glow of birthday candles. It’s a huge sheet cake with chocolate frosting. Her face is soft in the candlelight. Everything seems so hard now.

My dad extends the offering plate at the end of the pew. While the silver plates weave through the line of hands, he stands with his hands folded together and his eyes upward, reverent. In stained-glass light, he is yellow. I feel a burn in my heart, a burn that is the beginning of hatred.

– “Self-Help,” winner of the 1997 Renwick-Sumerwell prize, published in The Crescent Review

Improvising

It was hard not to see my sister’s fling with the singer at the martini bar as some sort of family experiment to see if she could summon someone to intervene. She was like that. Last year she had threatened to join the Marines. The year before, she dropped out of her second master’s program to go to Mexico. Inexplicably this time, no one did, and by fall she had given birth to the singer’s son. But alas, Sir Lancelot had long since left on a crusade of unspecified nature and unknown destination, leaving my sister to persevere alone. After the birth, my sister had vowed to remain chaste until the right man came along to play father to her son. She took to wearing prim flowered dresses, though my brother pointed out they frequently boasted necklines that showed off her cleavage, which had improved considerably upon the birth of her son, whom she breastfed. She placed icons of the Virgin Mary around her house, and my mother worried she would become Catholic. With her newfound zeal for the virtues of motherhood, the self-sacrificing and all, my sister took to addressing our mother as “the Blessed Mother.” This my mother found more distressing than my sister’s Zen Buddhism phase.

My sister proclaimed her vow was in honor of our deceased father, and she set about on a mission to find a father for her son with the same fervor I saw her pursue tickets for my brother and me to a sold-out Nirvana show in her teen-age years.

– “Improvising”

Blood

You watch the fire chew through the ashes at the tip of the cigarette. They watch you watch the ashes. Vermilion-hot ashes, perforated, like your brain, riddled with holes of memories they stole from you.

Your mother doesn’t say it, but she wants forgiveness for bringing you here. You heard her ask the doctor in the hallway, “Can he be saved?”

You have done this for 7,780 days in a row.

At night the cancer races through your body with a fervor, leaving gaping black-encrusted holes.

You die from the inside out.

– “Blood”

Detox

AN EXCERPT
Chris and I have been going out for a month. It’s as if I have no past. Chris doesn’t ask. I haven’t told any of my old stories, the significant events of my life. We wipe the dust off the silver glass of our lives and pretend it’s insight. But it’s just a reflection. I can’t see him, only my poor, pitiful self.

– Eden in Detox, published in Ellipsis; previously published in Wilde Frauen, Wilhelm Heyne, Munich

Talk at Bookworks — Oct. 9, 2008

INNER PEACE FOR TURBULENT TIMES
Mindfulness: A real-world technique for living in the present moment

“The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Mindfulness” by Anne Ihnen, M.A., and Carolyn Flynn

Mindfulness is living in harmony with your life. I say this because we so often exist in a state of dissonance with our own thoughts. When there is turbulence in the economy or in our personal lives, we want to shut it out, push it away, think about it later, hope it will get better or go away. But this creates a cacophany in our inner landscape, because these voices want to be heard. Gradually, we all off all the unpleasant parts, and so we only live with a fraction of our awareness.

Mindfulness is a technique that uses a focus on the present moment.

The goal of mindfulness is mindfulness itself – not insight, not spiritual revelation, not even relaxation, even though those often result from the practice of mindfulness.

You can practice mindfulness even if you are not a meditator. This is the foundation of our book. We wanted to reach people who weren’t meditator, per se, to introduce the benefits of mindfulness to a broader audience.

Keep an eye on this blog. In the coming months, I’ll offer real-world ways to practice mindfulness:

mindful multitasking

Mindfully evaluate your to-do list:
➢ What items do I need to do?
➢ What items do I want to do?
➢ Are any of these items here to distract me?
➢ Are any of these “shoulds”?
➢ What’s important to me?
➢ What can be done another day?
➢ What can I ask someone else to do?
➢ What doesn’t really have to be done at all?

mindful eating

Mindful eating is about finding your particular point of balance with food, choosing foods intentionally and tasting your food fully. It’s about nourishing yourself by making conscious choices that align with your needs and your values.

mindful driving

Use breath and body awareness to come back into your body, in the moment. Notice aversion – the need to push away the experience because it’s boring or irritating. Mindful driving is a way to practice mindfulness in a real-world way.

mindful writing

Even if you’re not a writer, mindful writing will open yourself up to the whole of your life, giving you a better, more grounded sense for how your mind works. Mindfulness is a way to tame the wild horses of the mind; mindful writing is a way to know those wild horses. Mindful writing is an excellent technique for tempering anxiety, building a resilience and tolerance for those thoughts of worry and reactivity; mindful writing is an excellent technique for unleashing your creative spirit – for allowing your imagination to go to the places that scare you.

For more about real-world mindfulness, sign up for my mailing list so that you can get updates about mindfulness talks, blog posts and other events.

All composed things are like a dream, a phantom, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning. That is how to meditate on them. That is how to observe them.
–– The Diamond Sutra

Jolly Good

JOLLY GOOD

At Minerva Graphics, which is just off Old Bond Street in Bath, England, I bought a sketch journal and a folio. An elderly couple were watching me as I fumbled with my umbrella and my backpack, fishing for pounds in the pocket. When I spoke, they nodded in recognition, as if to say, “I knew she was an American.”

The couple asked me where I was from.

“New Mexico,” I replied.

“How do you like this weather?” the woman asked. “A pity,” she said, answering her own question by way of apologizing in that way the British have of taking their national welcoming committee responsibilities seriously. She said “pity” like it had two t’s.

“I love it,” I said.

There was rain in my hair and a dampness soaking through my raincoat. My umbrella glistened.

“In New Mexico, all we get is warm and sunny. Or hot and sunny. Sometimes we get hot and sunny and windy. Or warm and sunny and windy.”

Her husband trained a steady gaze on me. I detected a slight turn of a smile.

The woman waited for me to indicate I was joking.

“Really,” I said. “It’s so rare that it rains in the desert that when you get a day like this, it’s refreshing. A joy.”

Turning to the man, I said. “We have 330 days of sunshine a year. We wish for days like this.”

The woman fluttered a forced smile. The man stood like whittled wood. I was aware of being a curiosity.

Finally, the woman said, “I guess when you live with one, you yearn for the other.” She spoke more certainly now, having located the solid ground of politeness. “We’re always thinking about what we have too much of.”

“It’s really wonderful,” I said. I noticed the rose in the man’s cheeks, which hung long from his cheekbones. His eyes were blue and watery. He was starting to look like a teacup. “I plan to enjoy it as much as I can.”

“You do that,” said the woman, cheered now. “Have a jolly good day.”

I’ve always wanted to hear someone say that.

Henge of Stone

STONES THAT SPEAK

The stones speak to me. I knew they would. It’s in my line. I’m Celtic, and I was born on Winter Solstice, the day they mark at Stonehenge as the sun sets, when the winter sun sets in the sky, the shortest day of the year. On this day, our group from Spalding University has stopped at Stonehenge, just a few days shy of Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year. A man sits at the Summer Solstice stone with a tripod and a camera, lining up a shot.

I have come here to England to write, to be with writers who are committed and inspired and who will share with me as we carve out our life’s work. We are at the midpoint of our trip, and yet I’m still waiting for my muse to arrive.

At Stonehenge, the otherly navigation that has marked this trip snaps into alignment. I know my muse, its wicked ways of arriving and departing, its silly jokes that I’ve heard a million times. Memories of my father are the trumpet call. When he knocks on my heart, I know there will be tears and ink spilled. He knocked yesterday, when everything was a supreme struggle. Though London had become familiar landscape after five days, yesterday all land markers of the conventional kind confounded me.

Next to me on the bus leaving London for Stonehenge this afternoon was a writer in full flush of her muse. She scribbled on the back of paper after paper. “Quick, get me the laptop,” she said, like an emergency room surgeon, to her boyfriend. This was the writer who was three years in love, writing poetry with him that they read aloud to the group of writers; I am four months in love, webbed in a primordial love-state of poetry, a dance of love and fertility, seeds and songs and words whispered. I sit between the writer’s lover and the writer’s muse. Her muse had arrived; mine was less than hours away. Like the Jackson Browne song, “Fountain of Sorrow,” I think, I’m one or two years and couple of changes behind her.

This how my muse comes, meeting me at the windswept Salisbury Plain where ancient Britons held ceremonies for births and deaths. I am attuned to my muse in a time, earth, bluestone way, as were the ancients who heard something in the way the bluestones of Welsh shore spoke to them from 250 miles away. I am attuned to my lover, who is 5,000 miles away, back in New Mexico.

I stand at the Winter Solstice stone, opposite from the photographer who prepares for the longest day. Archaelogists believe that someone standing at the entrance to the enclosure of trilithon stones facing the center could watch the setting sun on Winter Solstice, the light dropping rapidly through the narrow gap between the 40-ton sarsens. Like a Celtic ceremonial dancer, I’m near the membrane between earth and imagination. The muse invites me into the circle as the wind whips my auburn hair in ribbons above my head. To what place did the builders of the henge of stone want us to come? I cross over.