carolynflynn.com | Memoirist, novelist and essayist Carolyn Dawn Flynn is the author of Boundless, a becoming-of-age memoir that will be published in February 2024. The memoir was longlisted for the 2021 Mslexia International Memoir Prize and the 2022 First Pages Prize.
She 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.
Her novel Searching for Persephone, shortlisted for the Elixir Press First Novel Prize, is on submission. An excerpt, “First Cut,” appears on The Write Launch here.
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. She is a 2012 graduate of the Naslund-Mann Spalding MFA in Writing program and a native of Lexington, Kentucky, where she grew up near Red River Gorge. She now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is a hiker and a pilgrim and a desert dweller who is an appreciator of horizons. Find out more at carolynflynn.com.
As the daughter of pianist (my mother) and a writer (my father), writing has always been a sacred calling for me. So very often, my summons to inspiration comes from music.
The pure and simple expression of a song is the seed-star of the emotional change that drives a scene. The elegant structure of a song is what carries me when I think about how to construct a narrative arc.
Songs make me want to write, and then teach me how I am to write.
Carolyn Flynn
Known as The Story Catalyst for book coaching, developmental editing and writing mentoring, Carolyn Flynn is the winner of the 2014 Rick Bass/Montana Prize for Fiction for “Pretend”, author of “Resurrection,” published in Fourth Genre, which is a pre-cursor to the forthcoming memoir, Boundless. An excerpt from her novel-in-progress I Don’t Remember It That Way appears on The Petigru Review. I Don’t Remember It That Way was a 2021 finalist in the Tucson Festival of Books.
Carolyn has previously led writing retreats in Ireland, Scotland and Taos (New Mexico) and many other soul-stirring settings.