BOUNDLESS
A ROAD TRIP TO REJUVENATION
When you have become no one, how do you become someone again? That is the big question for author and magazine journalist Carolyn Dawn Flynn, a single mother of twins, as she faces the impending empty nest and the death-spiral of the newspaper industry in BOUNDLESS, coming September 2024 (Atmosphere Press).
In BOUNDLESS, Flynn’s eighth book, she turns her keen insight and signature poetic voice to the deeper questions about the stages of women’s lives as she faces the hard stop of motherhood.
The book is a stand-alone manifesto for Chapter Two wise womanhood and serves as a sequel for those who followed Flynn’s column in Sage Magazine in the Albuquerque Journal, which at its height had 425,000 readers.
“In eight weeks, two-thirds of my family would leave at once,” Flynn says. “As a curious journalist and creative literary writer, I was experiencing a colossal failure of the imagination about my future.” This sets her on a collision course where her high-minded journalistic values and feminist ideologies collide with the economic fragility of print journalism.
BOUNDLESS is a re-imagining of the empty nest. “This isn’t just the life passage ahead of the stage before death,” Flynn says, “but rather the recovery of a new form of youthfulness. To reinvent ourselves, we must reclaim our emotional agility.”
At times poignant, at times tragi-comic, BOUNDLESS is relentless in its pursuit of the question of what is a self, why do we need one and how do we reawaken one. Set at the intersection of the twins’ coming-of-age narrative and Flynn’s vanishing horizon of middle age, it is a story of becoming. “It came down to this,” Flynn says, “I am words. I am a voice.”
BOUNDLESS has been longlisted for the 2021 Mslexia Memoir Prize, and its opening pages were longlisted for the 2022 First Pages Prize. An early essay about the near-miss with death of her baby twins appeared in Fourth Genre.
Carolyn Dawn Flynn
Memoirist, novelist and essayist Carolyn Dawn Flynn is the author of the memoir Boundless and seven books of nonfiction. 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 single mother of Ukrainian-Irish-American twins and was the longtime editor of a life-giving magazine called Sage.
empty nest media angles for Boundless
As longtime editor of Sage Magazine, which at its height had 425,000 readers, Carolyn Dawn Flynn, is poised to speak to the second stage of motherhood, the empty nest.
It’s as if Anne Lamott’s Grace (Eventually) met up with Operating Instructions and decided to write about the opposite end of motherhood—the empty nest.
Here are topics she can be interviewed about for magazine features or on podcasts:
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The Hard Stop: Why the Empty Nest Feels So Emptying for Too Many Mothers
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Chapter Two is Wiser: Why We Get a Second Adulthood and What the Heck to Do With It
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Why There Is No Life Passage for the Empty Nest, and How Can You Create One (The Medicine Ball Approach is Not Recommended)
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The Second Mountain: How Emptying My Nest Was My Second Becoming-of-Age
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Why American Women Aren’t Claiming the Wise Elder Space: The World Needs Our Wisdom and Our Fresh Eyes, So Why Are We So Silent?
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