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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.
WAYS YOU CAN SUPPORT BOUNDLESS
I found her honesty to be a welcome invitation into the turmoil of the balancing act she was repeatedly faced with and I was able to connect with so much of what she shared on a level that I have not been able to do with other memoirs I’ve read. I think it will be the moments of disorganization and pervading emotional fights that readers will be most heartened by, as this is when her resilience shines the brightest. Flynn’s authenticity in the throes of both tenderness and frustration makes her memoir a powerful testament to the greatest prize of all: the reward of meaningful personal transformation.
Interview me for your publication.
Let’s talk about the life passage of the empty nest—or let’s talk about rebirthing yourself.
Interview me on your podcast.
Let’s give your listeners new ways to think about reinventing themselves after the empty nest. Let’s talk about how you can regain your emotional agility when you have been living the same stuck life for decades.
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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How to Reclaim Your Emotional Agility When You Feel So Stuck (Hint: Help Your Kids Write College Entrance Essays about Their Promising Future, and Then Send Them Off and Sit with Your Adult Aloneness)
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These reviews make a big difference. Below are prompts so you can knock out a quick review, and this can be painless. They are based on what my early readers, mentors and endorsers have said.
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Look for giveaways on GoodReads. I’ll be offering 10 free books + a one-hour publishing consulting session to the first ten pre-orders. Come find me there so you’ll be the first to enter!
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Add BOUNDLESS to your Want to Read list on GoodReads.
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Add BOUNDLESS to your featured reading list on Tertulia or Bookshop.
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It’s free, or you can become a paid subscriber (only $5/month) and get more about writing craft from The Story Catalyst, Memoir Catalyst and Inner Critic series; more about Living Boundlessly and more behind-the-scenes from the publishing world.
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Come see me, in person or online on my book tour!
My publicity team is working out dates for appearances in bookstores in selected cities, as well as online bookstore events and book club discussion groups.
What’s in the works? Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos in New Mexico, Phoenix; Denver; San Diego.
What’s on the horizon? Lexington, KY; Nashville; Saratoga Springs, NY; Ireland (Dublin as well as along the Wild Atlantic Way); Bozeman, MT.
Invite me to your city for a book talk!
Do you have a great connection at an independent bookstore, community library or empty-nested mid-life women who want to join the conversation? Let’s talk!
Download my book discussion guide for your book group.
Invite me for a zoom talk!
Invite me to speak to your writing conference or retreat.
Let me give your organization the behind-the-scenes story of how Boundless moved from lived experience to a literary memoir. I fast-tracked this book by tapping into mentors at The Lighthouse Book Project. And because it was memoir, I got emotional support so I could write it faster.
Invite me to speak to your spiritual group.
In BOUNDLESS, I touch on the teachings of Thomas Merton about the True Self—much harm comes to the False Self, the one we believe we must protect at all costs, but he teaches we can do no harm to the True Self. I draw on the teachings of Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation on my path to reinvention, and ultimately, I apply at the CAC’s Living School, a two-year program grounded in the transformative wisdom of contemplative traditions.
Ask your local library system to purchase BOUNDLESS.
Don’t know how to do that? Go to your library’s website and look for “Recommend a Title” or “Suggest a Title for Purchase.” It’s often in the Contact Us or Ask Us tab. This usually brings up the needed form.
At left are links to libraries in a few selected cities to which I have ties:
You’ll likely need this information for the “suggest a purchase”:
Title: Boundless
Author: Carolyn Dawn Flynn
Format: Book
Paperback : 324 pages
ISBN-13: 9798891324824
Item Weight : 0.91 pounds
Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.73 x 8.5 inches
Genre or category: Memoir, women
Audience: Adults
Language: English
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Year: 2024
Publication Date: December 21, 2024
Price: $16.99
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