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A peaceful memoir festival gets a harrowing tale

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This weekend the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, N.Y., is holding a memoir workshop featuring the poet, playwright and memoirist Nick Flynn.

The Omega Institute is a 30-year-old retreat -- the kind of place where communal vegetarian dining, yoga and meditation give shape to the day.

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Seems like an odd fit for the author of ‘Another ... Night in ... City,’ a memoir with a title that’s profane enough to send your average family newspaper into fits of ellipses, a book that Mark Doty called ‘ferocious ... harrowing.’

In it, Flynn recounts his troubled family history: His mother committed suicide when he was 22, and later, when Flynn was working at a Boston-area homeless shelter, his long-estranged father surfaced there as a client.

‘I couldn’t imaging anything worse, really,’ he told Robert Birnbaum for Identity Theory in 2005. Yet he continued:

People say with the book sometimes, ‘How did you write this book, it has no self-pity? It’s compassionate. Dah, dah, dah.’ I say you should have seen the drafts. They are full of self-pity and ridiculous rages. And I edited them out mostly because when you look at the stuff on page it doesn’t ring true, actually. It does feel like a diversion from the essential state. Which, hopefully if you can get to it, is a little purer.

So maybe Flynn won’t be as odd a fit with the authors of ‘The Guru Looked Good’ and ‘A Monk Swimming’ after all.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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