FOMITE

Music abides as an elemental force in the lives and situations chronicled in each of these seventeen stories and a concluding novella. The opening five stories groove to a noirish, mid-century jazz idiom, and the twelve middle stories develop as movements in an interconnected symphony of frustrations and felicities, while the novella charts in detail the pre-and-post Covid inner life of a boomer poet struggling obsessively with her bulimia and professional career aspirations. What all the characters share is a desire to follow Emerson's advice to "make much of your own place."

About the Author

John Michael Flynn has been Writer in Residence at Carl Sandburg’s Connemara in North Carolina, and an English Language Fellow through the US State Department in Khabarovsk, Russia. He also writes as Basil Rosa. Previous shot story collections are Something Grand, Dreaming Rodin, and Off To The Next Wherever. Poetry collections include Restless Vanishings, Moments Between Cities, and Second Nature Third Eye Fifth Wheel. His book of essays, How The Quiet Breathes, was published in 2021 by New Meridian Arts. 

Author blog

Praise

There is depth in the conversations and humility in the lessons learned. There is laughter, embarrassment, and a transparent realization of the human heart.

— Chila Woycik

Explores the connections between the human and natural world, between love and loss. He engages the reader and shows us the often hidden parts of ourselves.

— Maria Mazziotti Gillan

John Michael Flynn’s language dazzles to a very real end: the exploration and delineation of the free-floating breakdown known as ‘America.’ The range of tones and locales he uses is impressive but more impressive is the feeling invested in what almost inevitably slips through time’s fingers.
— Baron Wormser

The prose at every turn is crisp and evocative; he has a gift for description of cities, landscapes and characters – the latter seem so real one could almost touch them.
— Geoffrey Clark