Author Erin Flanagan on Losing Her Stage Fright, Winning an Edgar, and Writing Her “Scary” New Thriller
By Doug Moe
 

Erin Flanagan might have thought she was dreaming, except she had just awoken from a nap. While Flanagan was sleeping, her good friend, the mystery novelist Jess Montgomery, had sent her a text. This was last January. The text read:
 “Holy s—t! You got an Edgar nom!”

Flanagan, who teaches creative writing at Wright State University, was one of five nominees in the Best First Novel by an American Author category of the prestigious 2022 Edgar Allan Poe Awards presented by the Mystery Writers of America.

“I was like, ‘What?’” Flanagan told me recently by phone from Ohio. “’There must be a mistake.’ It was the shock of my career.” Flanagan’s novel, Deer Season, was her first to be published, but several unpublished earlier manuscripts spoke to the dues she’d paid. She wasn’t about to miss the Edgar Awards ceremony in April in New York City.

“I said this may be the only time I’m ever been nominated for anything,” she recalled. “We are doing it up. My husband rented a tux, I got a new dress, and we went to New York.” New to the community of mystery writers, Flanagan enjoyed meeting the other nominees. “So welcoming,” she said. As her category was about to be announced, she turned to her husband. “Whatever happens, I’ve had a great night.” A few moments later, it got better.   She won.

 Deer Season, published by the University of Nebraska Press, was launched with a starred review from Publishers Weekly that called it a “masterly debut” that “dissects a young woman’s disappearance from a small town in 1980s Nebraska and the pervading suspicions throughout the community… Flanagan balances the mystery and its surprising resolution with her emotionally rich character explorations.”

It was at the University of Nebraska that Flanagan took her first creative writing course and began reading contemporary short fiction, stories by writers like Lorrie Moore and Charles Baxter. She recalled, “I was like, ‘What is this wonderful world I didn’t know anything about?’”

Her grades as an undergrad in Lincoln were mixed: she did well in literature and writing classes but was indifferent to subjects she didn’t like. “My mom says I’ve been like that since first grade,” Flanagan said.

She made it into graduate school with the help of an instructor who advocated for her. Flanagan earned both a master’s and a doctorate at Nebraska. She figured she would eventually teach literature, but she was also, tentatively, writing stories. A pivotal moment came when Flanagan and a friend were set to attend a literary reading on campus and one of the writers cancelled at the last minute. The friend volunteered Flanagan, who had a story with her.

“I was probably more nervous than I’ve been in my entire life,” she said. “But I did it, and I stopped shaking eventually. People seemed to really like the story. I was like, ‘This is kind of fun. Maybe I’ll try writing.’”

She has been teaching – largely creative writing – at Wright State since 2005. “It’s been a gas,” she said. “What a great job. I can’t believe I get paid to do it.” She was also writing, and the University of Nebraska Press published two of her short story collections. But publishing a novel eluded her – “I had four dead novels in a drawer,” she noted in a later essay – and a colleague said publishing only stories meant she was “still sitting at the kids’ table.” Flanagan didn’t agree with that assessment, yet the failure of the novels had left her, in her words, “burned out and beat down.”

In 2015 – having been promoted to professor at Wright State – Flanagan took a year off writing fiction and instead plunged into reading and writing book reviews. The experience of analyzing fiction – with a positive but not uncritical eye – helped her once she returned to her own novel in progress.

Then, too, with Deer Season Flanagan hired a developmental editor, Tiffany Yates Martin, whose advice was priceless.
“It was an absolute master class in revision,” Flanagan said. “At the end of the process I said to her, ‘That was joyful.’ She’s so good she could see exactly what I was trying to do and where I wasn’t succeeding.”

Flanagan secured a literary agent for her follow up to Deer Season, and the new novel, titled Blackout, will be published by Thomas & Mercer, which specializes in mysteries and thrillers, on July 1 (pre-order here!). “I tried to hone in on things that were scary to me,” Flanagan said of the new novel. Her protagonist, Maris, though seven months sober, begins suffering blackouts, and soon discovers other women having the same experience. The novel, Publishers Weekly noted, is a “gripping psychological thriller… The stakes rise as Maris tries to discover exactly what is happening, who is responsible, and what links her to the other women. Flanagan keeps the reader guessing to the surprising climax. She remains a writer to watch.”
 

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