Then, she finds out there’s a network of other women this is happening to as well, so they have to solve what’s happening and hope it doesn’t get worse.”įlanagan is also the author of short stories contained in two collections: “It’s Not Going to Kill You, and Other Stories,” published in 2013, and “The Usual Mistakes,” published in 2005.

She ends up having a blackout and crashing her car, ending up in the ER. She’s also concerned her family is going to think she’s secretly started drinking again. She’s concerned this is somehow related to her drinking.

“It’s about a woman who has quit drinking about seven months ago, and then starts having these mysterious blackouts where she’ll lose like an hour of her life. “It takes place in Dayton, which I’m very excited about,” Flanagan said. Flanagan proudly boasts that this novel will be set in Dayton.

Shortly after crafting her first novel, Flanagan began work on a second novel, called “Blackout,” that is set to be released on July 1. It took Flanagan around four years to write “Deer Season,” and, though she doesn’t think that her writing process is relatively “sexy” (her process is far less Ernest Hemingway-esque and more analytical), Flanagan seems to have found a rhythm that suits her well. No matter the lack of diversity, there would always be a way to find outsiders. “So, it was partly a little bit my experience, but also the sense that, no matter what, I think communities find a way to ‘other’ people. “I think part of it was feeling like I didn’t quite fit in, in Sanborn,” Flanagan said. In every community - especially rural towns - Flanagan hypothesizes that people’s instincts will always be to ostracize those who they view as different from themselves. Then, when I ended up going to graduate school, that’s what I focused on.”įlanagan also used her personal experience as a misfit of sorts to inform one of the dominant themes in the novel - what it means to be an outsider or outcast in a small town. In undergraduate studies, I took some classes and really loved it. “But I got a little taste of what it was like to have an audience and I was hooked. “I was scared to death,” Flanagan says of reading her first written work out loud. I wanted to capture that in the novel.” Explore 15 entertainers with Dayton ties to watch in 2022Īs a self-labeled misfit and introvert, Flanagan found her voice and purpose in creative writing in the fourth-grade when she was invited to read something that she wrote to the fifth-grade class. A lot of information came through gossip and over backyard fences. I really wanted to capture that sense of community and how you existed in a bit of a bubble. “I can’t imagine how much rural life has changed in that time with cell phones, Amazon Prime, and all these things that were just unimaginable when I was a kid,” Flanagan said.

The novel is set in the 1980s, mostly because Flanagan grew up on the farm during that decade.

Deer season erin flanagan