FOW Kelly Flynn

By: Maame Dufie Awuah, Ethan-Judd Barthelemy and Maximilian Chuang

“Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field… From your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.” - Miguel de Unamuno

These words guide English Instructor Kelly Flynn’s approach to life and teaching. “It has to do with how I think about writing. You give yourself to life, just show up and pay attention, and life sends back ideas, wisdom about connections you might not have seen in the moment,” Flynn said.

Flynn grew up on a farm in rural Missouri, and didn't ever expect to be teaching at Exeter. “My parents were farmers and my brother and I were the first generation to go to college.” Flynn recalled. “My parents had beef cattle and raised corn and wheat and soybeans. We lived in a house on top of a hill and I really miss it sometimes because the sky was so big there, and we could see the storms rolling in.

“Not many kids from my high school went to college: it was a very small public school. I went K-12 with the same kids and I got out of my class when lots of kids were going into factory work or becoming farmers,” Flynn added.

Flynn applied to Harvard, the University of Missouri, and Washington University in St. Louis. After expecting to only get into the University of Missouri, Flynn was accepted into Harvard and went to the Northeast for the first time. “Harvard was a huge culture shock for me.” Flynn said. “I didn't visit it before I actually attended, and I'd never been to the Northeast. I'd never been inside a bookstore. I didn't know how to cross a street that had traffic lights.”

In college, Flynn started out as a physics major. “The physics major had come about because I'd gotten a strong message when I was in high school that if you were a girl who was good at science and math, you should do science and math to represent girls,” Flynn recalled. “My older brother majored in biochemistry and math, so I felt like I should be in there with the science and math.”

But after discovering a newfound passion for literature and music, Flynn ended up focusing on English and music courses. “I did figure out that I wanted to be an English major and I ended up feeling for me that English was more challenging than STEM because there's so much ambiguity involved in it,” Flynn said.

After college, however, Flynn struggled with adapting to teaching in a boarding school environment. “When I started teaching, it was, ‘I'll do this until I figure out what I really want to do.’ I was a teaching intern at Andover, where I had an incredibly difficult first year, so I second guessed myself a lot through that first year of teaching,” Flynn said. “I kept thinking, ‘Okay, I'll patch things together financially until I figure out how to make a career in the arts.’ I was planning to go to the Berkeley School of Music and study orchestration and music production. And then my money fell through, so I ended up teaching for a second year and I was still kind of feeling like, ‘Ah, man, if I only had money, I'd be free to go and do.’”

But for Flynn, a turning point came about in her teaching career. “I remember this sort of crystallized moment when I was teaching poetry, when this boy in my class said, ‘You know, I've always hated poetry, but I feel like I'm starting to have an idea of what it's for.’ And it just lit up my heart,” she said. “A few years after that time, I thought, ‘Okay, I'll teach a little longer, I'll put up with it.’”

“If you love teenagers and you love your subject, it's kind of ideal.” Flynn said. “It's kind of worth it. And I like how everyday is different. I laugh almost every day. I feel like I'm connected to other human beings that my work is real. And so here I am, I'm grateful.”

According to English Instructor Eimer Page, Flynn’s love for the practice of writing goes hand-in-hand with her passion for teaching. “I love hearing her read her poetry, and strongly advise attending if you ever hear she is doing a reading,” Page said. “She is hilarious in her descriptions of how her writing came about, and the poems themselves contain a huge range of moods.”

English Instructor Alex Myers has also been inspired by Flynn’s readings, even vividly recollecting an instance from years ago. “She read a story she’d written that was really great – and I’d never heard her read her own work before. That stuck with me.”

Flynn ascribes her reading methodology to the empathy and understanding words afford. “When I read poems or prose that I love, I realized what I love about it is that it kind of explains to me some experience of life that I've had that I hadn't ever put into words before,” she said. “One lesson I would say is that reading literature gives us practice for deciphering people around us and thinking about what their intentions are.”

Similar ideas guide Flynn’s process of writing— in particular, her recollections of growing up in a time when television was not widely available. “There was that mystery of that no TV time when there was nothing on to watch, and what do you do with yourself if you're up late at night?” she said. “I'm trying to write about that because for people my age and older, they remember that. And for people younger than I am, they've never known a time when TV and entertainment, the internet, isn't feeding stuff at you all the time.”

“There are good things and bad things about both worlds, so I write just to communicate something about the world we live in and how amazing it all is,” Flynn said.

Flynn’s great attention to the details of life and implications of events are visible when she approaches other texts, including Jane Austin’s works, which she teaches in ENG542. “Austin’s novels are formulaic. You can see that there's a heroine who has an adversary and some man whom she doesn't like, but you can see that they're going to end up together,” Flynn explained. “We've seen that formula again and again, but within that formula, there are infinite variations of how we go from point A—here they hate each other—to point, I was going to say B, probably point Z, where they married happily ever after.”

“I love that idea of a formula in art, or even other fields like sports, where something like the rules of football and the way the grid is on the field provides this structure for all of the beauty of the passes to unfold,” Flynn said. “Looking at Austin, it’s almost like we know where the 50 yard line is, we know where the end zone is, but how are we going to see these beautiful plays unfold? When I taught Moby Dick, it’s kind of multi-genre in the sense that not only is there no formula that novel, but parts of it feel like an encyclopedia, parts of it feel like biography, parts of it feel like a sermon, and it's this weird collage that's all over the place. I love the messiness of that.”

Senior Will Vietor has benefited from Flynn’s thoughtfulness in both reading pieces and teaching them. “Ms. Flynn truly lives up to her teaching philosophy of approaching the table as if she were a student — it feels like she learns as much from the students as they do from her, ” he said.

Students and teachers alike have described Flynn to be very playful and curious. “[Ms. Flynn] has a very bubbly, kind of spunky personality. She’s always so excited to talk, and she always can connect to you in some way. She’s so sweet to everyone,” upper Lucy Weil said. “As our adviser, she's like a second mom to us.”

Page praised Flynn’s kindness and charisma, noticeable upon first impressions. “I first met Ms. Flynn when she came to interview for her position at Exeter. She came to dorm duty with me during her interview, and after she left, the students requested that we make her a dorm affiliate for the following year since they had so enjoyed meeting her. Now, I teach across the corridor from her, and she often pops in just to catch up or share a moment from class. If I walk past her room when she’s teaching, I usually hear explosive laughter coming from behind her door,” Page recalled.

When describing her perfect day, Flynn mentioned playing a Bach fugue on the piano. “I love the rigor of memorizing music. I think because it demands my entire brain to memorize a difficult piece of music, I can't be worried about anything else. It's a perfect form of one pointed meditation.”

“And then I will dance in my kitchen,” she said. “I will turn on Chance the Rapper, or even some old school Lady Gaga or some nineties music like Mary J. Blige, and I will dance in my kitchen and that's my workout.”

Flynn has been unafraid to carry her playful spirit into the classroom and advising meetings, also connecting with her students through dance. “I love dancing. I could go dancing every night if I had the opportunity,” she said.

Flynn has shared the gift of dance with her students. “There’s this one advisory tradition that we have, where Ms. Flynn plays this Bob the Builder video. It’s like a dance routine, a tango of sorts, and it gets the whole advisory laughing. It really plays to her playful side. I’ve heard that she also does this in her classes too,” Weil added.

Flynn’s caring personality is not only appreciated by her students, but also by her five-year-old chocolate labrador, Pete. “She'll often come into the dorm with her dog and knock door-to-door and say hello to everyone,” advisee and upper Bona Yoo said.

Over quarantine, Flynn and Pete hosted dance party workouts. “Dogs can tell when we are happy or sad, and they pick up our energy, I’m sure of it,” Flynn reflected.

“If somebody is really wanting to milk every minute of their Exeter day for content and intellectual rigor, it can feel like a waste of time to spend four minutes watching a puppy video or to do a Bob the Builder dance,” Flynn said. “But I feel kind of retroactively vindicated because all of the brain science that's out there now tells us that relaxation and laughter help groups bond, and also the relaxation that comes from that creates a fertile field for learning.

“Being present in your body, laughing with other people, taking a moment to meditate on loveliness all help you grow and expand your imagination,” Flynn mused. “That’s why I’m a believer in laughter, dance, meditation, and kitten and puppy videos.”