Dan Flanigan is a novelist, playwright, poet, and practicing lawyer. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Rice University and J.D. from the University of Houston. He taught Jurisprudence at the University of Houston and American Legal History at the University of Virginia. His first published book was his Ph.D. dissertation, The Criminal Law of Slavery and Freedom, 1800-1868.
He moved on from academia to serve the civil rights cause as a school desegregation lawyer, followed by a long career as a finance attorney in private law practice. He became a name partner in the Polsinelli law firm in Kansas City, created its Financial Services practice, chaired its Real Estate & Financial Services Department for two decades, and established the firm’s New York City office and served as its managing partner until October 2022.
Recently, he has been able to turn his attention to his lifelong ambition— creative writing. In 2019 he released a literary trifecta including Mink Eyes, the first in the Peter O’Keefe series, Dewdrops, a collection of shorter fiction, and Tenebrae: A Memoir of Love and Death.
B&P: Why did you want to be a writer? You started young, then detoured, but what was the motivation?
DF: I can’t remember precisely, but it was a high school English class when we begged our teacher to stop making us diagram sentences and let us read and discuss some books. Once that happened, I do remember obnoxiously resisting the whole idea of a “theme” in a story. But I came around. And somehow, from nowhere really, it just seized me, a mild but still powerful “spiritual” sort of experience: I wanted to “be a writer.” I remember creeping up to our English teacher priest who was presiding over afternoon study hall and said, “Father, I wonder if I could be a writer?” He said, “I think you could because you’re such a good reader.” That was enough for me.
B&P: What was the worst part of publishing your first book? Any regrets?
DF: Putting it out there in the world and unsure it was worthy of it.
B&P: How much of you is in your characters and why do you find them compelling enough to write about?
DF: Not that much and a lot. I have deliberately tried not to put myself into my primary character in the series, Peter O’Keefe, and to help me avoid that, I have tried to put aspects of myself in secondary character Mike Harrigan, lawyer and O’Keefe’s childhood “blood brother” (not exactly self-flattering
as readers can attest). But then a close friend of mine, reading the O’Keefe books, said something like “O’Keefe sure sounds and acts a lot like Dan Flanigan. It’s like having you there on the page.” But I assure you that my life has not been nearly as exciting as O’Keefe’s or Harrigan’s.
B&P: Why do you find them compelling enough to write about?
DF: O’Keefe is a guy who is failing, achieving, searching, sometimes finding, struggling with the same things many in my generation have done, so he is “real world” in that sense though he lives a more exciting life than most of us. But even the excitement aspect is “real world,” nothing that either hasn’t or couldn’t have happened in “real life.” I am trying to give the readers a complicated,
struggling hero they can bond with in a “sibling” or “best friend” sort of way. And I work hard on my so-called “secondary” characters, which at times have already and will in the future become primary, and those are also, I hope, “real world.”
B&P: What lessons have you learned from youth and what lessons from the first time you wrote before the detour, to now?
DF: After a burst of short stories and poems in high school, the “detour” happened. I don’t think I learned anything from that experience except the “be a writer” drive never left despite many decades of multiple detours.
From “youth,” I’m not sure I learned any “lessons” except from my parents how not to live. I came out of it with enough unhappiness and neuroses that I doubt I would “be a writer” without them and have become perversely grateful for them. All the “lessons” I’ve learned in life came from addiction and recovery (cursed, damned, and saved; sin and redemption; spiritual death and resurrection).
B&P: How do you handle bad reviews?
DF: Not well. Luckily, there have not been many negative ones. I have the thinnest of skins. My daughter reads all reviews with the request only to send me negative ones that say something that might be helpful. And I have been helped by at least a couple of reviews that constructively identified problems.
B&P: What’s your writing process like?
DF: Best description I can come up with is “manic depressive.” I have always been disciplined in my legal work (though maybe the right word is “obsessed,” thus eliminating the need for discipline) but not so much so with writing. I don’t write every day. I often don’t write for many days. I am best when I can create a three-day or four-day weekend and just give myself to it full immersion and not be in a hurry about it. At the same time, I am terrified to give up my “day job” entirely and be relegated to nothing but that empty screen every morning. But I find it interesting that after taking two years to write An American Tragedy (with many ups and downs and even abandonments of the project), I am moving along much better and more “disciplined” with the current book. I think some of that, though not all, is feeling time’s footsteps clomping louder and closer behind me. In all events, writer’s block is a constant issue for me. The best remedy I have found for it is to skip the scene(s) currently stifling me and move onto something I know I can do. The more I get written down (and thus the greater investment in and commitment to the work as a whole), the easier it is to go back and fill in–and some of those once seemingly impossible scenes have turned out to be the best.
B&P: For those not familiar with it, please explain the Peter O’Keefe series and why a new reader should give it a try?
DF: Cribbing from the series description at the end of my most recent book, An American Tragedy: How did we get here? Dan Flanigan, after a long career as a finance, banking, and bankruptcy lawyer in which he was both a player in and witness to some of the dramatic transformations of our era, intends to provide at least a few of the answers to that question through a series of novels, recounting, from the 1980s to the present day, the life and adventures of his private detective hero Peter O’Keefe and the assorted characters in O’Keefe’s orbit as they wade through some of the legendary scams, schemes, and scandals of our troubled times.
I think it is important to emphasize for potential readers what many reviewers have said: Each of the novels is stand-alone. If you pick up one of the later in the series, you can enjoy it without having read the earlier ones.
B&P: You write poetry? How did that come about and how much of a poet do you consider yourself to be?
DF: In my high school “burst,” I wrote quite a bit of poetry but not much after that other than “in my head.” I did through all the years read a lot of poetry and especially late in life immersed myself in Yeats among others. But when my wife died in 2011, I wanted to write something about her last illness and death (with flashes back of our 45 years together). I started out trying to do it in novel form, but it just didn’t seem at all interesting. I found that poetry (both verse and prose) let me condense things and hopefully make them much more powerful through the condensing and the rhythm and imagery of poetry. So I wrote Tenebrae: A Memoir of Love and Death. But even it was primarily a narrative (though there were a few non-narrative poems in the collection). If I ever write poetry again, and I might, it will almost certainly be “narrative.” I don’t think my feelings and musings are interesting enough to express other than through characters acting in the world, i.e. “story.”
In addition to Tenebrae, I have published a book of short fiction titled Dewdrops.
B&P: You were a civil rights lawyer before changing to finance and bankruptcy. How do you feel your lawyer side helps your writer side, if at all?
DF: As noted above, some of the main themes and plot lines of the O’Keefe series are the scams, schemes, and scandals of our times. My finance and bankruptcy career put me in the midst of many of these. For example, the mink farm situation in my first O’Keefe book, Mink Eyes, had its origins in a case I handled as a young lawyer (but without the “fun,” i.e. intrigue, sex, and violence). My civil rights career was brief and, ultimately, sad because in the school desegregation area where I was most involved, we were ultimately stymied by massive white resistance (active and sometimes violent in places like Boston, passive, i.e. move across the state line, in Kansas City) and Congressional legislation (the Byrd Amendment in 1976, which prohibited the federal Department of Health, Education from cutting off funds to school districts that refused to bus their children for purposes of desegregation and that forbade the use of federal money to pay for busing of children beyond the school nearest their homes).
Most of all, it left me (which may be reflected in some of my writing) with the sense of the failed promise of the 60s and the civil rights movement (at least its school desegregation initiatives) and the thwarted initiatives of LBJ’s Great Society. Defeated, exhausted, or just without sufficient gumption and staying power, we set about becoming Yuppies instead.
B&P: You and your late wife, Candy Gambrell, founded Sierra Tucson, the alcohol/drug treatment center. What was the impetus for that, and how does that affect your writing style and character analysis?
DF: It grew out of my own addiction and treatment experience and my desperate gambit to successfully recover. I disliked everything about my life—my town, my profession, my marriage–and I felt I had to try something else, something better for the world, or I would slip back into alcoholic hell. So, I put it all on the line. It turned out that Candy was more than up to the challenge (I had been misjudging her all our lives together), and we did it. But we couldn’t keep it because we didn’t have enough capital to get beyond the initial startup operating losses and had to sell it, but it was the experience itself that was crucial.
And, incidentally, I enjoyed a burst of writing during that period that, despite an additional long “detour” thereafter, established the foundations for the literary work I have been able to accomplish in the last ten years. Ironically, I ended up not only in the same marriage but back in the same town and profession—but a different man (though still with many faults). That, to paraphrase Robert Frost, made all the difference.
B&P: What’s next for Dan, the author and poet?
DF: I am working on the fifth O’Keefe book. I am surprised I have become so committed to this O’Keefe series. I am an accidental crime writer. I wrote Mink Eyes as a detective story to make more interesting what I envisioned originally as a purely “literary” novel. But the series gives me opportunities, which I hope I am somewhat capitalizing on, to write “literary” but pulse-quickening meditations on some of the things that have made us who we are (and aren’t), create a large gallery of characters and observe/develop them over time, some over a long period of time, in the crucible of dramatic societal changes and exterior and interior challenges and crises. I may write something else someday, but have no specific plans to do so.//
We thank Dan for his time answering our many questions. Click on the book covers in this interview to learn more or buy the books.
You can find him online on one of his many social media platforms.
Website: https://danflaniganbooks.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDanFlanigan
Twitter: https://twitter.com/_DanFlanigan
Watch Dan Flanigan on WritersonWritershttps:// www.youtube.com/live/zQp40zUfOuY?si=sOK7Jl1dX6PjF9dv
About the Author
