Escaping the nine-to-five

“I’m quitting,” local blogger Maia Nolan tells Flashlight.

She’s speaking of her day job as a paralegal.

“It’s not what I wanted to do as my long-term career.” No, what Nolan is pursuing is that atavistic element of the American Dream forgotten by so many young people struggling to find a career or make ends meet: She’s becoming a full-time writer of fiction, working on the Great American Novel. Nolan recently received an Individual Artist Award grant from the Rasmuson Foundation to spend the first four months of 2009 completing her novel, Escaping the Donnellys.

Nolan submitted the first six chapters of her novel as the creative component of her masters’ thesis, before she received a MFA in creative writing earlier this year. But since finishing graduate school, she’s had nary a moment to continue fashioning her tome.

Flashlight first became aware of Nolan’s prose when her blog, ownthesidewalk.com, featured a gut-busting post back in June entitled “Alaska’s Dreamiest Politicians.” It posited that Alaskans should look beyond the hottest governor in America and examine our other sexy pols—the male ones. Her list included Representative Les Gara, former gubernatorial candidate and talk radio host Andrew Halcro, former Governor Tony Knowles, and the object of her obsession, Mayor-cum-Senator-elect Begich. Flashlight’s been reading daily ever since.

So what should we expect from the novel?

“It’s about death, and family, and casseroles, not necessarily in that order,” Nolan tells Flashlight. “It’s set in Alaska, and it’s kind of… it’s mostly about family and what happens to a family when one member of a close-knit family dies unexpectedly. It’s kind of emotionally based, though not factually based, on my experience when I was living in New York when I was 23 or 24 and my uncle died and I was the only one in the family who wasn’t there. It really draws from that kind of experience of flying across the country to grieve with family after really having kind of been out of the loop. Emotionally it draws from my experiences, and my family’s convinced it’s about them, but it’s not.”

Nolan’s waiting until she has a finished manuscript to shop the book to publishers, but Flashlight shares her optimism that four months with nothing to do but work on the novel will prove triumphant—for her sake, we hope so, since she’ll soon be unemployed. As to the future, she says, “obviously I’m going to sell my novel and get a huge advance and sell the movie rights and only be a novelist.”

bjk@anchoragepress.com