My two cents: A first-hand interview with Pine City author Jean Flanigen

With her unruly gray hair and intense green eyes, Jean Flanigen walks into Sherry Lynnes’s Café in St. John and immediately owns the room.

“Are you open? Do you have a menu? Can I get some coffee?” she asks the waitress across the room. All eyes in the place are on her in a second and she doesn’t seem to notice the attention or care.

The waitress responds to it all, nodding her head at every inquiry, shuffling to get menus and showing us to a table. Flanigen doesn’t stop once the waitress shows up with coffee, affirming her with a hearty “Bless you! Bless you!”

Flanigen is a Pine City area author coming out with her second book, the Zombie Connection.

On Oct. 24, she’ll hold a book-signing during the Rosalia Fall Festival at Pat’s Books at 11 a.m., marking the debut of her sequel. Her first self-published book was the Zombie Conspiracy.

Flanigen and I sat down the morning of Oct. 15 to hash out the story behind her books, which inevitably led us to the story behind Flanigen. The 55-year-old Rosalia woman has led a colorful life of lively hobbies and has now pounded out two colorful novels about sexually enslaved zombies finding their way to freedom. As Flanigen shares her life story with me, the pieces behind the bizarre plot began to come together.

We chat for a few minutes and then Flanigen starts in on her humble beginnings.

She claims her family helped found Athens, Georgia. She grew up with a minister for a father, spending the years of her youth split between South Carolina and Georgia.

In her early teens, Flanigen hit the road with her guitar to begin what would eventually turn into a life-long career singing all over the U.S.

“Back then, I just had me a little Volkswagon and a guitar and I took off,” she said, running her hand through her curly gray hair. Flanigen sang in Nashville and then California, eventually meeting her husband of 20 years, Dale, at the age of 35.

She says she played the 12-string guitar for so many years, her funny bone tendon eventually wore out.

“My doctor told me my nerve looked like a rubber band that you took out and stretched,” she said.

Flanigen was bitten by a black widow spider in 2003 in California, a trauma which sent her into a two-week hallucinogenic trip.

Three months later, she began the first of her two books that trail the life of a woman bitten by a black widow spider who turns into a zombie- a living dead body. For the next five years, she tried to get her book, the Zombie Conspiracy, published.

Finally, she and her husband published the book themselves and eventually attracted the attention of Gray Dog Press in Spokane. That company is publishing the first and second book. They can be purchased at Pat’s Books in Rosalia and all Hastings in Spokane.

Flanigen’s eyes and facial expressions are alert and interested. Her 55-year-old voice is raspy, wrinkled with a life of singing.

The morning of the interview, she wears a bright pink baseball hat, a denim jacket, white jeans and UGG boots, which come up over the jeans. The smile playing around her face never quite leaves, even when she delves into the darker mysteries of her life.

I ask about the bizarre plot- not a lot of people in Whitman County are sitting down to write about prostitute zombies. She dismisses my doubts- pointing out that there are no graphic sex scenes and very little profanity. And, she adds, the zombies find their freedom from prostitution in the first book and learn how to trust each other and work together for a greater cause of freedom, which they call, “the maternal circle of power.”

Right, but isn’t that still a little out there, I counter.

Unphased, Flanigen goes on to lay out the deeper themes behind her two self-published books.

Their freedom, she claims, is a metaphor for how she herself found her way to freedom and respect as a female artist when working in the music industry in Nashville and California in the 1970s through the 1990s.

Born in 1954, she says she and her fellow artists had to constantly fight to be respected as artists, not just sex symbols, as she puts it. She says it was a constant battle on stage to be seen as a legit artist, but she feels there were points in her career that she succeeded.

So do her zombies, she claims, when they find their freedom out of prostitution. One young reader even told her the first book has the elements of a self-help plot.

“One thing they learn is they create their own reality. I believe we create our own reality. We need to take responsibility for that. And once we do, you can take on your own destiny,” Flanigen says, her green eyes lighting up.

We talk about her life now on the farm. Flanigen rock-hunts. She unexpectedly opens her palm, where a sparkling crystal lies. I never even saw her reach for her pocket. It glitters seductively in my hand when she hands it to me. She has two.

“It carries good energy. Can’t you feel it?” she says, leaning in excitedly. Most of what Flanigen has to say about her years on stage, her black widow bite, her two dreamy Arab horses, her historic farm house, her dream to one day own an herb farm, has a child-like excitement behind it.

You would think the years would ebb her glee in these precious activities she partakes in, yet she leans in moment after moment, her eyes lighting up as she jumps from fascinating life fact to fascinating life fact after another. She jogs, she no longer smokes, she has been stalked in the past, she has been married going on 20 years, she fancies herself an up and coming writer. It all comes pouring out and you’d think it was all new to her- you’d think she just discovered herself a day ago. She claims, actually, that she has. There is nothing, she says, like turning 50.

She is finally getting to know even more about herself.

In writing out the seemingly demented plot of zombies enslaved throughout time as sex slaves, Flanigen leans over the table at the café at me and claims her books are helping her develop herself.

“They are developing along with me,” she says.