Journalist and artist Myra Flynn on creating a "righteous space for art and race"

Myra Flynn performs on many stages, shape shifting between music and journalism. She is an accomplished songwriter andsinger, performing soul, jazz and indie pop with five albums to her credit. She is also a journalist with a unique voice in Vermont’s media landscape. She is executive producer and host of Homegoings, a program on Vermont Public that launched in 2021 and brands itself as a “righteous space for art and race.” She has also worked as a features reporter at the Burlington Free Press.

Flynn, 40, grew up in Brookfield, Vermont, the daughter of an Irish father and an African American mother. She signed her first songwriting deal at age 16, attended Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and now divides her time between California, where she lives with her husband and 5 year old daughter Avalon, and Vermont, where she works for Vermont Public and does most of her musical performances. I caught her in one of her concerts this summer at a farm in Montgomery, Vermont. Her soulful blues singing is interspersed with a breezy repartee about life, politics, motherhood and relationships.

In her journalism, Flynn fearlessly delves into sensitive topics. She explained about her work in Homegoings, “I wanted to find a way to talk about race that was going to speak in a language that everyone understood and wasn't going to make anyone feel shame or fear around talking about it, that they could boldly participate in the conversation.” 

Then she had an epiphany. “That universal language is art. That's how we talk about race. It always has been art that's bridged this gap.”

Last year Flynn did a four-part series on Homegoings on “stereo anti-types,” her term for “the dangerous stereotypes that apply to Black men.” This includes the myth of the scary Black man, the stupid Black man, and the deadbeat dad.

“Black men ..are categorically more harmed in America...by these myths that become real life,” she explained.

Many of Flynn’s stories have an autobiographical component, such a s a show that she hosted about surviving the music industry as a woman of color, a program about preserving one’s culture in a predominantly white state, and another about the “biracial conundrum.”

That conundrum is “just having to choose between the Black or the white race, because it's two of the most opposing races in the world inside of your body. And so you are literally holding history in your blood and in your bones.”

Flynn reflected that in this time of deep polarization, she is “looking forward to whatever personal revolutions for artists come out of this,” such as happened in the 1960s and 70s. “I just want to hear people keep talking about our lives in real time and documenting our history as artists with a sense of responsibility.”

She said that “as a journalist it is my job to be of service to all people who have a story … especially to folks who have less of a voice in all of it. So in some ways, I'm really inspired to get to do the work that I do, and to get to be the person who either has the mic or is passing the mic for really important voices to be heard.”