In the preface to The Boat with a Girl’s Heart, Neil de la Flor offers a candid account of his process and motivation, framing the book as an homage to his late friend and collaborator, Maureen Seaton. De la Flor explains that he drew from their collaborative book, Sinead O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds, treating it as a word bank for what he calls a “radically undisciplined” version of N+7—a constraint developed by Jean Lescure of Oulipo.
While the work emerges from grief, it is shaped through play and a shared literary history–with a healthy dose of humor spooned in.
As a writer myself, I am drawn to the defamiliarizing power of constraints like N+7, which replace each noun in a source text with the seventh noun following it in a dictionary. Here, the dictionary is replaced by an intimate, co-authored book, and discipline gives way to affection and memory. The results are comic and delightful:
Draft 1:
My eyes are punctuation marks, haphazard commas, an aroma, a failed wink.
Draft 2:
My eyes are medicine wheels, haphazard megalopolises, a pervert, a failed detroit.
This transformation captures the very core of the work: language scrambled and remade, but never emptied of emotional weight. The “undisciplined” application of the constraint becomes not a failure of method but a necessary condition for mourning—one that mirrors the disorder grief introduces into one’s life.
Structurally, The Boat with a Girl’s Heart is organized into two “drafts” of dialogue, bookended by two poems sharing the book’s title. This framing places the reader inside an ongoing conversation rather than a retrospective. We are not told about a friendship so much as immersed in its rhythms and curiosities. The exchanges are frequently frank and intimate:
ND: You never bought stickers for me, jerk.
MS: Is this interview a catharsis or guilt trip?
ND: It’s freedom.
MS: George Michael
ND: No.
What gives these moments their power is not only their wit, but their persistence. The dialogue refuses closure, insisting on continuation even in the face of death. Ultimately, humor keeps this book afloat, but the undercurrent of grief and loss provides the substance that gives it a quiet force beyond the laughter.
In the end, the message is clear and heartbreaking–and Neil de la Flor’s captures what this book is all about in a single crushing line:
ND: In honor of. In remembrance of. To keep you alive. To keep me alive.
For more on the book: https://www.anhingapress.org/neil-de-la-flor
Jonathan Cardew won a travel toothbrush at a boules competition in northern Brittany. His stories appear in Passages North, Cream City Review, wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Superstition Review, Best Microfiction 2021, and others. He is the author of A WORLD BEYOND CARDBOARD (ELJ Editions) and the blog editor for Bending Genres. Ignore him on Twitter @cardewjcardew.