Flannery O’Connor – Phoebe Wilcox, Writing Like the Deadline is Death

She’s a Maniac

Talking about Flannery O’Connor and The Violent Bear it Away, of course. Just finished it. This book will make you feel like you live inside a smoldering cavity of blind and remorseless insanity–like the sunset is flaying you alive and that’s just an everyday occurrence. And it’s all tied in with evangelical Christianity and shatteringly beautiful (but merciless) rural life. Oh, Flan, hon, if you did this for FUN, what did you do when you were stressed?! I suspect you were a literary genius. RIP. –Now I’ll need to meditate for a day or so in order to recover. 🤣

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

Finished A Widow for One Year. It was alright. Now I picked up two books that I bought at Flannery O’Connor’s house in Savannah, GA several years ago. It must have been just her childhood home because it was right in town, one could see the Catholic church from at least one of the upstairs windows, I remember. The house in Wildcat was on a farm. Anyway, the books I’m reading are The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie and The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor. So far I LOVE the second. A welfare worker had to go through snaggly backwoods to try and check on this kidnapped baby. It sort of reminded me of my lovely livelihood. I have great pity and fondness for social workers, bureaucrats, and civil servants of low order. Kafka, Whitman, Bukowski. Maybe they would have been poets/writers that I could actually handle, I don’t know. Of course, Whitman is practically in my family tree with Dr. O.K. Sammis being his childhood friend. Jeannie Olivia Berry Sammis was somebody. My grandmother’s grandma was Kate Sammis. Kate Sammis was one of Dr OK’s many daughters. And Dr OK was Whitman’s friend. Look it up online if ya don’t believe me.

Wildcat

Saw the movie Wildcat (about Flannery O’Connor) this evening. Returned home to find a reference to a wildcat wrestling a prophet on page eight of The Violent Bear it Away, which I bought years ago but still haven’t really read. Finshing up John Irving’s A Widow for one Year. I think I’ll like O’Connor’s book better. Irving taught my dad at the Iowa writers’ workshop. The Irving book, I see why it was a bestseller. I also see why it is probably not a literary masterpiece.