Announcement soon, Flannery O’Connor quotes and writers with illness

I will have an announcement to make soon 🙂 Hopefully you will agree with me that it is good news. I am always happiest when there is a flurry of activity around beginning or completing something, I think.

I’ve been reading “Conversations with Flannery O’Connor,” which is now out of print and hard to find, even in libraries and used bookstores, but worth reading. Flannery reminds me a bit of Frida Kahlo in that she puts a bit of herself, her view of herself, into her work – her stories are full of disfigurements and ailments, women who are deaf, women who have wooden legs, people with strange grotesque appearances. Of course, because of her lupus, she herself walked with crutches and it affected her appearance, so she was highly aware of not fitting in, of not being “normal.” Her continual focus on the Southern grotesque is a bit like Frida’s self-portraits – full of her own distorted imagery of her own body. She is imperfect, cantankerous, the language she used sometimes frightening, a Catholic who nonetheless wasn’t impressed with Lourdes except by the germs, by a visit to the Vatican, and who thought most nuns and priests undereducated. (I got a real sense of her personality from her collected letters, easier to find and also worth reading.)
So, her lupus set upon her fairly severely after a trip to the writer’s residency at Yaddo, requiring multiple hospitalizations, experimental drugs, home injections, and later, the crutches. Nevertheless, she didn’t let this affect her work schedule, her work socializing, even. Flannery went and gave readings and taught classes as much as she could, and when she was not quite as able, she hosted writers at her house. (A young writer from Atlanta said of her: “She’s certainly not a hermit, though she’s not an extrovert, either.” Sound familiar?)

Flannery is a bit of a ghost of mine, she haunts me. Flannery was a good writer at a very young age, having a good deal of success in her early twenties, befriending important people, even at that age aware that her work was good and deserved to be treated that way. She turned down a book prize’s publishing contract because they wanted to change her work – that took guts. Despite getting as much treatment for her lupus as the time and technology and her money could allow, she was dead at 39, a year younger than I am now.

Here are a couple of quotes I particularly enjoyed from “Conversations.” Most of them I have never seen before, on the web or anywhere else.

“There has been no interesting or noble struggle,” she said of her life. She lived with her mother and helped raise peacocks and fancy chickens and ducks, which supplemented her income (which increased as she got older) not mostly made up of book royalties but fellowships, awards, and grants. She used a lot of the money on hospital trips. She complained frequently of the low sales of her books, about bad reviews or (what she felt were) ignorant or misguided reviews.

Her advice to new writers? “start reading and writing and looking and listening. Pay less attention to yourself than to what is outside you, and if you must write about yourself, get a good distance away and judge yourself with a stranger’s eyes and a stranger’s severity.” (Probably still good advice, esp. for young college kids.)
Here’s a saucy description of the “average reader.”
Flannery: “The average reader, however, is a good deal below average. People will say with considerable satisfaction, “Oh, I’m an average reader” when the fact is they never learned to read in the first place, and probably never will.”
On “the writer’s temperament:”
“People seem to surround being-a-writer with a kind of false mystique, as if what is required to be a writer is a writer’s temperament. Most of the people I know with writers’ temperaments aren’t doing any writing.” (And remember, she was friends with such famous writing temperaments as Robert Lowell!)

As for her disease, in an interview, she said “the disease is of no consequence to my writing, since for that I use my head and not my feet.”