Present Joys

jason-sims:

Happy 89th birthday, Flannery.

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”

Tolle, lege: her biblography.

My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable.

I made these two posters as a final project for my American lit class. They are posters celebrating the imaginary re-publication of two of Flannery O’Connor’s books: A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Other Stories and The Violent Bear it Away. I chose to make these instead of writing a final paper because I’m sick of writing; unexpectedly, I’m pretty happy with the way these turned out. I was going to do a third poster for O’Connor’s first novel Wise Blood but I ran out of time. Maybe I’ll come back to this project later!

To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive.

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.