Seriously, chicken shit bingo, The Sweet Thunder Strolling Band, a collection of local authors, paintings by Panhandle Slim, lots of people dressed in O’Connoresque costumes, a dog that refuses to accept that his owner is inside a gorilla suit — what more could one want on a glorious Sunday afternoon in the spring?

I take all sort of photos in dark nightclubs, but I’ll confess to being a little flummoxed by taking photos in bright sun and deep shade … Anyway, lots of photos here from the event.

“Itâ€s tremendous work to keep these places looking nice,” says Toby Aldridge, the resident guide at the childhood house museum of another great southern writer, Flannery Oâ€Connor. But renovations in 2007 have improved visitor numbers since, he says, and a student helped with the paint analysis for the green-and-gold living room. So far this year more than 2,600 people have come, already more than in 2013. The authorâ€s childhood books, such as “Five Little Peppers and How they Grew”, are on display—a far cry from the raw rural tales Oâ€Connor would write herself.

The Economist article focuses largely on the need for additional funding at William Faulkner’s home Rowan Oak in Oxford.

Savannah’s Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home seems in some ways an exception to the problems facing other house museums, especially ones with a literary focus. I’m a current board member of the Childhood Home and was president of the board when we hired Toby Aldridge, quoted above, as our first employee, so I’m familiar with the foundation’s history and finances.

“Securing sufficient funds to keep historic sites up to scratch is tricky across the South,” says The Economist, and the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home has had some tough times over the last 25 years, but we are now looking for part-time administrator, have completed some major renovations thanks to the generosity of donors like Linda and Jerry Bruckheimer, have expanded programing (including the Ursrey Lecture series, Flannery O’Connor-inspired art shows, and the annual Homemade Parade), and are really in quite fine shape (even if it doesn’t always feel that way). Thanks to the frugality, ingenuity, and hard work of the Childhood Home’s founders and many volunteers since then, we’ve created a sustainable nonprofit that has never received government funding at all.

Check out this post with photos from our recent Peacock Party, which was held at the Armstrong House (now home to Bouhan Falligant):

And here’s kind of an ominous pic I took of the Childhood Home at dusk recently:

What more would Flannery O’Connor have written if she had lived to the age of 89?

What would she not have written in her 20s and 30s absent the diagnosis of lupus — the same condition that killed her father?

As Brad Gooch suggested in his excellent biography, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, O’Connor lived her life under the gun, aware of the likelihood of early death. The Grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” was transformed in the moment before the Misfit shot her — her mind cleared and all the pettiness was stripped away. Fortunately for all of us, O’Connor didn’t have to wait for the last minute to see the urgency of art and life.

I am a past president of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah and have spent countless hours in the modest home where she lived about 1/3rd of her life. Many other O’Connor fans — often, worshippers — refer to her as “Flannery”, but I’ve never felt quite that close, quite that intimate, with her personality. I didn’t and don’t know Mary Flannery the person, and I envy those who did actually spend time with her (although I’ll confess that I wonder how well some of them really knew her).

But I do know Flannery O’Connor, the famed author whose work resonates more with each passing year. O’Connor’s stories, novels, and other writings seem in some respects even more shocking, more relevant, and more artful today than when they were first published.

O’Connor scholarship over the years has understandably and justifiably focused on her literary portrayal of Catholic doctrine, especially the hard concept of Grace, but there is so much more to be said about O’Connor’s work. One of these days I hope to make a few academic contributions to the ongoing legacy.

As Craig Amason (former director of Andalusia, the Milledgeville farm where O’Connor spent her later years) and others have explored, O’Connor’s work sometimes seems a commentary about post-WW II development in the South. The impact of the war itself on O’Connor’s work has certainly been insufficiently discussed. O’Connor’s delving into the psychology of religious fanaticism is obviously worth continued study, and so are the ways in which her work incorporates criminality — especially the threat of sexual assault.

Savannah Bishop Emeritus J. Kevin Boland is conducting a memorial mass at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist this morning, and there’s a reception immediately following at the Childhood Home across Lafayette Square. If you miss Bishop Boland’s remarks, check out this hourlong talk at Orlando Montoya’s new venture Savannah Podcast.

O’Connor’s Savannah home has become an important literary center, but Milledgeville remains the more important pilgrimage for O’Connor readers. I’ve made multiple trips to Andalusia over the last decade; it’s exciting to see the progress being made in preserving that magnificent landmark, which is now surrounded with ugly commercial sprawl. Walking where O’Connor did and seeing the vistas that spurred her imagination are awe-inspiring experiences. I even had the good fortune, thanks to the generosity of O’Connor cousin Louise Florencourt, to go upstairs in the house on Greene Street where O’Connor and her mother lived for a time after her father’s death.

But when I look out the windows of those homes, or wander along the same old boards that O’Connor did, I see a different world than she saw.

I may not share O’Connor’s religious beliefs, but I find inspiration in everything about O’Connor’s life and work.

Today is certainly a good day to reflect on O’Connor’s remarkable and always-evolving legacy, but I’m guessing that she herself would be cynical about such remembrances. It’s easy to honor the dead on days like this one — a 50th anniversary, even a Sunday.

It’s not quite so easy to keep O’Connor’s demanding beliefs and ideas in mind when our lives are more cluttered and the picayune demands of the world weigh on us.

But I’ve been immersed to varying degrees in O’Connor’s life and work for I guess about a decade now, maybe longer. I’m still on the board of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah (please like the Home on Facebook) and was president of the board for three years just after a major restoration of the museum house on Lafayette Square. My personal thanks to Linda Bruckheimer, Rena Patton, and others who were critical in making that restoration happen.

While I was president, we also hired our first — and still only — employee, launched the Ursrey Memorial Lecture Series (Alan Gurganus, Michael Cunningham, Jaimy Gordon, and Robert Olen Butler have appeared), and helped with the local launch of Brad Gooch’s biography Flannery, which was published by Little Brown.

And I’ve routinely taught O’Connor’s stories in my intro lit classes at Armstrong and presented a paper on criminality in her stories at a literary conference here a couple of years ago. I’ve given at least a couple of talks at the Childhood Home in the ongoing series of free Sunday lectures.

I was also involved a couple of years ago in launching Southern Discomfort, an exhibition and silent auction of works — almost all by Savannah area artists — inspired by Flannery O’Connor. I wrote about that first exhibit here, and Southern Discomfort 2 is now hanging at ThincSavannah at 35 Barnard St., just south of Ellis Square. The free reception and silent auction is Friday, Jan. 31 from 6 to 9 p.m. (silent auction ends at 8:30). Click here for the Facebook invitation.

I’ve worked on both Southern Discomfort shows with my Armstrong colleague Beth Howells, but the real work has been done by the artists. We’re offering all the invited artists a 50/50 split of the proceeds, by the way. That was something I insisted on from the very beginning; artists in Savannah are far too often asked to donate works in their entirety to nonprofit organizations, which can have the effect of devaluing the work.

But our offer to share the proceeds is only a small part of the reason that virtually everyone we ask decides to take part in the exhibit.

For many artists in this area, and around the world, O’Connor is a constant source of inspiration. Some find images in her short, intense life — her battle with lupus, the easy satire and irony of both her fiction and her early cartoons, the worlds of the farm and of the mind so fully chronicled in her letters, her love of peacocks and other fowl. Other artists turn to the stories themselves — the details of the hat in “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, a particular line in “The River”, the eerie presence of the hogs in “Revelation”.

Still other artists consider their creations so influenced by O’Connor that they’ve submitted pieces that are part of ongoing bodies of work.

Have any of these dealings with O’Connor’s legacy brought me closer to O’Connor herself? I don’t know.

On the one hand, I’d have to say no. Given the complexities of her fiction and her mind, and the simple fact that she died before I was born, I can never be sure that I know anything about her definitively.

But part of me desires to say yes. And I find myself looking past the easy interpretations of her work that rely so heavily on the concept of grace. Increasingly, I find myself fascinated by some of the darkest elements in O’Connor’s fiction — the tension between spirituality and sexuality, the omnipresence of criminals and the looming threat of sexual violence, the abyss of nihilism that her characters are so often on verge of falling into.

Cheery stuff.

Of course, it is cheery stuff. There’s nothing that can brighten a day more than O’Connor’s incisive wit.

The works in Southern Discomfort 2 encompass all those elements. Here’s a sampling:

“Revelation” by Curtis Bartone:

“Habit of Being” by Jack Metcalf:

“Young Horse” by Marcus Kenney:

“The Meanest of Them Sparkled” by Christine Sajecki:

“Finding Flannery” by Katherine Sandoz:

“Seven dollar hat” by Melinda Borysevicz:

“Art comes from the place where you dream.”

He was talking less about the dreams of sleep than the other dreams — the yearnings for something other than what is.

For Butler, yearning “is the deepest level of desire. That’s the thing that makes stories go.”

“Plot is simply yearning challenged and thwarted.”

Both at Friday’s Ursrey lecture and the next morning at a workshop for area college and high school creative writing students held at the historic Carnegie Library, Butler said that good fiction writers do not write from the mind. They do not write from ideas.

Writing students do need to study technique, Butler argued, but they study technique so that they can forget it. He compared the process to a swimmer practicing the hand’s entry into the water; the swimmer practices that over and over, so that she can forget it — so that it becomes automatic. (I tell my students of nonfiction composition almost exactly the same thing about technique, practice, and forgetting.)

I took some photos of both the Ursrey Lecture, held at Trinity United Methodist Church on Telfair Square, and the Saturday workshop.

Many of us affiliated with the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home here in Savannah were lucky to get to know Brad when he was researching the book, and we hosted a major launch for it with a talk at Trinity United Methodist Church followed by a reception in the grand rotunda of the Telfair Academy.

Brad is now working on a book for Harper Collins about Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet.

The research has taken Brad to Asia on multiple occasions, and he’s just written this fascinating piece for Bloomberg: Modern Tajikistan Offers Persian, Pop Music, Wrestling.

An excerpt:

My cruising the â€stans over the past year had shown me how each of these former Soviet republics has struggled to segue into its new national identity. Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, is a freaky monument of conspicuous consumption, with scores of white Carrera marble buildings but few residents; a rarified ghost town.

Kazakhstan blurs in the imagination withSacha Baron Cohenâ€s Borat. Visas to Uzbekistan are hard to obtain but well worth the effort for its grand ancient cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.

Yet Tajikistan has been uniquely successful in its transition and has found an enviable equipoise — with hijab optional for women — akin to Turkeyâ€s. A stroll along Dushanbeâ€s tree-lined main boulevard, Rudaki Avenue, feels like a lovely promenade in more cosmopolitan Prague or Vienna.

But I don’t often hear readers of Flannery O’Connor talk about what she might have written if she had not died at age 39 way back in 1964. I suspect that’s because we all know that her adult experiences, her religious beliefs, and her fiction were profoundly impacted by her illness. If she had not battled lupus for years, just as her father did, she might have been a very different writer. If she had not written with the knowledge that her life would likely be a short one, just like her father’s, could she have plumbed such awesome and strange spiritual depths?

So it’s hard even to imagine who Mary Flannery O’Connor would be if she were alive today — her 88th birthday.

And I have no idea what she would have thought of the birthday party we held for her on Saturday at her childhood home — now a house museum — here in Savannah.

The Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home’s Homemade Parade and Garden Party included some music, some crafts, some absurd costumes, a peacock-calling contest, good food and community, and just enough surreal images to seem a little strange even in Savannah.

As Brad Gooch notes in his excellent biography, the weather was “unsettled” in Savannah on March 25, 1925. And it was unsettled on Saturday, with hard rains giving way suddenly — just before the parade began — to bright sun and blue skies.

I’ll embed a short video and a few of my pictures here, but if you want to see all the shots, please visit this album on the Childhood Home’s Facebook page.

About 150 people — a great crowd for a literary event in Savannah, especially in August — turned out for Urrea’s moving, detailed, and compelling hourlong talk in which he took the listeners along for the ride through the complex and often funny stories of his writing roots.

Those roots are obviously intimately tied to his familial ones.

Luis Urrea at Trinity Church demonstrating his mother’s “teapot” pose.

His mother lived in several worlds, including one of demitasse cups and grapefruit spoons and another of hardscrabble persistence as she tried to nurture her son’s writing.

One of the young Luis’ first memorable encounters with literature was listening to his mother read Mark Twain. “I couldn’t believe a guy who was so dead and gone could be so immediate,” Urrea said from the Trinity pulpit. I’d get in touch with him to confirm that precise quote, but he didn’t use any notes at all.

He had his mother reread the scene when Tom puts Becky’s already-chewed gum in his mouth. His “first erotic moment,” Urrea laughed.

Urrea mentioned a wide range of influences on his storytelling — Stephen Crane, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, John Irving, Eudora Welty.

But experience seems to have outweighed those more solitary pursuits, and human connections gave meaning to his writing life. I especially liked the details about his mother giving him a typewriter and later hand-binding his first stories into a book.

“Suddenly I was the best selling author in my kitchen,” Urrea said.

As for Flannery O’Connor, Urrea didn’t start reading her until he was teaching her. But he knew O’Connor’s characters before that, some of them at least. He noted that his mother faced some of the same struggles as the proper Southern ladies of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge”.

Urrea has become a leading voice on issues regarding immigration from Mexico, but he spoke relatively little on the political dimensions.

But I did write the following quote in my notes: “The Mexican border is a great metaphor for the borders that separate us all.”

Ultimately, the incredibly warm and engaging talk was about how we can all turn life’s obstacles — especially those we face as children — into advantages that can enrich our adult selves.

The entirety of Urrea’s presentation was also a great example of how listeners can discover universality in specificity. It’s something I try, often in vain, to convey to my writing students.

Trinity Church once again proved itself a perfect venue for literary talks like this one. The Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home has hosted a number of other speakers there with the enthusiastic cooperation of pastor Enoch Hendry, including Flannery O’Connor biographer Brad Gooch and our previous Ursrey speakers: Michael Cunningham, Allan Gurganus, and Jaimy Gordon.

Here are a few more images from Tuesday’s event, which included book sales and signing: