The Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home recently threw another big party for the Savannah-born author’s birthday. The street fair and homemade parade are a few years old now, and this was the biggest turnout yet. Seriously, chicken shit bingo, The Sweet…
From a recent article about historic house museums in The Economist, Keeping up appearances; When federal money runs out, ingenuity is called for: “It’s tremendous work to keep these places looking nice,†says Toby Aldridge, the resident guide at the…
Mary Flannery O’Connor died on August 3, 1964 — 50 years ago today. 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…
I haven’t read everything that Flannery O’Connor ever wrote — I haven’t yet tackled the recently released A Prayer Journal, for example. But I’ve been immersed to varying degrees in O’Connor’s life and work for I guess about a decade…
At the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home’s 5th annual Ursrey Memorial Lecture last week, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler spoke with considerable passion about the creative act of writing. “Art comes from the place where you dream.” He was talking…
Brad Gooch‘s outstanding biography Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor shined an appropriate spotlight on arguably the most influential Savannah-born writer of the 20th century — and one of the most important writers in the South. Many of us affiliated…
When an author has died young, it’s pretty typical to hear readers bemoan the loss of all that work that never had the chance to be created. But I don’t often hear readers of Flannery O’Connor talk about what she…
On Tuesday evening, Luis Alberto Urrea (The Devil’s Highway, Queen of America, and a dozen other books) gave the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home’s 4th Ashley and Terry Ursrey Memorial Lecture at Trinity United Methodist Church in Savannah.
The first three Ursrey Memorial Lectures were given by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham (The Hours), man of letters Alan Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All), and National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon (Lord of Misrule). Urrea seems like a great author to extend that impressive list.
Word-for-word productions of “Greenleaf” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge” continue through Sunday.
For Betsy, the images showed the “residual after effect” of reading O’Connor, and she noted how the “lingering sorrow, mysticism, and southern gothic” connects to her own work.
There’s a great piece at the Paris Review about Flannery O’Connor — a Savannah native and arguably the most important writer in Georgia history — and her years of cartooning.
From the obituary in the New York Times: Virginia Spencer Carr, a literary scholar whose book “The Lonely Hunter†remains the standard biography of Carson McCullers, died on April 10 at her home in Lynn, Mass. She was 82. [.…
Local filmmaker Michael Jordan’s “You’ve Got to Come to Savannah” “You’ve Gotta Come to Savannah” won the Visit Savannah contest to create a YouTube promotional video. I like it. I especially like the way that Jordan includes so many small…
