#21

Dear Flannery,

I've been to another what-you-could-call family values conference and once again realize that I am not fit for polite society. This happens to me again and again, but since the events are few, in between them I forget how to safely conduct myself while I'm there. At these gatherings suddenly I am thrust into human interaction with mere acquaintances. I get to feeling comfortable when it appears that we are wonderfully like-minded and then I say too much. It's like I get greedy. Greedy for heaven I suppose, which I think of as a place where people are together who treasure reality and truth and rightness, all that is God's, above all else. Anyway, in the course of the dialogue, sooner or later, the faces of these people I'm talking with inevitably start to change. They seem to become afraid of something, and I know what. They seem to begin resisting something, and I know that too. But like an idiot I don't want to give up on them. So the conversation goes on and on and finally ends with them lecturing me. It ends with me dissolved into dust which has been ground underfoot and them put back all in one piece on their self-sculpted pedestals. This does not happen because they have won the day; it happens because I let them think they won, because I have placated them and flattered them that one inch which they took as a mile. I guess I don't like to end conversations on a bad note so I take the beating to end it on a good one. Yes, they seem to say to themselves, there are no questions or worries here, all is well, like we thought, like we always think.

No, I don't seem to be getting along with my own people. Maybe I should get some chickens like you did. (I have a friend who has two and actually have been asking her all about them. She gets at least two eggs a day which at least would be useful.)

I emerged from the above experience sorrowing. The thing is, as I talk with these people who are supposed to be on the same side as I am in this beastly culture war in which insanity seems to be increasingly victorious, they reveal themselves to be a new breed of church-institution-based moral relativist. When I suggest that we're losing the battle and that we might need a new strategy, they have all their arguments and excuses lined up neat and tidy. (And by losing the battle, I mean for individual souls; I know we're going to lose the war itself.) Hit unaware from behind by the devil, they refuse to admit they've been hit unaware from behind by the devil. They love to say, well, how can we win them [sinners] over unless we speak a certain way in certain words, unless we are compaaaasionate, unless we welcome them, unless we excuse their wickedness and call it a less condemning name? Do they not know that sin by any other name is still sin? I think they've convinced themselves it isn't! Truly! I suppose they apply this craziness to they themselves also and this is why they themselves don't use the words sin and repentance and redemption anymore hardly at all when it comes to anyone or anything.

Seriously, in religious/church forums, for sexual sins we now use words like problem and burden and addiction and pain and struggle instead of proper words like sin and wickedness. Apparently these really sleazy things people decide to do are nobody's fault anymore. Iniquity is not a choice; it's an involuntary psychological condition. They don't even admit that sin is pleasurable! Why else would anybody do it? It's astounding. In addition, they are what John Milton described as perfectly eager to shift off their personal religiousity onto some other human being or beings and blindly follow whoever's in charge at the moment rather than have to do any thinking or questioning or exercising faith in . . . what? Only  therockofourRedeemerwhoisChristtheSonofGod! Sorry. It's just astonishing.

In the meantime I proved to be a bit of a mess. It's so weird how our physical bodies sometimes (or maybe always?) respond to spiritual or emotional stress. In my case that day it was obvious and immediate. As I stood there being persecuted by my friends for my scriptural beliefs in timeless and obvious truths, my knees---one and then the other--- would take it upon themselves to jiggle up and down something awful for minutes and minutes! Violently, I would say. I don't know which was more frightening, the treacherous words coming out of these self-satisfied people's mouths or my own body reacting to them.

And to think I traveled across practically the whole country to go to this conference and be frightened out of my kneecaps. Well, at least one of our daughters and her family live there and we stayed with them and I got to be mauled by a chubby over-affectionate 10-month-old grandson for a week to balance things out.

Oh! On this trip I finished A Good Man is Hard to Find, the short story collection, once again which helped restore my peace and sanity. I read some out loud to my daughter one evening, the last two paragraphs in "The Artificial Nigger." (By the way, nobody, I mean nobody, except black people, can say that word anymore; it's referred to as the "N-word.) You wrote in a letter that the ending of this story gave you a lot of trouble, which trouble I am very glad you took.

 At home, putting myself back together, and considering becoming a hermit,
J.

#20

Dear Flannery,

 Now I've picked up A Good Man again and like Annie Dillard said, when I see the Rembrandts I want to paint, as always when I read your stories I want to write.I see that my stories have to be much better than they are. Dragged out my twelve unfinished stories and am working on one called "Earth Day." It's the one I've worked hardest on and the one closest to finishing. I'm having great fun as, like you, I "enjoy retrieving them better than I do writing them" from scratch (Habit of Being, 67). This part is like play.

So I wanted to enter a short story contest I caught a glimpse of but on further investigation I don't think I can. None of my stories fit in any of the genres from which I am required to choose: Thriller, Horror, Crime, Young Adult, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy. I can't for the life of me cram any of them into any of these although I suppose they have elements of a few: people die in horrifying ways and one has a pathetically wrong sort of romance. Then I thought, what genre are Flannery's stories? I never think of them in any genre. They are just great. Of course people say your stories are Southern Gothic. I think this is a very narrow genre to squeeze your stories into. And not accurate either, but I suppose they had to come up with something literary. "I am a writer with Christian concerns," you said yourself, but they ignore that statement and many others like it. How silly, don't you think? Sorry to say, these interleckshuls will do anything to sidestep God.

I am not writing stories set in the south. They are set in the west and southwest. But I do hope they are "Christ-haunted" as you say. Is that supposed to be the gothic part?  The current cultural consensus is that "goths" are young people who dress all in black and die their hair all sorts of crazy colors and have a lot of piercings and tattoos and chains. I wouldn't be surprised to see monstrous jewel-encrusted crosses--what now serves as costume jewelry--- as part of their ensemble. Hey, Parker would fit right in! Maybe our whole country has been invaded by Southern Gothic now.You can see them at any school or shopping mall. Freaks: misled, misfitted, melodramatic.

I see how the freaks work in your story. I can't hope for freaks. I am having a hard time coming up with interesting enough characters even though I suppose I am thought of being somewhat freaky myself these days in this my neck of the woods; it appears people have to work a little at being charitable towards me. A while back one of our old friends remarked, "You guys used to be fun, before you got religious." This is a friend we only know from our church, with whom we sing hymns and participate in religious rites and rituals. And yet like Mrs. McIntyre in "The Displaced Person," Christ seems to be quite a nuisance to this friend who resists even the most basic Christian certainty, such as what the priest said, "He came to redeem us."  Now that I think about it, I suppose I can find characters along your Christ-haunted genre freak spectrum right here. And I'm happy to be in that number.

My stories began much too bland and nice. The more I work on them the more they are becoming endowed with sharpness and distortion and caricature. I can see it makes them much better. I was working along today and saw little things that needed to be fixed so clearly. I changed she called out to she cried out in a screech like a magpie. And washed-out jeans to oil-and-dust-stained jeans. Exposed to glared bare naked.  Complacent light to pale apathetic yellow. It's such a challenge to exchange the ordinary word or phrase to a sharp distorted corlorful one. I call it uglifying the story. For someone unassuming like me it feels like vandalizing, spray painting huge shocking gang signs in public places. But it's really just making the story more accurate and vivid and real and important. I hope.

This really isn't me.It's a great stretch. I love it.

I don't know what genre my stories belong in. Like yours, they're about who we really are and how we really need Christ but don't want him. Well, they just have to be good enough to defy genre.

Yours certainly are.

J.

#19

Dear Flannery,

I'm reading Everything That Rises Must Converge again and loving every perfect word. I mean, "Both their grins became gelid."? Had to look that one up. I don't know which of your story collections I like best. They are all so . . . right. And hilarious. I read some to my husband from "The Enduring Chill" (is this your funniest?) and he laughed and laughed at the part when the conscientiously "dying" Asbury wants to have a smoke with Randall and Morgan. Ha! Poor Azberry.

But I am often caught off-guard. You make these stories so real, so concrete, as in "The Comforts of Home."  "From one of the upper windows a crumpled piece of paper blew out and drifted down." Little deatils like that go technicolor and I am so immersed in the movement and places and images and vividly accuatate human emotions that I must often shake myself and remember that these stories are not just what they appear, rather they are deeply metaphorical in their meanings. For instance, in "Greenleaf" I don't mourn for Mrs. May because she actually gets gored by a charging bull through her flesh-and -blood heart, I mourn for Mrs. May because she can't see that Christ (the annoying horn-wreathed bull that's always trying to get her attention in mundane everyday ways) wants to enter and change her miserable soul. Someone said humor is an acceptance of life, and we could add that humor is also an acceptance of humanity's fallen blind-and-deaf ridiculousness.

I must say that "A View of the Woods" is pretty wild, the greedy old man smashing his little granddaughter's head against a rock like that and all. But I think I get it. He's that selfish and that egoistic, but he ends up killing the thing he loves most: himself (or what he was sure was an exact mirror-image of himself). But that breaks his heart, which is a start. Is it too late? 

Now "The Comforts of Home" always throws me. I had to think hard about it. You said somewhere that maybe all we can do nowadays is at least point out there is a devil and evil of all kinds, and a need for soul-deep redemption, that that might be as far as we can get. So I think that might be what this story is. But Sarah Ham, although a ham and a silly, manipulative, naughty, unfortunate girl, is not really the evil one. Thomas is indulged, jealous, selfish, and self-righteous. He is the one to see that is at fault. His well-intentioned but clueless mother accidentally getting killed through his machinations to incriminate Sarah is a chance for him to see himself for what he really is. I hope that's somewhere in the ball park.

At the moment I am doing more thinking about my own stories than actually putting fingers to keys. I love your signature color-drenched sun and sky and woods and lines of trees references and thought I could use the close huge imposing mountains where I live in my stories. So I'm observing these aspects of my surroundings more at different times of day, in different weathers to get some ideas. In one certain story I want to add something about how the mountains enclosed the perimeter of the valley, their gargantuan dirty green shoulders and elbows and rumps heaped up high like those of guilt-ridden sinners nevertheless refusing to totally prostrate themselves. Work in progress.

Thanks for your indescribably meaty and delicious stories.
J.