#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.