#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.