Before we talk any more about me, we need to talk about Flannery O’Connor.
That’s because she isn’t just my favorite author. She is the author who makes me want to write. Her work is a prime example of what happens when Christian writers uncompromisingly tell the stories they’ve been given in their particular language and from their particular “country,” be it literal or metaphorical.
Of course, this describes any Christian writers who excel at their work and resist the temptation toward preachiness and propaganda. They understand that good fiction does not come from a message but a truthful, resonant story. This is true whether these writers are crafting fantasy, science fiction, or stories set in the real world.
But Flannery (we are on a first-name basis) represents a particular category of this. What happens when the stories a Christian is compelled to write are about the unceasing darkness of life in a sin-sick world?
Although she is my favorite author, Flannery’s characters—serial killers, swindlers, prostitutes, and the self-righteous—are among the most repulsive I’ve encountered in any story.
Yet, they are also among the most relatable. The novel Wise Blood played a significant role in my conversion to Christianity in college; in Hazel Motes, I saw my atheism for the repulsive, prideful rebellion that it was, and I saw his fate as a cautionary tale.
(Commercial Break: If that caught your attention, you’ll want to read my essay collection, Why I Dyed My Hair Purple & Other Unorthodox Stories, which will be out in January. In my essay “Wise Blood,” I recount this story in full.)
There are many beautiful stories written by Christians that feature more conventional light-to-darkness conversion narratives. But at that time, such a story never would have spoken to me. I was hardened against God and required something more aggressive—the “large and startling figures” Flannery spoke of crafting for an audience of unbelievers.
Flannery’s stories are indeed dark, so much so that many people see them as hopeless, but I argue against this. The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, and other books that Christian readers revere are so full of hope and light that it is radiant and blinding. In Flannery O’Connor, it seeps through a slowly-widening crack in a seemingly impenetrable rock wall.
It makes me think of my favorite line from the brilliant singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn: “Kick at the darkness ‘til it bleeds daylight.”
I love stories of explicit hope—after all, the Gospel is the most stunning example of it. However, I’ve always had a particular bent toward darker fiction, stories where the lines between good and evil are blurred (come back next week for an example). I face an ongoing struggle with depression, and while one might think that these preferences only feed the melancholy, it makes me feel less alone.
There is a peculiar sense of hope that comes from seeing portrayals of suffering. It makes me praise God that though we now see through a glass darkly, we are destined for a new heaven and new earth.
I aspire to practice this in my fiction writing, as I have a particular audience in mind for my work, one that has experienced deep suffering over the past 50 years. My novel-in-stories, The Goodbye-Love Generation, takes place in my hometown of Kent, Ohio, where four students were killed during a deadly showdown between the Ohio National Guard and students at Kent State University in 1970.
The event decimated the lives of dozens of people in their late teens and early ‘20s, some of whom are relatives and close friends of my family, and my community has never recovered.
My novel centers around the Purple Orange, a fictional rock band flourishing amid Northeast Ohio’s thriving music scene in 1970. The shootings deal a massive blow to this, and over the next 50 years, they’re left to cope with the aftershock.
They respond to the trauma in primarily destructive ways, and much of the book was hard for me to write because of how much their actions ran counter to my Christian morality. But their behavior, dysfunctional as it is, is authentic and reflective of what I’ve seen among people I care about.
A woman I used to go to church with once told me that I was disappointing God by not writing stories about characters who find Jesus and instead writing about perceived degenerates addicted to sex, drugs, and foul language.
These allegations hurt, but knowing that people told Flannery O’Connor the same thing comforts me greatly in my own creative vision.
When one woman told Flannery that her work left a bad taste in her mouth, Flannery famously fired back, “You weren’t supposed to eat it.”
I can’t tell you where the hope is in The Goodbye-Love Generation. I’m writing a sequel, and the end of the current book will leave the characters on their way to a happier ending. But I’m not particularly interested in putting hope in my fiction for hope’s sake. I write the stories I feel drawn to tell and leave the rest to God.
Like Flannery O’Connor, I want to explore the ways the truths of my Christian faith intersect with creativity and produce art that helps us better see the afflicted but beautiful world we live in.
I’ll get into this more next time. In fact, I’ll share the book that made me want to be a writer, and you will be shocked—perhaps even scandalized—at what it was.
For now, what’s your experience with Flannery O’Connor? Do you have an author whose work you want to emulate? Feel free to share in the comments!
Flannery O'Connor Peculiar Crossroads