Following Flannery

Almost a year and a half ago, I bought a collection of Flannery O'Connor's short stories and learned that, in addition to being a Southern author, she raised peacocks. In fact, she did most of her writing on her peacock farm. Anyone who's read O'Connor knows her work is often dark and ironic, quirky and beautiful. (To anyone who hasn't read O'Connor but is interested in her, I recommend "Revelation" or "The Lame Shall Enter First.") I think about her farm, and what it was like--how quiet it must have been, how hard she worked caring for the strange, bright, graceful birds, how spending so much time with the birds, studying their quirky and beautiful qualities, might have influenced her writing style--and I want that kind of place for myself. 

That is what I mean this place, this blog, to be: contemplative, quiet, even joyful. A place to appreciate others' creative writing that is beautiful, or delightful, or intriguing, and a place to work hard at my own craft and publish first drafts. I hope it will be a place of remembering how good life can be. 

For this first post, I want to share a meditation from Reverend Victoria Safford that my friend Jewel shared with me at least two years ago. It has stuck with me ever since. Though I cannot agree with Reverend Safford's beliefs as a Unitarian, she gets at a lot of truth and her thoughts form what I currently hold as my purpose as a writer:

           "Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope—not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is gonna be all right.”
           But a different, sometimes lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle.
           And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see."