This week marked the birthday of writer Flannery O’Connor, who would have been 84 if she hadn’t died quite young. We all read her work in high school and college, if we studied English at all.

O’Connor’s writing swirls around in my memory along with that of Faulkner and Harper Lee as inspiration in the Southern Gothic style of misfit heroes and mislead mystics. Such is a literature of that part of America where the roads are likely to be dirt, unlit, and walked in old shoes. If she were living, she would have to answer for being an influence on my own creative defects of character. Since she has passed to realms beyond reproach, we should forgive.

She once sent a letter to friends, along with a manuscript of her novel The Violent Bear It Away. In the letter, she wrote:

“I am 100% pure sick of it. I cannot see it any longer and the only thing I can determine about it is that nobody else would have wanted to write it but me.”

I can relate.