reaching higher and circling back home
on Flannery O'Connor, composting the creative soil, and writing where you come from
May always hits me like a runaway train. I tolerate the insane pace because summer break is just around the corner, but honestly I’m barely hanging on. In the last few weeks, I’ve proctored state milestone tests, an International Baccalaureate exam, and an AP Exam. I’ve graded the last essays for 136 students. My Lang & Comp students had their AP Exam a few days ago. Last week was my daughter’s chorus concert; this week was my son's band concert, and his eighth grade dance is tonight. This weekend is my daughter’s birthday, and then one week later is her annual dance recital. Somewhere in the midst of that, I’ll complete all of my final grading and the remaining work for an additional certification class I’m pursuing. I’m running on pure adrenaline, persistence, autopilot, and way too much caffeine.
But last Friday, I jumped off the runaway train for a few hours and took a personal day. That morning I visited the native plant nursery nearby to get a few things, and then I drove into the city for the afternoon to catch up with a friend and have a drink on a sunny patio. Then the big finale for my day, the impetus for taking the day off, was meeting up with friends for a screening of Wildcat at Atlanta’s Plaza Theatre followed by a Q&A with Ethan and Maya Hawke.
I woke up the next morning with the movie and the conversation still fresh in my mind like turned soil ready for new ideas. It was a weird and wonderful film, and I purposely didn’t read any reviews until after I saw it. I’m surprised now to see quite a few critics who didn’t like it. For me, it cuts like a blade in the same way O’Connor short stories do. It’s not comfortable at every moment, but it gets to the heart of the creative process in a way I haven’t seen much before. As Ethan Hawke said at the talk afterwards, if someone were to create a film that was “normal” or a warm and fuzzy version of O’Connor’s life and stories, they wouldn’t be true to her. Hawke and his daughter both know her work well, and I felt like that was reflected in the film for certain. Lines from her journals were used as voiceovers and even as dialogue in one crucial scene, and I walked out with a better understanding of O’Connor herself, what it must have been like to write through suffering and disability, and the miraculous way that our creative work can expand when our outer world is restricted.
My life is obviously so different from O’Connor’s. This isn’t Milledgeville in the 1950’s; I don’t struggle with disability; and my world is overflowing in a way that makes it hard to find time for writing. But there was some underlying thread in the film’s depiction of her that felt eerily familiar to me nonetheless. I relate to that fire of ambition she had, the unrelenting determination to not only tell a story but tell it well. Her journals tell us she didn’t just want to be a good writer but a great one, with Tolstoy’s depth or Kafka’s visionary lens. She also seemed to have some awareness that the level of ambition she held can be unbecoming, too much, not in line with the humility she was taught in her religious roots. It’s a familiar feeling to me— that particular tension of solid ambition held against the constant questioning of whether it's okay to be that hungry. There is some engine in me that won’t stop, a desire to keep reaching higher. And then there’s always that voice from somewhere else trying to tame it or question it. I’m fully aware that the drive I have is unbecoming and off-putting in some contexts and that it takes up too much room for some people, but I can’t put out that flame of ambition inside even when I try.
O’Connor’s relationship with her family was also complex, another piece of the film I resonated with deeply. Her stories reveal a biting critique of the world she lived in, and that didn’t always sit well with her mother and others who read them in her small circle. Or to be more specific, her work was simply never fully understood by them. Those of us who spring from a place with deep roots and conservative beginnings end up with a whole extra layer of debris to wade through when we write. It’s not as simple as pruning those old ideas from you like an amputation. The challenge is to hold the complexity, recognize that life isn’t as simple as dualities, and maybe even admit that you wouldn’t be the writer you are if you didn’t see the world through that filter at one time. Would we even have had the Flannery O’Connor we know without her deeply religious life in the sheltered place she came from? Not at all. Where you come from is baked into the bones of who you are in a way that you can’t deny, so you might as well reckon with it. That is all I have ever tried to do in my writing, and it gives me enough to wrestle with that I could write a lifetime and never come to the end of it. The way the film weaves together her short stories and her writing is such a reminder to me that creative work isn’t simply a side hobby that gives us expression or a small part of who we are. But instead it’s the fullness of who we are in a real and tangible way. Or as O’Connor says at one point in the film, “I can never seem to escape myself unless I’m writing, and strangely I am never more myself than when I write.” That paradox is at the heart of it for most of us when we come to the page both to escape ourselves and to know ourselves.
Another thing I learned as I heard about the creative process was that the film was ten years in the making and started with the tiny seed of a monologue Maya Hawke wrote as a school audition piece inspired by O’Connor’s journals. When asked if it was hard to get into character to play this role, she said her father had always told her, “It’s not how well you know something but how long you’ve known it.” By the time she was playing the role, she’d been immersed in O’Connor’s work for nearly a decade and knew it well. Now I keep thinking about that statement as it relates to my own creative work, the book that I’ve been at work on in one form or another for six years, and the way my writing often circles around the same themes examined again and again from different angles. I walked out of the theater finally feeling like maybe it’s okay if it takes a decade for something to become fully formed. A brief dive into an idea will never offer the same thing that depth can give you.
Let time pass, let the soil compost and rest, keep working on your craft, wrestle with the magnitude of your ambitions but don’t let them die. Know that your creative work is not just your lifeline but the core of your life. That’s what last Friday night illustrated to me in a way that echoed loud enough for me to hear it, and I’m grateful I was in the room for those moments with so many like-minded people. It was a balm to me in this season of manic overscheduled demands.
I’ve got an essay coming out this weekend over at Salvation South; it’s published on Sunday if you want to read it. I’m incredibly honored to see it there alongside so many voices I admire. It’s about class and education and inheritance, subjects that are so complex and delicate for me that I didn’t want to let it enter the world through a doorway that wouldn’t give it the respect it deserves. I trust that Salvation South’s readers can let it resonate and handle it with care. For this essay to be born, it took years of tilling the soil and letting it rest. More than that, it took honesty and digging deep and the realization that who we are and what we come from is where it all begins and what we keep circling around, even as we grow and evolve beyond it. Wildcat opens with Flannery O’Connor’s time in New York City appealing to big publishers following her success at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But it closes with the image of her writing life as it remained for the final fourteen years of her existence, a small desk in a small room on a small farm in a small town that probably felt swelteringly oppressive to her at times. But it’s only from that restricted place that she could dig deeper and her work could expand. We reach outward, but it always circles back home, doesn’t it? With this latest essay, I tried to write that story in all of its complexities.
When I’m writing something, I always feel free and expansive and like the truest and bravest version of myself. But then just before the publication comes out, I get scared and small again. That is where I am now, a little afraid that I won’t be fully seen or understood after all, that someone won’t like what I said. There’s a moment in the film, the scene I loved best, where O’Connor is wrestling with her life path and writing through suffering, and she tells the priest she worries that her writing isn’t pleasing God because it’s often twisted and corrupt. The priest asks her, “Is your writing honest? Is your conscience clear?” When she nods through tears, he simply assures her she can rest knowing that it’s for the highest good.
Sometimes I don’t even know what highest good means, though I always strive endlessly to reach it. I am the subject I know best, but like Flannery O’Connor and the rest of us, I don’t exist in a vacuum. Every piece of my own life that I explore is inherently bigger than I am, inherently political, inherently indicative of the ways we fit together and the ways we all have to get by somehow in the systems we live in and survive the things that happen to us. I tell the truth. My conscience is clear. I write what I know. I’m always praying that at the end of it all, that alone is enough to guide me and enough to guide my work to reach the ears that need to hear it.