Step Nine

Books and stories have always been my bread and butter. My early goal was to be an elementary teacher, but when the coursework ended up being more about bulletin boards and laminating I bailed in favor of Secondary English. It was a good choice, even if I really didn't get everything out of it I could have. Student teaching though was a nightmare. My university supervisor said I did quite well actually, but my supervising teacher tried to fail me. When I came home for the summer, I disliked everything having to do with the experience. I spent the next three years teaching preschool and kindergarten.
My supervising teacher was quite a fan of female Southern authors, and the one week she taught while I was there she lectured on Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find. It was the weirdest story I'd ever heard. I'd spent most of my credits immersed in literature from the ancients to the 17th century. The most modern class I'd taken was a survey course of the second half of English literature. I don't remember much after we left the Romantic period. Modern literature was too much of a wilderness for my taste, so those lectures were just strange. Wandering the aisles at my local library the summer after graduation, I came across, The Violent Bear It Away. I picked it up mostly to comfort myself that my supervising teacher had been a moron, and ended up being completely blown away. The book was the most accurate picture of redemption I had ever read.
Growing up Baptist, any contemporary literature I read on the theme of redemption was largely a waste of time--another reason I didn't spend many credit hours on modern lit--and completely focused on the moment of conversion. The whole of the book was about getting someone, anyone, down the aisle to that magic moment when redemption took place, and the rest was unimportant. Flannery's view was raw, honest and awful. She tore open that moment where grace becomes visible and displayed it in all its horror. It was like seeing the difference between a sitcom birth and a real one. No one in my community wrote like this. No one in my community saw like this. If I was ever going to write, I was going to write like that. I began to feel the need for a different community, one that would nurture such honest vision. I began to wonder if Flannery's home wasn't as evil as I had been lead to believe.
This series begins Here. This series continues Here.