While searching for something else entirely, I came across this remarkable interview on Vimeo with Flannery O’Connor’s good friend Louise Abbot, who discusses O’Connor’s disdain for fame, among other things.
The unusual, very occasional blog where I found the interview link is The Role of Imagination in Literary Nonfiction, worth a visit. This quiet blog is about, according to its author, Colin Foote Burch:
• About the value of the nonfiction narrator’s subjective internal experience: real events that happen in thought and/or feeling
• About questions the narrator asks
• About metaphors, similes, analogies, speculation, daydreams, and fantasies that interpret events in the narrator’s mind (Emily Birx’s reading)
• Not about inventing events
• Not about claims of divine revelation
Burch says he started the blog when he taught a class by the same name at Queens University, Charlotte, North Carolina. Burch also edits the online publication Liturgical Credo, focused on “contemporary stories of faith and doubt.”
Thanks for linking to my blog! I used imaginativenonfiction.wordpress.com instead of a PowerPoint presentation when I taught a seminar at Queens, my grad school.
LiturgicalCredo is still active: http://liturgicalcredo.com/ . It’s a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. Our most recent update was Sept. 25, and we have more poems and stories in the pipeline.
Originally, I posted the Vimeo clip at liturgical.wordpress.com.
Thanks again for your visit!
Thanks, Colin. I corrected the post. Hope to see more on your imagination blog as well.
Wonderful interview, Richard. As you know, I read many of her stories this summer and was amazed by their dark power. Then there was the video when she is reading these same stories with the audience howling with laughter and catching on to her humor. Truly one of the great ones.