Flannery's Trick
Flannery's Trick
Stack Takeover | Angela Alaimo O'Donnell
August 3, 2024, marked the 60th anniversary of the death of Flannery O’Connor. In honor of O’Connor’s work and memory, we have invited Angela Alaimo O’Donnell to take over this Substack for two weeks. In this time, you’ll see a selection of poems from O’Donnell’s book Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery.
“[My mother] and I live in the country a few miles outside of Milledgeville. The place is a dairy farm and I am glad to say that most of the violences carried to their logical conclusions in the stories manage to be warded off in fact here—though most of them exist in potentiality.”
–Flannery O’Connor, January 13, 1957, The Habit of Being
And it’s my stories that save us from the ravages of not-so-good country people who will steal your fake leg out from under you, marry your daughter just to get your car and abandon her pretty pink head, who will set your woods on fire for fun, kill your family one by one, and leave you on the side of the road much the worse for wear. I couldn’t bear o just sit there, let evil have its way with me and mine. So I rise each day and write down horrors I pray don’t come true. To fend off the devil, you give him his due.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD is a professor, poet, scholar, and writer at Fordham University in New York City, and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include two chapbooks and nine full-length collections of poems. Her book Holy Land (2022) won the Paraclete Press Poetry Prize. In addition, O’Donnell has published a memoir about caring for her dying mother, Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell; a book of hours based on the practical theology of Flannery O’Connor, The Province of Joy; and a biography Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith. Her ground-breaking critical book on Flannery O’Connor Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor was published by Fordham University Press in 2020. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Able Muse, Alabama Literary Review, America, The Bedford Introduction to Literature (anthology), Christian Century, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940 (anthology), Christianity & Literature, Contemporary Catholic Poetry (anthology), Flannery O’Connor Review, Italian Americana, Italian Poetry Review, Literary Matters, Mezzo Cammin, Peacock Journal, Presence, Reformed Journal, and Taking Root in the Heart (anthology), among others. O’Donnell’s eleventh book of poems, Dear Dante, was published in Spring 2024.
Photo by Islam Hassan on Unsplash
Thank you for these wonderful poems. “Good Country People” is my favourite Flannery story. I see myself in Hulga. I heard O’Connor wanted to convince people evil is real, as a prerequisite for grace. Often those in her stories who think they know what’s what—teachers, psychologists, sentimental church ladies—are the blind ones. It may take an act of “violent grace” to wake us up to our own state, but I like this poem because it shows Flannery not standing aloof judging people but rather praying we might come to our senses without violence. Her stories can be dark but that isn’t the point of them; grace is.
It’s refreshing to read the writings of someone who wrote of evil without apology. She truly understood the blindness and stumblings of human depravity and violence and blood as its inevitable end.