The Comfort of Home

Andalusia reminds me of my childhood home. No, it’s not a farm, but there is a farm right down the road. Our house sits back in the woods, no neighbors visible. Well, you could count my Mawmaw, aunt, and cousins as neighbors— they’re the first house on our long winding driveway. But they’re not neighbors as much as just another unit of the family that’s only a two minute walk. We’re a tight knit community tucked away on an old dirt road.

When I visit I am always relieved by the silence. The evening air is full of tree frogs, cicadas, and crickets, but the chorus of humming rises and falls naturally, like it’s the forest’s heartbeat. Our porch is the perfect place to let the night air whisper against your face while you swing and look up at the stars.

The sky is so breathtakingly clear out in a place like that. Stars, comets, and entire galaxies are visible in a way that even the smallest town’s lights can obscure. I’m sure this was the case at Andalusia in Flannery’s time. After those years in town, at Iowa, and in New York, I wonder if she ever looked up at the night sky and felt at awe. The sky plays an important part in her works- blistering white afternoons, blood red sunsets, and even big turnip shaped clouds. I don’t recall any stories with night sky descriptions, but Flannery was probably too tired from the lupus and the treatments to stay up late and look at it. From what I’ve heard she did a lot of porch sitting in the afternoon or evening.

If you’ve ever been in Milledgeville at sunset, you’ve likely seen some amazing colors splashed across the sky. These beautiful sunsets are especially breathtaking at Andalusia (hence the new Thursdalusia series) where the light dances under the trees and winks off the pond. I can imagine Flannery taking all of this in as she spent time convalescing with her mother and the other members of the farm. It’s well recorded that she was reluctant to return to Milledgeville, but I think the farm did her good. I suffer from migraines, anxiety, and depression; trying to maintain an active life and still take care of my body can be exhausting.

My visits home aren’t necessarily frequent; it’s a three hour drive to Centralhatchee and I’m happy with my life in Milledgeville. But the visits are good for me and after a weekend of fresh air and quiet, I feel a little more in touch with something spiritual. For Flannery, I’m sure it was God- she was famous for being as devout a Catholic as they come. I’m not sure what it is for me yet; maybe God, maybe Mother Nature, maybe just peace with my own thoughts. The name of it doesn’t really matter to me. I just know that if I need to find a little bit of whatever it is while I’m in Milledgeville, I can drive out to Andalusia and breathe.

Jessica McQuain is a senior Creative Writing and Spanish double major at Flannery's alma mater, Georgia College. She enjoys gardening, reading, and writing poetry. 

How Flannery O'Connor Did Money

On Tax Day, we thought it somehow appropriate to repost a blog by Brooke Hatfield that originally appeared September 23, 2013 in the online journal The Billfold: Everything You Wanted to Know about Money But Were Too Polite to Ask.

"How Flannery O’Connor Did Money"

by Brooke Hatfield

“I never believe nothing unless I got the money.” — Flannery O’Connor, April 1952

American novelist Flannery O’Connor was real about getting paid. In The Habit of Being, a book of her letters, she writes about theology, literary theory, and life on her family’s farm, but she also talks about money. The transactional language that punctuates these epistolary glimpses into her remarkable career reveal that the uncompromising mind behind some of the last century’s finest writing believed firmly in that mind’s financial worth.

O’Connor was demanding of herself, and of her first publisher, Rinehart, whose notes on her work she found “conventional.” “If they don’t feel I am worth giving more money to and leaving alone, then they should let me go,” O’Connor wrote in a 1949 letter to her mentor. She was 25.

 

O’Connor didn’t beat around the bush in her first letter to her first agent, Elizabeth McKee: “I am writing you in my vague and slack season and mainly because I am being impressed just now with the money I am not making by having stories in such places as American Letters.” In her second letter, O’Connor says that the book she’s working on (which would become Wise Blood) would be a year in coming. “I will need an advance for that year,” she writes. At this point in O’Connor’s career, she was certainly a promising writer — a graduate of the University of Iowa’s prestigious creative writing graduate program and winner of the Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award, she’d even published a few short stories — but here she is straight up asking her brand-new agent to make it rain, please and thank you, and lo, it comes to pass!

“I do believe that she was quite savvy about the business side of being a writer, and she understood the difference between art and commerce,” says Craig Amason, the executive director of The Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation.

In 1950, while in her mid-20s, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus. She moved home, from Connecticut to Andalusia, her family’s dairy farm near Milledgeville, Ga., where she raised peafowl and wrote the majority of her fiction. It is safe to assume she was not a pauper. O’Connor attended college and graduate school, and her uncle Bernard Cline, who owned Andalusia, was an Atlanta doctor with enough wealth to buy a the 550-acre estate. But O’Connor’s mother Regina ran Andalusia as a working farm. “No one ran a dairy in the 1950s as a hobby,” Amason says. “Regina Cline O’Connor must have needed an income.”

That said, O’Connor had the luxury of focusing all her limited energy on writing.¹ She was adamant about selling her work to publications like the Kenyon Review and Harper’s Bazaar. In 1961 she received $750 for an essay entitled “Living with a Peacock,” which appeared in the now-defunct Holiday magazine. “More than I have ever got for any piece of writing, by about half,” she wrote. “Crime pays.”

As her career progressed, O’Connor was increasingly asked to lecture at colleges and literary festivals. She saw the engagements as a necessary evil,² and in letters to friends, she was open about her motives for the work:

“I am in terrible shape with the govermint. I made more money than usual one year on the Sisters’ book³ and the next year I had to talk at a lot of places to pay my income tax, which made me more money again so I had to talk at a lot more places which made me make more etc. etc. I’m poor as they come and getting poorer and income tax is getting higher every year and I think this must end somewhere short of the penitentiary or the poorhouse.”

In addition to publishing her fiction and lecturing, she pursued and won several writing awards during her lifetime, and many of them came with a cash prize. When she won an $8,000 Ford Foundation grant — “just $8,000 more than I was expecting” — she wrote to a friend that she intended to live for 10 years on that sum.

O’Connor also managed a handful of rental properties, but Amason says that even with her money from writing, it’s unlikely O’Connor was ever her family’s sole breadwinner. When she did splurge, it was usually on upgrades for the house.⁴ After O’Connor sold the television rights for The Life You Save May Be Your Own in 1956 (“It’s certainly a painless way to make money”), she bought a Hotpoint refrigerator (“the kind that spits the ice cubes at you”) that’s still on display at Andalusia.⁵

Cash certainly didn’t rule everything around O’Connor, but its importance wasn’t lost on her. She was compelled to write herself ragged, and money was necessary for her to continue that writing life. This was not a lonely, monastic existence, mind you; O’Connor and her mother often entertained visitors who wanted to meet the woman the New York Times called “a writer of power,” and her reams of correspondence speak to the satisfaction she found in the forming relationships she formed. Despite her lupus, and the limits it placed on her life, her letters never reveal self-pity.

A doctor once told O’Connor that her illness precluded a trip she didn’t want to take in the first place, which she recounts with her characteristic wry composure: “I am bearing this with my usual magnificent fortitude.” But the same disease that killed her father was killing her. It’s the kind of thing that could make someone need to lose themselves in work. That’s a reason to chase paper, too. (“For the last two days I have worked one hour each day and my my I do like to work. I et up that one hour like it was filet mignon.”)

As O’Connor’s lupus progressed, her medical bills mounted. Of a lengthy hospital visit: “… That was an awful long time to have to stay, particularly as I was my own guest — no insurance for lupus. I’m all for Medicare myself.” Despite weakness and hospitalization, O’Connor worked with what friends described as urgency to finish her last collection of short stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”

 

She died from lupus-related kidney failure in 1964. She was at 39. “Revelation,” one of her last short stories, won the O. Henry Prize the next year.⁶

^***

^Citations
 

1. She was only physically capable of writing for about two hours a day, but it was a routine she devoutly clung to; the love of ritual evident in her passion for Catholicism was just as evident in her work habits.

2. She shrewdly maximized time to write fiction by repurposing lectures: “I can use practically the same thing I used at Notre Dame and they pay my way and gimme 100 dollars and I get to see the horrors of Milwaukee…”

3. A Memoir of Mary Ann, a book by the nuns of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cancer Home in Atlanta. O’Connor helped the nuns compile the book and wrote an introduction for it.

4. Or peafowl, or chickens, or swans: “I never bought the record player,” she wrote in a Jan. 22, 1964 letter to Thomas Stritch. “I saved up the money and then I thought this is a lot of money to spend for something you don’t already appreciate and no guarantee that you ever will, so I ordered me a pair of swans instead.”

5. She also casts some spectacular shade on the eventual adaptation, which starred a “a tap-dancer by the name of Gene Kelly,” emphasis O’Connor’s.

6. In 1962, O’Connor was paid $300 for the 1956 O. Henry Prize, which she won for her short story “Greenleaf.”

To see Brooke’s original post, visit https://thebillfold.com/how-flannery-o-connor-did-money-d92a4bf93c57#.k9hav0htm

Brooke Hatfield is a writer, artist, and brine enthusiast who helped imagineer the Flannery O’Connor Portrait Zine and the Eudora Welty Portrait Reader. Her work has been featured in Southern Living, the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Gravy Quarterly, Washingtonian, Atlanta Magazine, the Bitter Southerner, Southern Spaces, and Creative Loafing Atlanta.

Of Birds and Dreams and Flannery O'Connor

We are fortunate to excerpt a passage on O'Connor and Andalusia from Michael Tobias's forthcoming book, Embracing Co-Existence in the Anthropocene, coauthored by Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison and published by Springer Science/Business Publishers of New York. The volume will be available in 2017.

Like Emily Dickinson, who referred to birds 222 times in her poetry¹, William Butler Yeats and D. H. Lawrence each immortalized a peacock in their writing, while Krishna Lal, far more recently, devoted a book to the Peacock In Indian Art, Thought and Literature (2006).² The list of literary ornithological connections goes on in endless iterations, often obscure, but always revelatory. In 2002, at the International Conference on “The Chicken: Its Biological, Social, Cultural, and Industrial History,” convened at Yale University, Karen David, Ph.D., presented her paper, “The Dignity, Beauty, and Abuse of Chickens: As Symbols and in Reality.”³ Like the great dream many of us have harbored of those legendary plains of Cervantes’ La Mancha in Spain where his Don Quixote tilted at windmills, Spain has also engendered other dreams of Andalusia – mountainous, agricultural, abutting the Mediterranean and alive with tango and a vast cultural history. But the other Andalusia, Flannery O’Connor’s family farm in Milledgeville Georgia, where Ms. O’Connor spent more than half of her evanescent life, invites a very different dream, and one that is certainly no wishful thinking: namely, the importance to the artistic spirit in humanity, of birds.

It is a matter of record that Ms. O’Connor surrounded herself with birds, from her childhood in Savannah, continuing that passion at Andalusia where, prior to my own first visit less than two years ago, I had viewed the famed British Pathé News footage with its wonderful fleeting scene of the 5-year old child, O’Connor with two chickens in her arms. “Do You Reverse?”(1932)⁴ with its vaudeville music track and opening script, “Here’s an odd fowl, that walks backward to go forward so she can look behind to see where she went!” Little wonder that the British news gatherer’s very logo was that of a proud hollering rooster.

I can only imagine the ephemeral joy this piece of footage must have brought all those millions of people suffering during the Great Depression (and about to be plunged in to World War II) who would have likely viewed with a smile the young O’Connor and her cochin Bantam, which adds an uplifting loft to O’Connor’s own oft-cited admission that “I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax."⁵

After reading Margaret Eby’s “Flannery O’Connor and Her Peacocks”⁶ it was just a matter of time before I could track down an original copy of O’Connor’s astonishing September 1961 essay “Living With A Peacock” (later re-named “King of the Birds”) in Holiday Magazine⁷ in which the author describes how that “Pathé man” had managed to stir in her “a passion, a quest. I had to have more and more chickens.”

This astonishing piece of writing is assuredly comparable in many respects, I feel, to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s obituary in The Atlantic Monthly of Henry David Thoreau, published almost precisely 99 years earlier. Both essays⁸, Emerson’s and O’Connor’s, are among the greatest non-fiction essays on nature written in American history. O’Connor turns her attention to peacocks with that remarkable statement, “Many people, I have found, are con­genitally unable to appreciate the sight of a peacock. Once or twice I have been asked what the peacock is ‘good for’ - a question which gets no answer from me because it deserves none.”⁹ Near the end of her astonishing Holiday Magazine essay, O’Connor writes, “Lately I have had a recurrent dream: I am five years old and a peacock.” And she subsequently concludes, “I intend to stand firm and let the peacocks multiply, for I am sure that, in the end, the last word will be theirs.”¹⁰

As a writer, but also an ecologist, O’Connor’s love of chickens and peacocks add significant weight to the infectious constellation of data I trundle around with when it comes to America’s very different kind of love affair with chickens, and the world’s – with peacocks. The USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) “Poultry – Production and Value 2014 Summary, published April 2015¹¹ reveals that 104,519,000 chickens were slaughtered in the US in 2014 and this number does not account for the total of approximately 9 billion so called “broiler” chickens slaughtered each year, just in the United States, and an estimated 50 billion worldwide.¹²

And yes, if you browse the Internet you will also find sites suggestive of the fact that peacocks are also eaten at the dinner table, around the world and in the U.S. One would be ill-advised to even mention such a heresy in India, where the peacock (Pavo cristatus) is the national bird, protected under Section 51 (1-A) of the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. The bird’s fat and feathers are believed by some within India to cure arthritis but the Government certainly doesn’t buy that and those caught harming the peacock risk six years imprisonment and a 25,000 rupee fine. Peafowl in India are still considered of “Least Concern” under IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) criteria.¹³ But the closely related Green Peafowl is “Endangered”; and the Congo Peafowl is listed as “Vulnerable,” as a result of hunting and habitat fragmentation pressures.¹⁴

Such data altogether underscores the very brutal truths on so many levels that O’Connor herself mastered in her unique craft and manner of deeply troubling, ironic storytelling.

I had the good fortune to hasten to Andalusia in time to meet Manley Pointer prior to his death one bitterly cold January, and also to read the astonishing 2015 obituary by Kay Powell¹⁵ which reminded me of an obituary in Wellington in 1939 of a national celebrity, the wild Airedale terrier, Paddy, who wandered the docks of New Zealand’s capital, keeping company with all of his buddies, the adoring longshoremen and, after his death, the whole nation of New Zealand, that was in mourning for the beloved canine.¹⁶ As Kay Powell describes Manley Pointer’s funeral, “News of his death drew 8,000 views on social media. A coterie of young mourners met through social media, dressed in black, and attended the sunset funeral at Andalusia Farm.”¹⁷

We know that more than a few peacocks ended up being embalmed in pyramids with Pharaohs. They were worshipped and venerated and painted throughout Ancient Egypt, Syria and the Roman Empire.

When the last Passenger Pigeon, Martha, died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo, she, too was the subject of a funeral, and national news, as well as a sobering centennial documentary. While Audubon painted birds in all their glory, he typically employed dead specimens. No one other than Ms. Flannery O’Connor has ever described a bird – one of her own beloved peacocks –quite like “That rascal [who] could outrun a bus.”¹⁸ In my mind, Flannery O'Connor is something of a national environmental hero.

Most recently (late February 2016) I noticed Manley Pointer II enjoying the onslaught of an extremely balmy early Summer, as I would describe it, coming from California, out at lovely, expansive, thought-provoking Andalusia.

***

Citations


1- A Spicing of Birds: Poems by Emily Dickinson, by Emily Dickinson, Jo Miles Schuman and Joanna Bailey Hodgman, Editors, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CT, 2010.

2 - Abhinav Publications, New Delhi, India 2006.

3 -http://www.upc-online.org/thinking/dignity.html

4 -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtnV-iD2QlI

5 - O'Connor, Flannery; Rosemary M. Magee (1987). Conversations with Flannery O'Connor. p. 38. ISBN 0-87805-265-8.

6 –Eby, http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/flannery-o-connor-peacocks-blog-entry-1.1640856

7 – https://holidaymag.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/living-with-a-peacock-by-flannery-oconnor-september-1961/

8 –“Thoreau,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/08/thoreau/306418/

9 – op.cit., O’Connor, “Living With A Peacock” (“King of the Birds”)

10– ibid., O’Connor

11- http://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/plva0415.pdf, ISSN 1949-1573, p.11.

12-See the following 5 websites: http://www.animalethics.org.uk/image-bites.html; http://www.upc-online.org/chickens/chickensbro.html; http://www.aspca.org/animal-cruelty/factory-farms/animals-factory-farms; http://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/chickens/; http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/factory-farming/chickens/

13 - http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/22679435/0

14 - http://animals.mom.me/endangered-peafowl-5258.html

15 -“A Death Among Flannery’s Peacocks,” by Kay Powell, Photos by John Ward II”: http://bittersoutherner.com/obituary-for-flannerys-peacock/#.VuDuF4wrK2x

16 -http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/page/death-paddy-wanderer

17 – op.cit., Powell.

18 – ibid., Powell.

Dr. Michael Charles Tobias is the long-time President of the Dancing Star Foundation (dancingstarnews.com) and the 2016 Martha Daniel Newell Visiting Scholar at Georgia College and State University.

 

On the Subject of Grace

I remember the precise day forty years ago when I fell in love with the writings of Flannery O’Connor.

A friend and I were in a little cabin in Tennessee on a peaceful winter day with a roaring fire blazing before us. I think I was sipping some Jack Daniels whiskey to be exact. It was a cozy and peaceful late afternoon just at sunset.

My friend handed me O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and said simply, “Here’s something for you to read.” I was prepared to further enhance my tranquility by reading the short story. I was half dozing and half awake. The more I read, the more my heart began to palpitate and I thoroughly awakened from the serenity of the moment. I finished every last word of the story and threw the book across the room saying, “Why did you give me that to read?”

I was shaken to the core of my being. Jarred to my senses. Aroused to contemplate the meaning of O’Connor’s words and to begin to read other stories and then her novels and everything else I could get my hands on about her extraordinary insight and journey.

These were my origins on the subject of grace which has been my focus for many years. O’Connor began to teach me about grace, grace in its most intense form as it occurs in the midst of suffering. I experienced a suspended moment of deliverance which has been growing since that sleepy day in Tennessee. I owe her a debt I can never repay.

 

-- Jeff Blake, of Covington, Georgia, is retired after spending his life in the non-profit world and with Berea College in Kentucky and LaGrange College in Georgia as a Major Gift Officer. Since he retired, he has written three books, Traveling on Grace Street, More Travels on Grace Street and Homestretch -This Journey on Grace Street. He proudly says his mentors are his nine grandchildren.

March 25, 2016

Today is one of mixed emotions out on the farm, as we mark Flannery's 91st birthday on a day of spiritual significance: Good Friday. I'd like to think that, were she around to celebrate her 91st with us, Flannery would look at the passing of another year with a sardonic comment and a nice helping of Coke and coffee. The date also is at the height of a busy season on the farm, between planting and the mating season of the beloved birds. I would imagine, too, a birthday celebration would be a welcome break from the business of farming.

Someone with such an eye for the eternal soul would look at a birthday as but a drop in the bucket, and this one especially, since it would no doubt entail a service at Sacred Heart Catholic Church downtown.  I, too, have attended my share of Protestant Good Friday services both here in Milledgeville and at home in Woodbury.  Traditionally, Good Friday would be marked with a fast; one wonders how this would coincide with birthday celebrations.  Indeed, the holiday is a quite solemn marker of, as David Ulin put it for the LA Times a year ago, our passage through a fallen world, one that Flannery’s fiction describes in close detail. I find myself caught in the middle of the celebration of Flannery the person and the spiritual gravity of the holiday. But Sunday is coming, and then the solemnity of today will turn to gratitude and celebration.

And in that spirit of thankfulness I mark Flannery’s birthday here on Good Friday—in gratitude for the stories that describe both Southern history and piety in a new and startling fashion, for Andalusia that offers me the chance to get to know like-minded folks from all over the world, and for the stroke of good fortune that allows me to live in a place where the two can come together.  Happy birthday, Flannery, and thank you. 

Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Milledgeville, GA

Daniel Wilkinson is a Visitor Services Assistant and Bon Vivant at Andalusia Farm

Springtime at Andalusia

Any visitor to Andalusia in the past couple of weeks could tell: Spring has sprung. The first two weeks of March saw comfortable temperatures and the accompanying changes of attire and attitude.  The blooms and fresh scents are equally as satisfying as turning off the furnace and putting the sweaters away.  March also brings with it, however, a rather sulfuric shade of yellow to cover the outdoors. Those of us who cannot abide pollen had their two weeks of fun; now it's back inside, lest we need the whole pharmacopeia to keep ourselves on two feet. The birds, too, are feeling the effects of warmer weather; Manley II has taken to spreading his tailfeathers for visitors and staff alike (though Joy/Hulga doesn’t cotton to his behavior and will peck at him for his insolence).  In any case, these days of Spring are important to the spirit; there’s new growth outside, and the best of us take the cue from nature and bring our better selves out, as well.  

I think Flannery was well aware of nature’s effect on the human spirit. O.E. Parker had his epiphany beside a tree, and Joy/Hulga’s enduring image of Manley Pointer will be his running off through the fields.  Indeed, even the terrible scenes at the end of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” are tempered somewhat by their taking place away from civilization.  There are others still who are unprepared to take on the outdoors, such as Mrs. May in “Greenleaf.” 

Thus, these days of Spring bring Andalusia and the fiction into sharper relief, far more so than the days in winter where I am forced off of the porch and must place myself next to the heaters, or in summer where the heat is such that any place except directly under the attic fan is far too hot. I usually tell visitors who have not read much of the fiction to grab one of our reading copies and head to the Hill House porch to read “Good Country People” in eyeshot of the infamous barn and hayloft. Perhaps I should offer “Parker’s Back” or “Greenleaf” instead, stories whose characters are deeply invested in the outdoors.  (I leave to our social media friends to remind me of further stories that deal directly with nature.)

I am reminded of how good things are as visitors and friends share with me what conditions they are stepping away from, even for a little while; a Colorado friend, for example, passed along pictures of his parka and snowy backyard earlier in the week. We invite you to partake in all the trappings of Spring out at the farm—flowers, cool weather, and birds both real and drawn (our new art exhibit opens on April 9).  There will be extra hours to do so to boot on Thursdays beginning April 7, when we will be open until sunset daily.  Further, third Thursdays will be Thursdalusia, in which the new Nail House pavilion will be put through its paces with music, storytelling, and more.  The staff no doubt will be taking advantage of this time of year, too, except for one; the Bon Vivant needs a decongestant and a hot tea. 

Daniel Wilkinson is a Visitor Services Assistant and Bon Vivant at Andalusia. His springtime hobbies include tending to the flowers behind the Brown-Stetson-Sanford House in downtown Milledgeville, singing Easter choral music, and playing golf very poorly.

Reading and Performing Flannery

In her essay “Writing Short Stories”, Flannery O’Connor tells us that “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is....When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.

I am writing this from my home in Los Angeles, having just returned from Georgia after retyping Flannery's two wonderful novels back-to-back over a 17 day period. I started with Wise Blood at Andalusia, then moved to Savannah, to SCAD and the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home, where I retyped The Violent Bear It Away. Getting to perform these devotional re-readings and re-typings in her stomping grounds added a great deal of texture to the experience. As Flannery herself reminds us, the most meaningful experience is in the reading all the words themselves, and my time with these novels has affirmed in me the rightness of her advice. But during those in-between times, when I found myself sitting, for example, on Flannery’s front porch, looking out across to her pond, the smaller gaps in my understanding filled in, and I was drawn that much closer to her. It is an experience available to anyone with a volume of her stories and enough gas in the car to get to Georgia. If you are a true pilgrim, perhaps you will make your drive in an Essex with a rope holding the door on.

-- Tim Youd is a Los Angeles-based artist who has undertaken the project of retyping 100 classic novels. He stages each performance in a place charged with literary significance specific to each novel. He recently retyped “Wise Blood” at Andalusia before moving on to a residency at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) where he retyped “The Violent Bear it Away” at SCAD and Flannery’s Childhood Home.