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.

Manley Pointer II: The Prince of the King of the Birds

I had forgotten to commemorate the occasion properly at the first of the month, but it’s been right at a year since we held our first peacock funeral, very nicely summed up here by Kay Powell for the Bitter Southerner.  It was rainy last January, too, and likely as cold.  Fresh off the first Sunday of my tenure as interim choir director for the First United Methodist Church, I led a rather rainy, squishy processional to the burial site and was deeply unprepared for the challenges in walking and singing while being out of shape.  Nevertheless, I was pleased that those in attendance were familiar with the first two verses and refrain of “I’ll Fly Away.”  Even the cadre of collegians from Mercer who braved the unfortunate weather were undaunted by the ways of their cousins from down the hill in Milledgeville. It was indeed a situation right out of an O’Connor story, and I wager she’d have had a chuckle or two at us had she been in attendance.

Since then, Manley Pointer II has taken up the place of his namesake and is proving to be as big of a hit with our guests. Manley II is young yet; I’ve seen him doing laps around the aviary, and I know now how the assessment of Flannery’s visitor so many years ago came about: “I bet that rascal could outrun a bus.” Joy/Hulga, older and no doubt well-versed in the ways of aviary life, tends to give him sidelong looks and is no doubt bemused at the ways of her new companion.  He has opened his tail once while I’ve been on duty at the farm; the feathers are short and his strut is a bit too exuberant to be called such. But the sight is remarkable nevertheless—no doubt practice for Spring and a new crop of feathers.

The prideful ways of the peacock are a frequent topic in Flannery’s prose, but I believe that the pride of a peacock is in equal share a projection of our pride and self-assurance onto the bird putting itself on display in its strut.  I think here of Father Flynn in “The Displaced Person,” who is so deeply in thrall to the display of feathers that divinity is made anew each time he sees them, when he clearly has a decent grasp of God’s nature if his discussions with the troubled Mrs. McIntyre are any indication. We relish the peacock’s confidence, even moreso if it’s a display by one so young and brash. In that spirit we at the farm are proud indeed of Manley II, and for the growth yet to come for him and for Andalusia in 2016.

Daniel Wilkinson is a Visitor Services Assistant, Man-About-Town, and Bon Vivant at Andalusia. He is no longer choir director at First United Methodist Church, but has his baton at the ready if duty calls once more.

  

New in 2016

Happy New Year to all of you from the staff at Andalusia. We’ve got all manner of new things on tap for 2016, some of which were in the most recent newsletter, which you can get by subscribing via the contact form at the bottom of the landing page for andalusiafarm.org. 2015 was a banner year indeed, and more is to come in 2016.  

First of all, we’re pleased to welcome a new Visitor Services Manager, Ross Sheppard, to the fold after the promotion of April Carlson to Assistant Director.  Milledgeville needs to keep the young and talented within its confines, and Ross’s return from a sojourn in Athens is a sign that one can indeed go home again.  A promotion to Bon Vivant may well be in the cards if he proves himself after the several years of training requisite of the position.  

Not as recent of an arrival but equally as exciting is that of Manley Pointer II, our new peacock in the aviary.  Almost exactly a year ago, Manley I succumbed to “January’s arctic blast,” as put by Kay Powell for the Bitter Southerner. Manley II is still a young fellow; those tailfeathers aren’t yet at their full complement. He will strut occasionally, no doubt practicing for springtime.  He joins Joy/Hulga, who is no doubt delighted to have some company.  

In terms of non-living additions, a new program space is in the backyard. The Nail House Deck now occupies the location of the storage building behind the house.  Long a casualty of a fallen tree, the Nail House gave way in the Fall to a proper outdoor stage that will no doubt be well-used when warm weather returns. Keep a sharp eye on our social media pages for these events in the coming months.

During the cooler months, however, the programming remains inside with the February Four Lecture Series. This year’s set will discuss Wise Blood during every Sunday afternoon in February and comes on the heels of last year’s very well-attended series. Those who were unable to attend in person did so in spirit via the podcast, and they will have that same chance this year.  These lectures are no doubt a good excuse to give another look at the novel, one that I haven’t revisited as often as I should have over the years.  So too, if you’ve not seen the film version of Wise Blood, copies of it are on offer here in the gift shop.  The film has grown on me over the years, as Brad Dourif’s image is the one that comes to mind when I think of Hazel Motes.  I am further fascinated by Macon as it looked in the early 1970s; one can actually rent out Haze’s apartment to this day in a house not far from Mercer University. 

There’s much to anticipate in the coming year.  Meeting all the Andalusia “pilgrims” as I like to call them remains a delight each time I come to the farm, and as much as we offer in programming, I find that the visitors keep this place fresh for me.  Even if I have to do a little “mission work” as far as Flannery’s fiction goes, welcoming these folks to the farm and to Milledgeville is the central delight that the special programs help to bring about. Thus, Happy New Year, and I’ll see you shortly out here on the farm. 

 Daniel Wilkinson is a Visitor Services Assistant and Bon Vivant at Andalusia Farm.  When not greeting visitors and consulting with peafowl on the important issues of the day, he can be found with still more museum visitors at the Old Capital Museum and Brown-Stetson-Sanford House.

Flannery Fandom

During my first visit to Andalusia last summer, one of the biggest surprises to me was the containers of dirt for sale in the gift shop. T-shirts, postcards, books—these I expected. Even the peacock feathers made sense. But dirt? I’m told that when they didn’t sell it, fans would dig it up themselves. Or try to steal signs, fauna, scraps of wood—any sort of material souvenir of O’Connor’s home has been fair game. What do we make of such weird fandom? Flannery O’Connor attracts serious scholars. The annual Flannery O’Connor and Other Southern Women Writers Conference reflects the scholarship that her work continues to elicit. A quick library database search returns nearly fifty peer-reviewed articles which have been published about her work in the past three years, and I can only imagine that in the next few years, the attention garnered by the newly available archives at Emory University will only cause this output to increase.

However, she also attracts serious fans—some scholars, but many not. It’s well known that artists including U2, Bruce Springsteen, and REM have cited her as an influence (and I have written elsewhere about her surprising influence on punk music). There are novels such as Ann Napolitano’s 2011 novel A Good Hard Look, which imagines O’Connor’s life in Milledgeville and her effect on her neighbors there, as well as Carlene Bauer’s 2013 novel Frances and Bernard, a fictional “what-might-have-been” account of her intense friendship with poet Robert Lowell. And then there’s the annual birthday parade at O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia. Every year, to commemorate her birthday in March, people assemble at Lafayette Square in Savannah in costume to parade, play music, and generally make a joyful noise in appreciation of O’Connor’s life and work.

There are people in minister’s hats and gorilla suits, in tribute to characters in Wise Blood; there are costumes with peacock themes; and there are plenty of people dressed as O’Connor herself, imitating her hairstyle, glasses, and the 1950s dresses so many of us know from her photographs.
I can only imagine how ridiculous O’Connor herself would have found such shenanigans. Even when she was alive, she had a wry attitude toward what she referred to as the “lunatic fringe” of her fandom. Complaining about a letter she had received asking for an autographed photo, O’Connor observed that “I feel that since I have now reached the lunatic fringe there is no place left for me to go.” 1

Although authors do come from everywhere, it’s tempting to think that artists emerging from Milledgeville are unlikely, I suppose. Visit a city, and every third barista has written a novel. Visit Milledgeville, and you see a cute college town: less hipster than Athens; less self-conscious, perhaps, than Oxford, Mississippi. There’s nothing unusual about Milledgeville water, and unlike (so many) other Southern writers, O’Connor is not known for her drinking—so, the argument that it’s something in the water of central Georgia that produced O’Connor is a hard sell. What Georgia does have is its dirt—even the Georgia Writers’ Association has an annual Red Clay Writers’ Conference. And
although it has become clichéd to speak of the centrality of place in Southern writing, I believe that O’Connor paid enough attention to it in her work—whether essays such as “The Regional Writer and His Country” or The Grotesque in Southern Fiction” or stories such as “The Displaced Person” or “A Circle in the Fire”—that it’s safe to say that the land occupied a certain amount of her writerly attention.

But enough to merit its commoditization? Perhaps. Fans of living authors will camp out for hours for a few minutes in the presence of their hero. To have your name articulated in speech and in an autograph implies an added layer of intimacy to that you already feel you have, from living with the novel or poem or song your hero has created. It feels like you’ve forged an even stronger connection with the novel or poem or song that you love. What, then, about the artists we can’t wait in line to see? That’s a big reason, I believe, that such superfandom occurs.

When we (and yes, I’ll admit “we” here, as I have been known to emulate O’Connor’s sense of style) dress up like O’Connor and her characters—or want dirt from Andalusia—I think that we’re trying to similarly forge more intimate connections to things we have strong emotional reactions to. It’s more complicated than “the things that we love”—no one just “loves” O’Connor’s work. We’re struck by it, challenged by it, and feel confused by it. So we keep returning to it.

We literary tourists want to inhabit the outer versions of the worlds we have built in our heads. We want to connect physically with the imaginations with which we’ve already connected. O’Connor herself understood the desire for souvenirs—she often sent her friends and admirers peacock feathers, whose symbolism represented her own values.2 I hope, then, that she would forgive our desire for dirt.

1. Apparently, parades of people in sweater sets and pearls or gorilla costumes were beyond even her own active imagination. 

2. If you haven’t read her essay “King of Birds” about her fascination with peacocks, go do so now. In fact, even if you have read it, go read it again. And then listen to REM’s song with the same title.

Monica Miller is the Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program and a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech. Her current work focuses on the figure of the ugly woman in southern literature.

Keeping Andalusia Beautiful

Fresh off a wildly successful 11th Annual Bluegrass Festival, the Executive Director of Keep Milledgeville-Baldwin Beautiful, takes to the blog this week to describe the efforts that his organization took to make the festival a minimal-waste event.  Thanks to KMBB, an event that drew nearly 600 people had a cumulative 4 bags of waste taken to the local landfill. Thanks Andy!

There are many things all people have in common, and of those, having a good time is a favorite. All across our planet people like to get together for food, music and all sorts of fellowship. Some rituals date back millennia, and new traditions are created everyday.

In planning a celebration, of any sort, people can focus on sustainability. Specifically, people can strive to reduce their impact on our planet by planning minimal waste events. The amount of fun doesn't have to be sacrificed to make an event more environmentally responsible. In fact, the fun can be continued afterwards in knowing that your impact on the earth was minimized.

Andalusia hosted its 11th annual Bluegrass Festival as a minimal waste event.  The food and beverage vendors used recyclable materials and Keep Milledgeville Baldwin Beautiful provided recycling bins for their disposal. Volunteers were on site to help facilitate. In addition to providing a family-friendly event featuring world-class musicians, hopefully this year's festival will inspire others planning events to consider more responsible waste management options.

So after banjos and mandolins are put away, we can whistle and hum those tunes in the months to come knowing that the fun had on the farm did not come with a hidden cost.