According to Writer’s Almanac, Southern fiction writer, Flannery O’Connor, spent much of her life on her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, raising poultry and writing novels and short stories: Wise Blood (1952), The Violent Bear It Away (1960), A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). This last book of short stories was published after her death in 1964, at the age of 39, from complications of lupus.

Flannery O’Connor said:

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

She also said:

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”

When she was five years old, Flannery O’Connor trained a chicken to walk backward, and a newsreel company came to her house to make a film about it, which was shown all over the country. She said,

“I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life.

Everything since has been anticlimax.”

So that, my friends, is the secret to becoming a great southern writer: teach a chicken to walk backward! Success naturally follows.

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 The Secret Sense of Wildflower

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