Flannery O’Connor

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A Moment of Grace in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

At its heart, like so many of Flannery O’Connor’s stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a story about error at the level of perception, about a confrontation with reality, and the grace that can enter a human heart when a person is stripped down to nothing.

Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Flannery O’Connor’s  A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find

These narratives depict a South struggling for identity in the middle years of the twentieth century, peopled with crooked Bible salesmen, earnest preachers, escaped convicts, one-armed grifters, and wayward souls seeking salvation, or at least satisfaction.

Birds and nature, 1901

Serious Subjects

I learned that I could respond to poetry with a thousand times a thousand micro-emotions. I soon began to wonder what I even meant by “serious” poetry, and what constituted a poem’s artfulness. I reflected upon the fact that those initial ideas were narrow, even elitist, and they are ultimately limiting to both poets and readers.

Cartoons & Archetypes: How They Work and What to Know

Cartoons & Archetypes: How They Work and What to Know

I learned about character development not by studying it, but by understanding the nature of cartoons. I spent years sculpting superheroes and cartoon characters for DC Comics, Nickelodeon, Pixar, and others. Although the perception is changing, the art world considers cartooning of all kinds to be a distant, lesser cousin to the fine arts, painting…