At the chalkface: Flannery O’Connor

Each day the news gets grimmer – “cuts to the bone”, the return to 1950s’ Grammars, a near Victorian destitution, and now a threatened Happiness Module. Ha! Ha! Ha! We are left raging spectators.

So this week I’d prefer to remind myself why I joined up for this lark in the first place – the sheer pleasure of being in a classroom, especially an inner city sixth form classroom. The pupils were open, enthusiastic, thrilling and passionate. We were fortunate with the syllabus, we could chose most of our set texts.

Nothing worked better than Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. If you don’t know her, just get a copy. Start with A Good Man is Hard To Find. Sheer bliss. Do it with your sixth form. It goes down a treat. It ought not to, but it does. She’s fiercely Catholic and lays waste to the more tender sensibilities. She has no time for mimsy notions of “creativity”.
“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”