Last Thursday, the Andalusia Institute hosted a discussion with Mary Carpenter, author of the recently released middle-grade biography, Flannery O’Connor: A Girl Who Knew Her Own Mind.
Flannery O’Connor: A Girl Who Knew Her Own Mind is a biography about Flannery O’Connor, written for seventh through ninth graders. It was published by the University of Georgia Press and recognized for its unique writing style to fit a younger audience.
“I like this mantra that nothing is too complicated,” said Carpenter. “My younger son struggled with his reading skills. As he got to middle school, he still struggled with reading and would become frustrated that his options to read were limited. So, with him and his age range in mind I wanted to write a book with inspiration and information that was both fitting for that age but could also be read by any reading skill level.”
Carpenter wanted to create a book that could be used in the classroom, read by a range of younger people and offered a look into many complicated topics along the journey of O’Connor’s life. She felt that O’Connor herself wrote with a range of ages in mind and didn’t ‘sugar coat’ her stories and wanted to portray that same style of writing and thinking within her own novel.
“In the discussion last week with the people at Andalusia, a developmental psychologist complimented my book because I wrote about serious topics in a way that everyone can understand them. He said that kids can handle tough subjects and that many books write as if they can’t and try to sugar coat things,” said Carpenter. “But Flannery O’Connor wrote in a way that anyone could understand, and she created complicated and unique characters and plots that didn’t shy away from serious issues.”
Flannery O’Connor covered topics such as criminals killing a family and a young boy drowning in her fictitious tales. In Carpenter’s biography, she worked through the editing process to include more background information and discussion of serious topics that impacted the environment O’Connor grew up in but also impact the world today.
“The editing process took a very long time and began to get accepted in the fall of 2018,” said Carpenter. “During that period there were enormous changes in this country in handling race, what we knew about race and how we reacted to race. The edits that my editors really encouraged me to write were to address this more at greater length in the book. For example, they asked me to include more history behind the antebellum mansion, like how it was built by enslaved people and built on the back of the cotton economy because it wasn’t right to just talk about the square where she lived without the context to understand that time period.”
Carpenter expressed that she gives a lot of credit to these editors despite the long time the biography spent in the editing process. She feels that if the book had come out in 2017 before these edits, it would be outdated by now because of how much perspective has changed in the world over that little amount of time.
“I worked at Time Magazine before and they were very strict about fact checking, so I spent a large amount of time tracking down primary sources and traveling to the places that Flannery O’Connor lived,” said Carpenter. “I visited her home in Savannah and Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, along with a few other places.”
Traveling to the places that O’Connor lived had an enormous impact on her writing. Carpenter was able to connect stories and information from primary resources to the destinations she visited. For example, the Savannah home of O’Connor was a row house and many stories describe her staring out the second floor window. As the home has been kept in almost the same condition as when O’Connor lived there, Carpenter was able to visualize and experience these stories in real-time.
“I just got a sense of her through my travels and at the farm I got very close to people who worked there and felt like I learned more about her mother and the small community in a way that I felt like I knew them,” said Carpenter.
During her stay in Milledgeville, Carpenter also expressed that she learned a lot about Southern hospitality and the inspiration behind O’Connor’s narrative works. The Flannery O’Connor Center at Georgia College & State University was also a very large help for her writing.
“When Flannery found out she was going to have to return home and live with her mother in the South, she was not happy. But she found it made all the difference in her writing, because she was in the region where she heard the sounds of the people as she wrote,” said Carpenter. “At each place I visited, Flannery O’Connor had a number of famous sayings, and they’re sort of tacked up everywhere, so that you feel that you’re surrounded by her in these different places. It just all made a difference in my writing.”
Carpenter hopes to bring her book to Georgia schools and potentially be a part of a unit on Georgia history in the eighth-grade curriculum. As of now, she is currently working with Irene Burgess at Georgia College on a grant that could fund fifth-grade literacy units in Baldwin County to include Flannery O’Connor and use her biography.
“I feel that my writing can work for third grade and up with the proper discussion and reading assistance,” said Carpenter. “Flannery O’Connor is a good role model for young students, especially young women, because she was very sure of herself from a very young age and had the freedom to develop her own voice. She writes with everyone in mind without straying from complicated subjects. For these reasons, I believe she is someone who should be taught more in school.”