Book club exploring letters of Flannery O’Connor

Published 2:00 pm Friday, January 12, 2024

It seems there is always something more that can be learned from writer Flannery O’Connor’s vast collection of work, and though a local book club has met for about two decades, members are taking a new approach at understanding more about the famed Milledgeville author.

“We had been through all of the stories and both of the novels enough times so that we were at the point of saying, ‘OK, what else can we do with these people who have now read everything and [who have read] some of the stories and stuff twice?’” said Georgia College & State University’s Dr. Bruce Gentry, editor of “The Flannery O’Connor Review.” 

The question led to the idea of delving into O’Connor’s famous volume of letters included in “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor.” Gentry broke the letters up into eight discussion sessions, which began last fall and will conclude at the end of spring semester. Gentry said the letters the group has been discussing were written to all sorts of people.

“And so, there’s no particular letter that’s crucial,” he explains. “It’s just whatever anybody wants to talk about. Whichever letter anybody wants to bring up as one that they were interested in, we talk about it.”

Discussions are varied, which Gentry said makes for a casual class that is easy for those interested to jump right into.

“As a result of that, nobody should worry about dropping in on the next session about the next batch of letters without having attended the previous session because they’s no connection between one month and the next. We go in there and we start talking and eating cake and drinking coffee,” he laughs. “We just do whatever we feel like doing. It’s very casual, and I’m sure some people come without having read anything, and they’re fine.”

The Flannery O’Connor Book Club began in part as an homage to the late author.

“Flannery O’Connor had a book club that met in her house once in a while, and so the idea got planted that there should be a book club,” Gentry said. 

In the 2000s, Gentry said the late Mary Barbara Tate, a Georgia College professor who was a close friend of O’Connor’s and was dedicated to securing her legacy, presided over the book club.

“They’d meet out at Andalusia, and Mary Barbara invited me to come and sit in with them,” he explained. 

He visited a few times, and as Tate’s health began to fail, he began facilitating the discussions. Through the years, the club began meeting at the Georgia Writers Museum in Eatonton, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom sessions also became a popular form of meeting. Today, Gentry hosts the in-person class once a month at 2 p.m. in Eatonton and then holds two Zoom sessions later in the same day at 4:30 and at 7 p.m. The club is sponsored by the Andalusia Institute, the Georgia Writers Museum and Allied Arts of Milledgeville. Classes are free and open to the public.

“The groups tend to be small, but once I do it three times in the day, I think we have a fair number of people who are in on at least one of the meetings,” Gentry said. 

And, perhaps the best part: “It’s totally voluntary; nobody gets graded,” Gentry laughed.

In addition to the usual classes going on this spring, Gentry said there will also be four additional meetings that will take place with visiting guest speakers as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. And in the fall, an O’Connor conference is planned to take place at GCSU Sept. 12-15 to celebrate O’Connor’s 100^th birthday in March 2025.

Jessica McQuain, project coordinator for the Writing for Success grant at Andalusia Institute, said people support the book club’s Zoom sessions from other states and even other countries. 

“All of our programming is free to everyone, and you don’t have to be a scholar or any kind of expert to show up,” she said. “We’ve had high school students join because they were reading something in class. We’ve had artists who just like [O’Connor’s] work join, and especially with this new movie with Maya Hawke (‘Wildcat’) coming out, there have been a few more curious people…[asking] ‘Who is Flannery O’Connor and what is she about?’”

Upcoming in-person meetings and Zoom sessions discussing O’Connor’s letters will be held on Jan. 25, Feb. 15, March 21 and April 25. In his teaching, Gentry wants people simply to give O’Connor a chance and learn just how interesting she is in many different ways. 

“I want to have more successes like I’ve had with some people who get hooked on O’Connor and then just keep coming back and coming back and coming back, and they come back and they do the same story even though they’ve been in a previous group that’s already done that story because they figure out that if you have another hour long discussion about a story, a whole bunch of other things are gonna come up that didn’t come up the first time.”

For more information on upcoming sessions, visit www.gcsu.edu/andalusiainstitute/events.