In the later photographs, showing her on the aluminum crutches that became a permanent part of her life, there remains that same schoolgirl freshness, a young gentleness in her face and expression. Most of the others, the former GI's were tuned-in to New Criticism theories, and many sensitive young writers got shot down by the heavy onslaught of their critical fire. Sometime late that first semester I learned that Flannery had received the MFA degree the year before and that she had already published one story. Flannery was staying on at Iowa for another year because Paul Engle had gotten her a grant of money to live on while she worked on her first novel. From then on, I may have looked forward more to sitting beside Flannery than to the Workshop itself which, in those days, was something like going to a good movie.
Writers read their own stories, sitting at the front of the room.
Flannery never entered into the Workshop discussions. I heard that when she was first in the Workshop in 1945, before she had published anything, her stories had not been well received and she had not tried to defend them. The only comment I every heard her make in class was the next spring. Andrew Lytle was in charge that semester during Paul Engle's absence from campus, and he asked her what she thought of the story we were discussing that day. The irony of Flannery's statement lay in the fact that the crocodile was the best thing in the story but had absolutely no meaning in the texture of the story itself.