Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Subtitle: Adventures and Misadventures in Literary Savannah
Edition: Special Edition
Series: Follow-up to Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
Publisher: Black Skylark Singing
Published: 2020
Place of publication: North Carolina, United States
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 194
Copyright date: 2020
Description: The publication of Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind comes at a time when citizens of the U.S. are reevaluating the roles which concepts of race, gender, and nationality have played in America’s history and are likely to play in its future. The three authors on which this volume focuses--James Alan McPherson, John Berendt, and Flannery O'Connor--each addressed these subjects in their own stylistic ways long before the United States arrived at the boiling point it reached in 2020. As has been well-documented in mainstream media and on social media, the country reached that point following a series of events which resulted in disruptions of daily life as Americans knew it on a scale not seen in a century.
Notes: Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind is a book written in the style of memoir essays for which the author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah has become well known. This literary approach allows him to share with readers compelling stories in which he explores the impact of works by celebrated authors James Alan McPherson, John Berendt, and Flannery O’Connor upon himself, and, the cultural biases which have prompted millions of Americans to take to the streets in protest of the same. The first Special Edition (ISBN 978-1-71668-481-4) of the title also features on its covers [original artwork][1] by Aberjhani.

The stories pose timely questions like these: 
Does what many interpret as overt racism in writings by classic authors like O’Connor detract from the writings’ value as world literature for contemporary readers? 

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To what degree are such characterizations of O’Connor’s classic works accurate or erroneous? 

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Why did America’s first African-American winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction exile himself from his hometown of Savannah, Georgia, and what does that say about the complex nature of race relations in the city? 

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How and why did “Midnight madness” come to have such a powerful effect on Savannah following the publication of Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil? 

Various observers have presented some provocative thoughts on the above issues.  A major difference between them and Aberjhani, however, is the latter’s connection to the subject authors not only as someone––like O’Connor and McPherson––born in Savannah, but as a fellow author included with them and Berendt in the celebrated travel anthology Literary Savannah.  While seeking answers over a period of decades across America and around the world, he draws inspiration from some unexpected sources. They include: an “intuited conversation” with O’Connor herself, reggae music pioneer Bob Marley, Sufi educator and poet Jalaluddin Rumi, and authors Alice Walker, George Dawes Green, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison.


  [1]: https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/posteredchromatic-poetics?tab=artworkgalleries&artworkgalleryid=942249
Table of contents: title: Introduction: O’Connor, McPherson, Berendt and the; title: Literary Nature of Uncertain Times  1; title: BOOK ONE; title: Days of Midnight Madness   9; title: Antique Photo Album   55; title: BOOK TWO; title: On Exile, Genius, and James Alan McPherson   65; title: BOOK THREE; title: Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My; title: Mind   87; title: Original Introduction Now an Afterword: Sensibilities of; title: an Uncanny Nature   159; title: Acknowledgments   163; title: Appendix: Hitch Village and Us   165; title: Notes and Sources   171