New Hours at the Childhood Home!

For almost two decades, the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home has sustained itself purely through the effort of volunteers. It's been a remarkable run.

But now the Childhood Home has entered a new phase. The board of directors recently hired Toby Aldrich as our first ever employee. Toby will work 24 hours per week. So as of November 16, the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home is open from 1 to 4 p.m. every day except Thursday (closed major holidays and the first two weeks of September and January). $5 for adults, free for those 12 and younger.

Among his many other duties, Toby will join me in making posts to this blog, which we hope will develop into just one of many ways in which we reach out to our past and future supporters.

This is an incredibly exciting moment in the 20 year history of the Childhood Home

Landings Book Club Tour

Flannery's Childhood Home was visited by 10 members of the Landings (Savannah, GA) Book Club. In preparation for their visit, the members read Flannery's first published collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard To Find. Our special thanks to Beth Larance for her interest in Flannery's works and contacting the Childhood Home on behalf of the Club. The other guests were Larry Larance, Ken & Carol-Lee McKenna, Howard & Alice Welt, Don & Kay Gardner, Diane Logan and Walter Fraser.

Every effort will be made to accommodate those wishing to tour Flannery's Childhood Home. Please call or email to set up an appointment.

O'Connor: The most important female writer for me to read?

Just came across this article from Esquire last month: www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/75-books

A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories is #10 on the magazine's list of The 75 Books Every Man Should Read. O'Connor is preceded by 9 men: Raymond Carver, John Cheever, James Dickey, John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, Dostoevsky, Edward P. Jones (The Known World), Studs Terkel, and Philip Roth.

Photos from our October party

Check out these great photos from our big party in October at the unbelievably wonderful home of Connie and Walter Hartridge:

John Berendt weighs in on O'Connor

Some interesting comments from our friend John Berendt over at eric forbes's book addict's guide to good books:

In an interesting interview he said in part:
"Despite the commercial nature of the publishing industry, there are still many publishing houses willing to publish literary books even though they expect modest sales at best. None of Flannery O’Connor’s books, for example, ever sold more than 3,000 copies, and she was arguably one of the most important American literary figures of the 20th century."

and:

"Flannery O’Connor is one of the half-dozen finest American writers of the 20th century, in my opinion. A very dark humour runs throughout her stories, and she has an uncanny facility for describing people’s faces in highly original and imaginative ways."

Visitors and more visitors

It's a small world.

I docented on Saturday afternoon, and the first visitor was Annie Coggan, whom I met a number of years ago. She's now in Mississippi and wrote about her visit on her blog Chairs and Buildings.

Later that same afternoon, we were visited by Anne Trubek, an Oberlin professor who is writing a book about authors' house museums. She suggested that we might be the only such museum in the country that's devoted to an author's childhood. As it turns out, Anne is good friends with one of my oldest friends from high school in Kentucky.