explanation

My friend, Frank Stephens is a political consultant who knows a lot more about the electoral college than I do. As a favor, he allowed me to to reprint the following -- because of such a strong reaction to my last blog. Thanks, as always, for reading!!
Janet

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What’s an Electoral College and why Are Some

Calling to Abolish It?

By Frank Stephens
Is our way of electing the President of the United States fair?

Assemblyman Tom Umberg, the chair of California’s Assembly Election and Redistricting Committee said, “When you're in first grade, if the person who got the second-most votes became class leader, the kids would recognize that this is not a fair system.” So, why is it fair in presidential elections?
Umberg, taking his grade school analogy to an extreme, is advocating a bill (AB 2948) to enter California into a compact with other states to cast all their electoral votes for the presidential candidate receiving the most popular vote nationwide. This end-run around our Constitution is being pushed by National Popular Vote, and, according to news coverage, by folks still upset that George W. Bush is president instead of Al Gore.
Very few Americans, and we should include Assemblyman Umberg here, even know how we elect our president. What is the Electoral College and why did the Founding Fathers create one? They faced the daunting question of how to elect a president in a nation that:

1. was composed of thirteen large and small States very jealous to protect their own rights and powers and suspicious of any national government;

2. had only 4,000,000 people thinly spread up and down nearly one thousand miles of Atlantic coastlands without good roads or communication;

3. believed that political parties were harmful if not downright evil;

4. felt that a true gentleman should not campaign for public office. The saying was that “The office should seek the man, the man should not seek the office.”

Today some call for an abolishment of the Electoral College. Following Al Gore’s loss to George Bush the pundits argued, it was “undemocratic” to deny the presidency to the man who received the most votes.
This argument is hostile to the Constitution, however, which expressly established the United States as a constitutionally limited republic and not a direct democracy. The Founding Fathers sought to protect certain fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of speech, against the changing whims of popular opinion. Similarly, they created the Electoral College to guard against majority tyranny in federal elections. The president was to be elected by the 13 (now 50) states rather than the American people directly, to ensure that less populated states had a voice in national elections. This is why they blended Electoral College votes between U.S. House seats, which are based on population, and U.S. Senate seats, which are accorded equally to each state. The goal was to balance the inherent tension between majority will and majority tyranny. Those who wish to abolish the Electoral College because it’s not purely democratic should also argue that less populated states like Rhode Island or Wyoming don’t deserve two senators, but they conveniently overlook that fact.
A presidential campaign in a purely democratic system would look very strange. That’s because any rational candidate would focus only on a few big population centers and a few big states. A candidate receiving a large percentage of the popular vote in California, Texas, Florida, and New York, for example, could win the presidency with very little support in dozens of other states. Moreover, a popular vote system would only intensify political pandering, as national candidates would face even greater pressure than today to take empty, middle-of-the-road, poll-tested, mainstream positions. Direct democracy in national politics would further dilute regional differences of opinion on issues, further narrow voter choices, and further weaken what’s left of political courage in our parties.
Consider that those who call for the abolition of the Electoral College are actually hostile to liberty. Not surprisingly, most advocates of abolition are statist elites concentrated largely on the east and west coasts. These political, economic, academic, media, and legal elitists overwhelmingly favor a strong centralized federal government, and express contempt for the federalist concept of states’ rights. They believe in omnipotent federal power, wherein states are reduced to acting as mere glorified federal counties carrying out commands from Washington. Is this what we want for our states?
The Electoral College threatens the imperial aims of these elites because it allows the individual states to elect the president, and in many states the majority of voters still believe in limited government and the Constitution. Voters in southern, mid-western, and western states (we rudely refer to them as “flyover” country) tend to value family, religion, individual liberty, property rights, and gun rights. Washington elites abhor these values, and they hate that middle and rural America hold any political power whatsoever. Their efforts to discredit the Electoral College system are an open attack on the voting power of the pro-liberty states.
Sadly, we have forgotten that states created the federal government, not the other way around. The Electoral College system represents an attempt by our Founding Fathers to limit federal power and preserve states’ rights. It is an essential part of our federalist balance. It also represents a reminder that pure democracy, or mob rule, is incompatible with preserving liberty.
Frank R. Stephens is government affairs director for construction trade associations in Sacramento and Republican county central committee member, CRA 1st Vice Chair. He may be reached at frstephens@msn.com

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college

Voting used to be one of the best things about being American.

In school, we learned that John F. Kennedy, one of our most influential, heroic and genuine presidents, beat Richard Nixon by a margin of one vote per district.  If Kennedy hadn't canvassed neighborhoods to get out the vote, he would have lost to Nixon.  This, as we learned from our history, would not have been a good thing.

Electing presidents has changed since the days I was a girl sitting in a classroom, learning about voting districts and canvassing.  Not that the election process has changed, but the electoral system has been exposed as a system that is failing our republic.

Elections today are scientifically assessed, strategized, and flooded with candidates who have speech writers (we call them spin-doctors).  Few voters have the confidence in the system that they did twenty years ago.  The Electoral System I have given my children and will soon give to my grandchildren is a sorry, sad thing that frustrates me.

WHY?

When Americans go to the polls to vote for a chief executive, we actually vote for a particular slate of electors. Each state has as many "electors" in the Electoral College as it has Representatives and Senators in the United States Congress (District of Columbia has three electors). The electors meet in their respective states forty-one days after the popular election. There, they cast a ballot for president and a second for vice president. Each candidate must receive a majority of electoral votes to be elected president.  As the 2000 election proved, the Electoral College does make it possible for a candidate to win the popular vote and still not become president. We do not elect presidents on individual votes, despite the stories we have heard.

If you don’t like the Electoral System, you can blame James Madison.  He worried (loudly) in 1788, about what he called "factions," or groups of citizens who have a common interest in something that could violate the rights of the nation as a whole.  Madison’s fear was real – he saw it everywhere around him.  Alexis de Tocqueville described this as  "the tyranny of the majority" – when a faction would grow to become more than half of the US population.   Madison had a solution for tyranny of the majority: "A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking."

With this, the Electoral College was born. 

Alexander Hamilton, one of the brilliant writers of "The Federalist Papers," said that the Constitution is designed to ensure "that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man [or woman?] who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications."

We have lived to see that the electoral college can indeed be hijacked by money, factions, and a bit of corruption, just like a majority vote.  We have also seen that the office of the president can indeed fall to a man or a woman who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. 

We have also seen the system producing quite a bit of broken friendships.  We were raised that our vote counts, and now we see that this may or may not be true.  What matters are the votes and endorsements of moneyed companies and individuals who want a piece of American government.  We have even learned this week that this is for sale.

If I ask the majority of my friends and acquaintances if we are living in a democracy, they will answer yes.  We are indeed a democracy.  The truth is, the United States is (and has always been) a Republic.  We are a nation of electors voting for electors.

What’s the good news?  We are a Republic.  Our Electoral System may be broken, but its citizens are not.  If you want the system to change, you can exercise your voice at the state and national level.  A good read is the 2013 U.S. News and World Report article, Should the U.S. Get Rid of theElectoral College?  It points out how easy (and how probable) the system can be gamed and manipulated.

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Alicia

Alicia Robynn 2 days old

Alicia was born 28 years ago, our only girl. She came after three boys, Mario had David and Joe and I had Vince when we married.  Blending our family together was sealed with Alicia’s birth in July of 1988.   

She was born in living color, vibrant from a young age.  Her love of the natural world that either burst with joy and sunshine or raged with discontent.  She jumped into life and devoured it, always drawing a friends to herself.  She was a tomboy who loved to read.  As a result, school and the sports that went with it came naturally. It all went by so fast that I  still wonder where the time with my little daughter went.

I have oodles of pictures of us, in various stages of play and through various ages.  Her smile illuminates the film that captures her.

 She is surrounded by friends, family, love, teams, her array of collections.  They show our girl who rarely settled down for anything!  

Alicia is now a small-business owner and mother of two girls, Harmony and Alannah, that are the joy and fabric of her life.   To see her with them is incredible, the way that she mothers in a no-nonsense style, showing incredible instincts and love for her girls.  I am grateful that I get to help her every Friday.

Malawi 2004

My Fridays are spent driving to Chico, seeing her off, playing with the girls, and celebrating with them, whatever kind of day we decide to make it.  Harmony and Alannah are joy-filled and ready for any adventure that their small town can open up for them.  They remind me so much of their mother at that age that it is frightening.

Chico Downtown Plaza - Last Week

I was raised by a mother who had four daughters, and each of us have the symbiotic relationship with Mom that she had with my Grandma.  Alicia is my only daughter, and we haven’t exactly had the traditional mother-daughter relationship.  There have been misunderstandings, seasons of them.  We always manage to plow through and continue on, probably because both of us have a great deal of determination.

Today, on her birthday, I pray for breakthrough.  I want us to arrive at a place where she understands how much I love her and I understand how much she loves me.  I want the easy connection that she seems to have with her daughters, and that I have with my Mom.  On this day, I want us both to understand that I am me and she is herself and God created us both this way and everything is alright.  This would be the greatest gift I could ever give her.   So today, my prayer is for true communication.

There is a movie called Brainstorm, starring Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood that I thought about today when I thought about Alicia.  In it, a man and wife are going through a painful divorce.  The husband is a scientist who is part of inventing a brain tape-recorder, communication technology that would allow people to feel the same feelings another person  does.  This inventor records his own brainwaves, thinking of his wife, and goes to her.  After giving her the headset, she is able to “feel his heart” for her.  After years of misunderstandings, walls being built, and terrible communication, she sees that her husband genuinely loves her and they reunite.

If only life were that easy.  If only I could make a tape of my brain and hand it to my daughter.  Here I am, here is what I really feel.  Now you can see the depths of my heart -- how much I love you and how genuine my love is. 

Happy Birthday, Alicia.  My words are the closest things to a futuristic brain wave recorder.  I hope that in them you can hear my heart of love for you.  Today I celebrate who you are and all of the many things that are coming alive in your heart.  

Cisneros

“He said that he would love me like a revolution, like a religion.  Abuelita burned the pushcart and sent me here, miles from home, in this town of dust, with one wrinkled witch woman who rubs my belly with jade, and sixteen nosy cousins.”

~from “One Holy Night” by Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros

photo by Jessica Fuentes

Sandra Cisneros was born on a Monday – December 20, 1954 in Chicago.  Her father, Alfredo Cisneros de Moral was born in Mexico and met his wife, Elvira Cordero Anguiano in America, where they married . Sandra was the third of seven children, the only daughter in the family. She moved frequently during her childhood and visited Mexico often.  Cisneros found a creative outlet in writing, later earning a BA in English from Loyola University of Chicago and an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop in the late 1970's.  Her unique voice, a working-class, Mexican-American woman with artistic sexuality, was different from everyone else’s at Iowa and writer's workshops were often painful.

The experience of celebrating how she was different, not only from other students at Iowa but with any author in print, eventually led to her book, The House on Mango Street, which was published in 1984.  It won the Columbus Foundation's American Book Award in in 1985, and instantly became an American favorite.  Also an accomplished poet, Cisneros published two full-length books of poetry: My Wicked Wicked Ways and Loose Woman.   Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (my personal favorite) was released in 1991 and Caramelo in 2002.  Her latest work, A House of my Own:Stories From My Life, is a memoir of collected, interlocking essays of  personal stories about family, travels, moving, and the challenges (and delights) of a single woman journeying solo. "So often you have to run away from home and visit other homes first before you can clearly see your own," she told the Los Angeles Times in October of 2015.  

When We Met:  Believe it or not, I just started reading Sandra last winter.  I was at the Sacramento Poetry Center, doing a public reading of one of my short stories, “The Puzzle” when a girl came up to me afterward and remarked how much my story reminded her of The House on Mango Street.  I was nonplussed, and told her I’d never heard of the book. She nearly fell over.  She told me that I had to RUN to buy it and read it.  After that meeting, I vowed to start reading Cisneros and did.  I was moved, on more than one occasion, to tears as I read her well-constructed stories of lives leaning against one another, struggling to find a true identity that s somewhere between Mexico and America.  She has a deep and true voice of a Latina – and she makes me think she is related to me as she tells tells a story.  "You know the one," she says.   "I'm not like the Allport Street girls who stand in doorways and go with men into alleys..." she tells me, and I agree, nodding my head.  "I know, mi amiga, we are not like those girls.  But we have made some bad decisions about love, verdad?" 

Why She’s Good:  Being Latina-American, I can say that there is a piece of myself that lies just below the surface of who I am – and never comes out.  It is too polite.  It has been taught to be subservient.  Sandra gives that piece of myself permission to surface and dance with her as I read.  For a Latina reader, Sandra Cisneros es no apenas escritor, pero ella es mi hermana!  In other words, she expresses my heart in its fullness and makes me feel like I am right there with her.  The moment I started reading Sandra Cisneros I wanted to go hug my Mom.  I wanted to reunite with my Grandma.  I wanted to celebrate being Latina, Latina, Latina - with no apologies!

Plot Variations:  A sister and her loud, noisy brothers take a yearly journey with their parents from Chicago to the "Little Grandfather’s and Awful Grandmother's" house in Mexico City for the summer.  A girl who wants to find significance falls in love with a man who turns out to be a serial killer.  Emiliano Zapata’s girlfriend tells a story of loneliness, understanding, and being constantly abandoned by her lover, who is off “revolutionizing the country.”  A girl living in a poor Chicago suburb seeks out a meaningful life and freedom as she learns to appreciate her neighbors.

Buy One:  While others will try to persuade you to buy The House on Mango Street, I believe that there is greater depth in Woman Hollering Creek, the book that made me howl at the moon and declare Cisneros a sister.  I’m going to recommend Audible for the first time here.  Woman Hollering Creek is actually paired with Loose Woman, a book of amazing poetry, both read by Sandra herself.  You will get to hear the familiar stories in her own voice, and for the way she writes, it is best this way.   If you haven’t used audible yet, now is the time!  It’s awesome! Available here.

Favorite Quote:  "Perhaps all memory is a chance at storytelling and every story brings us closer to revealing ourselves to ourselves."

Trivia:  Cisneros' books have been translated into over a dozen languages, including Spanish, Galician, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, Greek, Iranian, Thai, and Serbo-Croatian.

Pain in Motion: Great writers find their voice in deep-seated insecurity or rejection.  Cisneros remembers many childhood moves, which involved changing residences, not only in the USA, but also back to Mexico to be near her paternal grandmother.  She admits that her family’s impermanence affected the way she viewed her life.  “We moved like the tides," Cisneros told Publishers Weekly in 1991.  “From Mexico back to another barrio of Chicago that looked like France after World War II—empty lots and burned-out buildings."  The moving continued for many years. Cisneros noted that her grandmother's Mexican home was the only constant in a series of traumatic upheavals.

Lahiri

“That afternoon, as was her habit, Boori Ma reknotted her hair, untied the loose end of her sari, and counted out her life savings.”

~from “A Real Durwan” by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was born Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri on Tuesday, July 11, 1967 in London.  She is the daughter of Amar and Tapati Lahiri, a Bengali couple who immigrated to the United Kingdom from Calcutta, India.  Jhumpa’s name was shortened for ease – a family nickname that westerners preferred over her Bengali name.  She started writing as a child, but did not take it seriously until her early twenties. After graduating from Barnard College in 1989, she began experiencing what she called “a slow, hesitant artistic awakening… a secret, scary thing." She then joined the student body of Boston University, where she took her first serious creative writing courses, eventually earning three literary master's degrees before receiving her doctorate in Renaissance studies. For her publishing debut, she gave us Interpreter of Maladies in 1999, which won the Pulitzer Prize and a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. She followed up in 2003 with her first novel, The Namesake, which was made into a movie. She later published Unaccustomed Earth, The Lowland, and most recently her Italian memoir, In Altre Parol – or  In Other Words.

A frame from "The Namesake"
when the American-Indian family visits the Taj Mahal

When We Met:  I had just returned to America after living on the African continent for seven years.  Our things (including all of my books) were in transit and my super-cool housemate lent me her copy of “Interpreter of Maladies.”  The title intrigued me and I sank into a good chair and began.  The collection of stories is about Indian-Americans (most from the Bengali tradition) wrestling with “border identities” –all authors I admire present these paradoxes in their characters.  Lahiri's  words were delicate and casual, and I became entranced as if someone placed me in a room where the air was infused with opium,.  Her stories sang to me, and I was meeting characters with whom I could identify.  They ask the same questions we do: Who am I and where am I going?  I am in awe of the way she tells a story.

Why She’s Good:  She has an unusual, scary command of language.  No one has wowed me with story endings the way that Jhumpa has.  She saves an important detail for last few paragraphs and the reader is stunned, surprised, and even a little freaked-out.  She is casual and easy to read, but you realize that you are in a five-star restaurant after the first bite. 

Plot Variations:  A married couple live as polite friends in their upscale residence until an electrical outage brings them together, sharing the first real conversation they have had in years.  An Indian-American family hires a tour guide to take them to ancient ruins, where they learn about his other intriguing occupation.  Two college roommates share chemistry and keep secrets about intimate relationships.   

Buy One:   I prefer Lahiri's short stories over her novels.  I recommend Interpreter of Maladies, but only by a nose in front of Unaccustomed Earth.  These stories are vibrant with color, tension, yearning and the search for significance.  Available here.

Favorite Quote:  “I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed.” 

Trivia: Lahiri’s recent triumph of writing her memoir in Italian is not an accident.  Her parents came from India, so she spoke Bengali until she was four years old. She learned to read and write English, but she says neither of these linguistic identities ever felt fully her own. "I had studied Italian for many years — simply for the love of it," she told NPR.  Italian offered the linguist a different path, with respect to her identity in writing.  "I'm bound to fail when I write in Italian, but, unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn't torment or grieve me."  Thank you to NPR - read more here.

Finding Her Voice: Authors take years to  "find their voice" - the distinctive tone and style that is woven into their words, permeating their writing as your mother's fragrance permeates her house.  Lahiri once addressed the development of her own literary voice,in her understated, beautiful way: “I just want it to be true, and I want it to be strong, and I want it to be pure. But these are lofty ideals, and language is a very messy thing; it's a very complicated thing. And that's why I say that that voice is an illusion, it's an ideal that I'm moving toward. You know, the closer you get, the farther away it gets. But I think, isn't that the point of creativity, to keep searching?”

Lahiri receives The National Humanities Medal in 2015

Tan

“This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.”

~ from The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Amy Tan was born on Tuesday, February 19, 1952 in Oakland, California to John and Daisy Tan, Chinese immigrants who settled in Northern California. Her father was both an electrical engineer and a Baptist minister.  When Amy was fifteen, her father and older brother died of brain tumors six months apart. Their deaths affected the whole family differently.  Daisy, convinced that the family was under a curse, moved Amy and her younger brother John Jr. to Switzerland.  Amy rebelled, but finished high school.  She won an American Baptist Scholarship to attend Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon and met her husband there, on a blind date. The two have been together ever since.  

Tan also attended San Jose City College and San Jose State University (Mario’s Alma Mater), where she was a President’s Scholar, and graduated with a BA in both English and Linguistics.  In 1985 she started to write fiction in her spare time.  She attended a fiction workshop at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. There she met writer Molly Giles, who gave her advice on a flawed short story with too many inconsistent voices and too many beginnings of stories. “Pick one and start over.”  Giles' suggestions guided Amy to write the multiple stories that would become The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989. After that came The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Bone Setter’s Daughter, The Hundred Secret Senses, and The Valley of Amazement – all of which are stunning. Her essays and stories are found in hundreds of anthologies and textbooks; many are assigned in high schools and universities as required reading.  Thank God. 

(A special thanks to Amy Tan’s bio page.  Read more here.)

When We Met:  I was making my way through the classics, somewhere between Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment when a friend asked me if I read Amy Tan.  I gave her my standard, proud answer: “I only read the dead guys.” My puffed up answer makes me shake my head in embarrassment now, but for some reason I told her I would read a living person's book.  She lent me her copy of Joy Luck Club and told me that it was the best book she ever read.  I jumped in and drowned in the beautiful, graceful language that stretched its neck toward heavenly perfection.  I have never, ever, ever looked back.  Tan is one of the best writers on the planet, and encouraged me to read other living authors. 

Why She’s Good:  Tan reminds me of the person that can do an algebraic equation with their left hand while oil painting with their right.  She tells a beautiful story while constructing a structural foundation that will never collapse.  I admire the structure of her stories as much as I admire the language that builds them as much as I admire the ornamentation and colors that grace their ceilings.  She’s oh-so-intimate in conversations, and I have literally felt guilty for eavesdropping as I read.  She is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. 

Plot Variations:  Four mothers and their daughters take turns telling interlocking stories, all about being Chinese-American.  Intertwining narratives of a mother and daughter paint a picture of misunderstanding, loneliness and a desire to be known by the other.  A Chinese born young woman connects with her half-sister by telling her about secret tales and superstitions, things she understands because she can see ghosts.

Buy One:  Each is a gem, but none have affected me like The Joy Luck Club, the novel that made me want to be a full-time writer.  In its pages are the differing voices of mothers and daughters, a bittersweet symphony that casts eternal light on mother/daughter relationships.   Available here.

Favorite Quote:  Tan is funny.  She thinks on her feet and is as silly as she is serious. I am going to cheat here and steer you to a recent TedTalk she did.  Watch it to laugh and think deeply… 

Trivia: Many of you know how much I love Amy Tan already.  My own novel, Treasures In Diepsloot is what I pitch as Joy Luck Club in a South African township.  Tan’s trusted reader, Molly Giles (who won a Flannery O'Connor award for Short Fiction) accepted the privilege of reading my book and loved it!!  On a supernova high, I sent it to Sandy Dijkstra, Tan’s literary agent.  She wrote to me, saying “Alas, Janet, I wish I could sign on but I’m just not in love with the project, which is so essential when it comes to fiction. Please know that we’ll be cheering you from the sidelines and hope that another agent has the vision for this project!”  Tears. Disappointment. Suck it up and move on.

No One Ever Asks About the Language: Tan plays in a band, The Rock Bottom Remainders, with other writers, including Stephen King.  He tells a story of eating with her right before a gig in Miami Beach in his book, On Writing (available here).  He asked Amy if there was ever a question she was not asked by star-struck fans during the Q and A sessions at writer’s conferences.  She thought awhile and said “No one ever asks about the language.”  King expounds on the importance of this, citing that fans do not seek advice about language from commercially successful authors.  He writes in the preface that his book will be about “the language,” as Tan calls it.  Then. He dedicates the book to her. 

O'Connor

“Parker looked, turned white and moved away. The eyes in the reflected face continued to look at him — still, straight, all-demanding, enclosed in silence.”

~ from “Parker’s Back” by Flannery O’Connor

 

Flannery O’Connor was born on a Wednesday, March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Edward and Regina O’Connor. The family, inside of an extended family, were devout Catholics in the heart of the Bible Belt, ripe with Protestantism. Growing up in the deep South and being part of a spiritual minority wasn't easy for O'Connor, and writing was one of the ways she coped with her surroundings. Her pensive, careful personality allowed her to digest the brutal landscape of the South, and in turn, write what she saw. 

After graduating from high school in 1942, O’Connor enrolled in Georgia State College for Women and then to the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and then to Yaddo, a writing community. Every piece of her education nurtured the fire she had inside. O’Connor's teachers and mentors marveled at her work, and encouraged her development of the Southern Gothic style. She used regional settings and “grotesque” characters, (referred to as freaks or misfits) to portray the humanity and need for salvation. 

O’Connor died of lupus when she was just thirty-nine years old. During her brief career, O’Connor wrote two novels, thirty-two short stories, an incredible collection of letters, and many literary reviews and commentaries. Her collection of Short stories, Complete Stories, won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.  In one 2009 poll, Complete Stories was named the best book ever to have won a National Book Award. O'Connor's writing has influenced a myriad of writers, artists, and even filmmakers. 

When We Met:  I was eighteen when I read “Parker’s Back”, the haunting story of O.E. Parker, a man who wants nothing to do with religion. His body is covered in ink, tattoos that he wears proudly, the ultimate anti-establishment chip on his shoulder. He meets a devout but austere woman, who he later marries, and slowly becomes unable to fight the terrible truth that God is real.  The title “Parker’s Back” refers to O.E.’s back that he will not tattoo, simply because he can't see it.  Once he finds a Byzantine picture of Jesus, with all-consuming eyes, he chooses to break the oath he's made to himself. The complexity and desperation of the story is amazing – a web spun with pure gold. 

Why She’s Good:  O’Connor is seen as a writer who was “kissed by God” – in other words, she was meant to write.  Each story involves an unapologetic wrestling with God, the central reason she started writing in the first place.  Flannery’s stories have deep, spiritual themes, but many are filled with racist language, horrid villains, classicism, sexism, and violence. She wanted to move her readers to a place of discomfort, to consider their own need for God. Using grotesques, she shocked and moved her readers to a place of decision. In addition to her round, Southern characters, O’Connor writes God into her stories. He is always there, somewhere. Her aim, she once explained, was “to penetrate the natural to reveal the supernatural” by writing about “unthinkable acts of grace.” And yet, her prose writing is so accomplished that Flannery O’Connor cannot be described as a “a Christian Writer,” any more than Shakespeare can be labeled “an English poet.”

Plot Variations:  A man intends to take his family from Georgia to Florida for a summer vacation, but a car accident places an escaped convict in their path.  A racist woman who runs a farm seeks to run a scrub bull from her property singlehandedly, like she does everything else. A PhD and amputee opens her heart to a traveling Bible salesman, only to see his true colors exposed. A young girl contemplates her silly cousins in the same day she measures the possibility of becoming a martyr.

Buy One:  Easy.  Buy Complete Stories, the perfect sampling of Flannery O’Connor. Available Here

Favorite Quote:  O’Connor viewed Christianity differently than how she viewed the church: “The only thing that makes the church endurable is that somehow it is the body of Christ, and on this we are fed. The operation of the church is entirely set up for the sake of the sinner, which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”  

Trivia: Flannery O’Connor is cited by many authors as a writer who influenced their work, but many others have been affected by her as well.  Once in an interview, Bruce Springsteen was asked to name his biggest influence.  He replied: “One would be difficult, but the short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.”

The bleeding, stinking, mad shadow of Jesus: True to Southern Gothic Form, O’Connor wrote The Violent Bear it Away, a story about Francis Tarwater, a fourteen-year-old character who does not want to fulfill a destiny that God is calling him to: being a prophet.  A modern-day version of Jonah, many people say that they see Flannery in him. As he walks the road to his destiny, Flannery shows the reader: "His black eyes, glassy and still, reflected depth on depth his own stricken image of himself, trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus."