|
 |
  |
 |
 |
 |
< Back to Travel Pursuits Main Page
Mystery and Manners in SavannahSelected Works of Flannery O'ConnorLocation Savannah, Georgia Dates April 6–10 (4 nights) Works Flannery O'Connor: selected short stories, essays and letters Program Description To read Flannery O'Connor's fiction is to be amused, provoked, and pushed to reconsider ourselves and our place in the world. A Roman Catholic and a native of Georgia, O'Connor created stories that inimitably blend humour, horror, and the mysteries of faith. While her writing is richly specific, evoking the dusty back roads and quirky characters of the American South, it deals powerfully with universal questions: What does it mean to be good? How should we live? What is the meaning of death? How can the divine penetrate the everyday world? In her relatively short lifetime (1925-64), O'Connor created a powerful body of work, including two novels and a number of short stories and nonfiction pieces. In O'Connor's stories, deceptively ordinary situations – a bus ride, an encounter with a traveling salesman, a family automobile trip – erupt into life-altering revelations. In her essays, O'Connor delves deeply into the mystery of writing, why people do it, struggle over it, sacrifice so much of themselves in order to do it. Itinerary Our base will be Savannah, O'Connor's birthplace and childhood home. Here we will hold our discussions, visit the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home Foundation and explore it this beautiful antebellum city's striking architecture laid out around twenty-four squares. We will travel by private coach to Milledgeville, where we will be received at Andalusia, the O'Connor family farm by a close personal friend of hers and where we will watch a movie of her short story, “The Displaced Person.” We will visit O'Connor's grave and the church where she worshipped in Millidgeville. Leaders Nancy Carr is a senior editor at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago and is also a freelance writer and teacher. She has taught college courses in writing and English literature, and led a week-long seminar on the works of Flannery O'Connor at Classical Pursuits' summer program in Toronto. Mary Barbara Tate, a member of the Flannery O'Connor-Andalusia Foundation board of directors, fondly remembers her visits to Andalusia during O'Connor's time there. A professor of English at Georgia College and State University for twenty-three years, Tate belonged to a reading group that met every week at the farmhouse to discuss Southern literature chosen by O'Connor. Accommodation Marshall House – This beautifully restored boutique hotel with the intimate comfort of a bed & breakfast has the perfect historic location downtown on Broughton Street, in the heart of Savannah's historic district. It was voted Savannah's Best Hotel in 2004 and 2005. Fees $1,920 Cdn Fees include
|
“If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious... he will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves whether they know very clearly what it is they act upon or not.” Flannery O'Connor, “The Grotesques in Southern Fiction”
|
 |
|
|
