I Write to Discover What I Know

This quote, came from one the better known female Catholic writers of the 20th century, Flannery O'Connor. Some of her more prominent works are, A Good Man is Hard to Find, Revelation and Good Country People. These books reflect the fallen goodness of human nature and reflect on the choices we're given in this life. How Flannery shows the good through an overwhelming amount of bad is amazing. Her work is chalk full of satire and underlying meanings that are both witty and all-knowing. She has been compared to William Blake in her prestige and delivery.

A woman who taught a chicken to walk backwards and later developed her mascot as a peacock. Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. Growing up as an only child she quickly developed a creative mind. When she was six, living at home she experienced her first brush with celebrity status. Her trained chicken broke headlines and she was featured on Pathetic News as "Little Mary O'Connor" with her trained chicken. She later claimed that that was the climax of her life and everything thereafter was anti-climatic. She attended the Women's College of Georgia before going on to receive her master's in fine arts from the Georgia State University. In 1946, after her graduation she was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Their she developed several of her short stories including Wise Blood. This workshop also helped her develop a Southern Gothic style for her writing. As later mentioned her work has a somewhat brutal unrefined finish that relates to Christian realism. She felt moved by the Thomist notion that the world is created by God and her sacramental upbringings. With her morally flawed characters in a Southern grotesque setting she portrayed them as touched by divine grace. She later wrote, "Grace changes us and the change is painful." 
Flannery has been an inspiration to many of my fictional works and the simplicity of her life has contributed to my writing schema. I hope this has been an informative little ditty for you to learn a little about the fantastic Southern author, Flannery O'Connor.