From an interview conducted with Kenneth Hallenius at Notre Dame’s De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. Original article here. Due to the strictures of space, they could only use some of the quotes—my full answers are here.
1) How did you first come to encounter Flannery O'Connor's writing? Did she play a role in your studies as an English major?
In undergrad, a few of us had an afternoon reader's theatre--I was reading stuff like Tolkien's Homecoming of Beohrtnoth Beohrthelm's Son (based on the Battle of Maldon, which I later wrote and published on), and a friend brought O'Connor's "Good Country People." The next semester, Dr. Gene Veith had us read "Revelation," "A Good Man is Hard to Find," and The Violent Bear It Away for a class. I could tell right away that O'Connor was good, but I wasn't sure if I liked her.
After I graduated, I worked part-time while I waited to go to Infantry School with the Army, so I had a lot of time on my hands and took the opportunity to read the rest of her short stories, Wise Blood, and her letters and essays. Mystery and Manners was a revelation for me and fell in line with what I'd been reading in Benedict XVI's Spirit of the Liturgy--for someone who was raised on 90s evangelical art, it was a gigantic shift from a salvation narrative-driven art to the confidence that the union of flesh and logos in the Incarnation baptized all human action. This opened up a much wider realm of artistic exploration. I decided I did like her, and her essays and short stories particularly.2) There's been a resurgence in interest in O'Connor lately, with a 2019 documentary, a 2023 PBS special, your album, and an Ethan Hawke-directed movie on the way. From your perspective, why is she so fascinating?
There are a lot of reasons she's fascinating to creatives in general--she's also had a lasting influence on songwriters over the decades (Irwin Streight's recent Flannery at the Grammys goes into this in-depth). Bruce Springsteen wrote his Nebraska album after an O'Connor binge and cites her as an influence; Lucinda Williams does, as well (and she once visited Andalusia with her poet father while Flannery was still alive). I can also think of a rapper, a German EDM group, an indie-rock artist, and a hardcore rock group that reference her, with varying depth. Martin McDonagh gives her a subtle but clear shout-out in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
I think her influence lies in her focus on and mastery of dealing with huge themes in the microcosm of real people--I like to oppose her to Faulkner in parallel with John Prine v. Bob Dylan or Robert Frost v. T.S. Eliot. Like Prine and Frost, O'Connor is content to simply tell the stories of people and let their actions and language--and she had a mastery of the spoken language around her--speak for them, without feeling the need to mythologize them or even tie them explicitly or implicitly to bigger ideas she had in mind. As she wrote in Mystery and Manners: “When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it." Where folks like Eliot, Faulkner, and Dylan defamiliarize by means of language and image, O'Connor, Prine, and Frost do it by forcing the reader to look at the parts and people of everyday life we tend to ignore.
Now, her willingness to use the language of everyday folks can also get her into trouble, and was at times problematic--or just plain wrong. I was asked during the presentation at Notre Dame why, given recent controversies (the unspoken part was "controversies over the depth of her racism"), she is still relevant. I do think it's an important question, and I don't think O'Connor's a saint. While she was happy to make fun of the KKK and Gone with the Wind and even undermined some racist attitudes in, say, "Revelation," her letters betray some attitudes that I don't think can be explained away. I also find it significant that she will, quite often, edit her characters when they're "cussing" (Bailey Boy in "Good Man," Parker in "Parker's Back"), but is fine with quoting them using "n_____." All that to say, I don't think she's anti-racist, and this is a worthwhile discussion to have--better folks than I, like Alice Walker, Hilton Als, and Amy Alzenauer have written on this carefully and with more complexity than I can here.
For myself, I would like Tarwater to be seen not as an outright celebration of O'Connor, but as a tribute to her for the influence she's had on me and so many others in forcing us to see--both what she's forced us to see (which is limited in some ways to her time and place), and how (which extends on into our time and beyond). Writing the songs was fairly easy--growing up Pentecostal with rural Southern family, I know or have been a lot of her characters at one point or another, and the songs take the characters' perspective, while also picking apart their internal conflicts.In the sense of broader cultural worth: I'm fine with taking her off some of the pedestals, but I do think she's worth studying, both in a historical sense for the wide-ranging influence she's had in the arts, for the moment of cultural shift that she lived through and exposed, and for how she explicated her artistic vision and its ties to both faith and region. Her literary strength was also her social weakness: she was concerned with what is, and largely ignored the consideration of what could be in a society. But good Lord, did she see clearly that what is.
3) Your album, Tarwater, features at least two songs that are directly inspired by the story "Parker's Back." What is it about this particular story that fascinates you?
Yes, two distinct songs, one recorded twice in very different ways. I think what first caught me about "Parker's Back" was how it embodies her entire artistic philosophy, which followed from her centering the Incarnation in her theology and the Sacrament in her practice. Again, for someone raised Pentecostal and Southern Baptist (with a sojourn in conservative Presbyterianism), this was a revelation.
But I think what stuck with me is the characters. I've been Parker in many ways--a returned veteran (my discharge was honorable, though) and worker of odd jobs. He's running from the folks whose love was on their own strict and religious terms, in search of a love that would receive him and make him whole--the external actions that got him closest couldn't match up to him owning himself as himself.
And it's hilarious, even when it's grim. But then, I thought Moby Dick was hilarious when I was 12: like O'Connor, "I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran."4) Several tracks on Tarwater, particularly "A New Tattoo", remind me very much of some of the best of Dwight Yoakam's discography. Who would you say your own musical influences are?
Identifying influences is always entertaining--I've recently been compared to Dwight Yoakam (several times) and Ray Wylie Hubbard, neither of whom had I listened to before that. But I suspect we're working off of similar roots, which has been my creative research philosophy for a long time: when I was younger and wanted to write like Tolkien, I didn't study Tolkien, but the sagas and Eddas and Old English poems and the Kalevala and the Enuma Elish.Little of that medievalism stuck past my twenties, but I took that same philosophy over to songwriting. Old Crow Medicine Show and Furnace Mountain and Johnny Cash became doorways to Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie and Jimmie Rodgers, who led to Ola Belle Reed and Blind Willie Johnson and the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Joe and Odell Thompson and innumerable anonymous or uncredited writers of the American folk tradition. It's less artists and more songs (and, in the folk tradition, their variations): "Dink's Song" is an absolute favorite (Furnace Mountain's is a recent, but favorite recording), I've known "John Henry" since I was 4 or 5, and "Swannanoa Tunnel" is a recent favorite.
But I can say that "Parker's Back" was absolutely written after a John Prine binge.
Articles on O'Connor and race
Hilton Als: "This Lonesome Place"
Alice Walker (From "Beyond the Peacock"--the whole essay is well worth a read)
Amy Alzenauer
Songs:
"Dink's Song" (Recording)
"John Henry"