There is a photograph in Flannery O’Connor: In Celebration of Genius which, I think, defines the author of the Southern gothic novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. In the picture, a 13-year-old Flannery is standing next to three other girls at a birthday party. The other young debutantes are dressed in simple cotton dresses of the late 1930s; they peer shyly into the camera; one has her hands clasped in front of her. Flannery, however, looks older than her age—as if she’s already filling up with wise blood. She is distracted, staring grumpily off to the left, as if she sees something out-of-place with the world.

Flannery brought that same “the world is tilting toward Hell and I think you’re all a pack of foolsâ€? vision to her writing. In story after story (like “Greenleaf,â€? “Good Country Peopleâ€? and—my favorite—“The Enduring Chillâ€?), she skewered organized religion, racism, hypocrisy, modern psychology and higher education. On the tip of her pen, society turned like cured meat on a spit.

But damned if her writing wasn’t some of the most delicious Southern barbecue ever slapped between two covers!

In celebration of her life (O’Connor would have turned 75 this year if she hadn’t died of complications from lupus in 1964), Hill Street Press has published this wonderful collection of essays, poems and one remarkable piece of fiction (a short story by Greg Johnson in which Miz O’Connor herself has a visit from a boy straight out of one of her fictions).

Flannery O’Connor: In Celebration of Genius (edited by longtime O’Connor scholar Sarah Gordon) is indeed a celebration—but it’s less a birthday party than it is a funeral eulogy. Yet, not a dirge, but more like one of those New Orleans processions where the weeping and wailing breaks into the Dixieland blare of trumpets and there is dancing, yes, always dancing.

Like the best of eulogies, this collection captures the quick and wonderful spirit of the dear departed. Contributors include Doris Betts, Fred Chappell, Maxine Kumin, Bret Lott and Lee Smith, among many others. Some of the selections are a bit dry and drawn-out, but the best of them more than make up for the heavy-handed lit crit.

My favorites include an anecdote from poet Miller Williams (father of singer Lucinda Williams, by the way), which opens the book. In the mid-1950s, Williams was a traveling textbook salesman and a struggling poet who sought out Flannery’s company and spent afternoons on her porch out in rural Georgia, sipping iced tea and watching her peacocks. Williams writes:

Sometimes she would give me one or two books of poetry that had been sent to her, sometimes by the poet, saying that she didn’t know how to read poems. She read mine, though, and commented on them sensibly and helpfully. I suspected that the real reason she passed the books along was that she didn’t have room for them on her shelves and knew that I couldn’t have afforded them.

“You know how to read poems,â€? I insisted. “You write poems. You just call them stories.â€?

“You write stories,â€? she countered, grinning. “They just look like poems.â€?

From the moment she turned my remark around and handed it back to me, my attitude toward my work was never the same.

Of course, I’m insanely jealous of Williams. What I wouldn’t give to be sitting there on that porch, sipping Flannery’s tea and talking above the screech of her beloved flock of peacocks. I could have learned much at the feet of this woman.

Many of the writers here feel the same way and most struggle to describe the ways her writings have affected their own novels and poems.

When I read that famous last line of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,â€? I realized that nothing was wrapped up here, writes Lee Smith. Instead, a whole world opened out before my astonished eyes, a world as wild and scary as life itself….A story does not have to be resolved in the end, I realized. It is enough to glimpse something, momentarily, before it slips back into the dark woods.

Poetry is also nicely woven throughout the book—some of it dealing directly with Flannery herself, some of it just reverberating with echoes of that (as one writer put it) “phalanx of tartly precise detail, that perfect-pitch reporting of dialogue.â€? One poem in particular—“On Visiting Flannery O’Connor’s Grave,â€? by Kumin—ends with this cymbal-crash:

Flannery lies unadorned except by name
who breathed in fire and fed us on the flame.

Thirty-six years after her all-too-soon death, O’Connor’s fire-and-brimstone continues to burn across the pages. If you have even the least interest in the 20th century’s sharpest writer, then you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of this collection of tributes. It is truly a revelation that is good to find. ( )