Actor and director Ethan Hawke joined Fordham’s Angela O’Donnell and David Gibson at a May 3 private screening of Wildcat, a movie about Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor directed by Hawke and starring his daughter, Maya Hawke. 

In a Q&A after the screening, attended by 300 people at a Manhattan movie theater, Ethan Hawke said it was an “absolute honor” to be with O’Donnell and thanked her for writing her book Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor (Fordham University Press, 2020), which deepened his understanding of the writer.

The film follows the life of O’Connor, who is celebrated for short stories such as those in Everything That Rises Must Converge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965) but also criticized for her views on race.

Fordham has been a center of research and events related to O’Connor’s work since 2018, when the writer’s estate granted $450,000 for an endowment at Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, where O’Donnell is the associate director.

A Writer’s Complexities

Although his mother had introduced him to O’Connor when he was a child, Hawke said, reading Radical Ambivalence helped him better understand how complex a person O’Connor was. He mentioned the book in an essay he wrote for Variety explaining why he and Maya ultimately decided to go forward with the film.

“I’m just so grateful for your time and for your enthusiasm and open-mindedness,” he said of O’Donnell’s writings on O’Connor. “I can’t imagine knowing as much as you know about Flannery. I have to bottle it into an hour and a half.”

O’Donnell said the Variety article was the first time she learned that Hawke had read her book, and said she was deeply moved by the film. 

“When I wrote the book, I was hoping that it was going to be useful to people in some way and not just something that academics would read,” she said. 

Hawke credited Maya with pushing the film to completion and suggested that O’Connor’s faith, coupled with her unflinching exploration of the way religion and morality sometimes collide in horrific ways, makes her appealing to a generation that is otherwise turning away from organized religion.

“A lot of people are scared to talk about faith. If we were all at Thanksgiving dinner together and I said, ‘Hey, can we talk about God?’ about half of you would go to the bathroom because you’re worried people are going to have an agenda,” he said.

“What I try to do with the movie is model Ms. O’Connor, which is that she’s not trying to convince you to believe anything. She’s trying to be a good artist and present something for you.”

For Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, a new book of poetry serves as a tribute to both types of “holy lands,” be they far or near.

Holy Land, (Paraclete Press, 2022) a collection of 87 poems that won the Paraclete Press Award in 2021 and was published in October of this year, was in fact inspired by a trip that she took to Palestine in 2019.

The first chapter, Christ Sightings, is based on her time in Palestine. What follows is a series of chapters—Crossing Ireland, Ancestral Lands, Sounding the Days, Literary Islands, and Border Songs—that were inspired by her travels to places that may not be the Holy Land, but are holy to her just the same.

Crossing Ireland features poems O’Donnell composed after visiting the Emerald Isle, while Ancestral Lands features meditations on her native northeast Pennsylvania. The poems in Sounding the Days and Literary Islands expand the notion of holy lands into the spiritual, emotional, and intellectual realms. The book ends with 15 triolets inspired by the crisis at the United States-Mexico border that dominated the news in 2019.

The book’s first poem, “The Storm Chaser,” was inspired by a visit to the Sea of Galilee. The view of the sea has changed little in the 2,000 years since Jesus and his disciples were said to have spent time there, so O’Donnell said it was easy to create a picture in her head of what it would have been like then.

Running along the Sea of Galilee,
I see you in your boat, tall brown
man that you are, standing in the prow,

“All of these stories that I had been hearing all of my life in church in the Gospel readings suddenly became so much more powerful and real when I was in the landscape where they unfolded,” she said. 

“There was something electrifying about walking literally in the footsteps of Jesus and being in those spaces where these events took place.”

As moved as she was by the geography there, O’Donnell said she knew didn’t want to limit herself strictly to one location.

“It’s arguable that there are no places that aren’t holy, that aren’t sanctified in some way by human experience,” she said, noting that Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is considered sacred ground because nearly 50,000 soldiers died there during the infamous Civil War battle.

“I used to take my kids there, and I remember having this eerie sense of so many lives being lost in this peaceful, rural place. You know, the very dirt of the ground being watered by the blood of human beings. That’s a sacred ground.”

When she started considering other holy lands she’s visited, it dawned on her that many of them are places that most people don’t think of as holy. In “304 Washington Street,” for instance, she considers growing up in a small town just south of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Squat and square, her pea green shingles
made her strange on our straight street
lined by wood white houses,
their faces bland and neat.

“Northeastern Pennsylvania was very beautiful at one time and then was ruined by coal mining. The land is sacred in the sense that that’s where my immigrant ancestors settled down, where they lived and died, and that’s where my family flourished,” she said.

From there, O’Donnell made a leap to the idea that parenthood can be holy ground, as can being a sibling. And if one lives a creative life, the bonds one forms with practitioners of the past are also relevant. In the Literary Islands chapter, “Flannery’s Last Day” marks the anniversary of the Aug. 3 death of Flannery O’Connor, whose family trust endowed Fordham with a grant in 2018 to promote scholarship of the writer. 

Today of all days you would show up
making sure you are not forgotten.
Your suffering at the end was true,

The final chapter, Border Songs, was arguably the toughest in which to envision a connection with God, she said. The poems are meant to be “poetry of witness,” a term that the Nobel-prize winning Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz coined to describe his writing about the experience and aftermath of World War II. She wrote the poems in an attempt at accompaniment, as the world watched the horrors at the border unfold during the spring and summer of 2019.

“I felt as though it was important to meditate, to pray for, and to memorialize these people who are forgotten—people who no one cares about, people who are alienated and don’t belong,” she said.

She decided the best form to use was the triolet, a song-like poem which features several lines that are repeated several times.

“The idea is to create this haunting incantatory effect, particularly when the poem is read and listened to out loud,” O’Donnell said. 

One of the first ones she wrote, “Border Song #2,” was inspired by a report that immigrants who were taken into custody were having their rosary beads confiscated. 

They confiscate your rosary when you come.
I cannot go to sleep without one.
Thumbing each bead until the night is done.
They confiscate your rosary when you come.

She penned 15 triolets in short order.

“I didn’t have to look very hard.  Every day, there was a new outrage, a new photograph or quotation that I would see in the news that would trigger another triolet,” she said.

She noted that in his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl declared that God was with him in the concentration camp, “suffering and dying with us every day.”

“That sense of God dwelling in brokenness and in sorrow and horror as well as in the sunny places that we remember happily—that’s part of what this book is about,” she said. 

“There is divinity in everything—even in those dark places that we don’t necessarily want to be. There are times when we have to celebrate the darkness, and some of these poems attempt to do that.”

Teaching While Black: A New Voice on Race and Education in New York City

Originally published in 2016, this memoir by Bronx-born writer, educator, and activist Pamela Lewis, FCRH ’03, has been getting renewed attention amid the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a deeply personal account of her experiences teaching in one of the most racially and economically segregated school systems in the country. Lewis details her frustrations working within a system she feels does not value her own understanding, as a Black woman, of what children of color need to succeed. She writes about the effects of “double consciousness” on her and her students, using the term, coined by W.E.B. Du Bois, that refers to the challenge African Americans face when forced to view themselves through the eyes of those around them. Ultimately, Lewis challenges educators to acknowledge the role race plays in their classrooms and, above all, “to not be color blind.” —Nicole LaRosa

Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor

As a fiction writer whose Catholic faith was a driving force in her work, Flannery O’Connor created “powerful anti racist parables,” writes Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Ph.D., associate director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. And yet, in her personal correspondence, she expressed “attitudes that are hard to describe as anything but patently racist.” In Radical Ambivalence, O’Donnell sets out to explore these contradictions “rather than try to deny, defend, or resolve” them. She helps readers see portrayals of race in O’Connor’s fiction from contemporary, historical, political, and theological perspectives. Although the opportunity for O’Connor’s thinking on race to evolve was cut short—she died from lupus at age 39, just one month after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—O’Donnell ultimately hopes to “focus attention where O’Connor clearly wanted it to be, as evidenced in many of her stories: on the ways in which racism and a racist caste system shape (and misshape) white people, its inventors and perpetrators.” —Ryan Stellabotte

Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan’s Upper West Side

Jim Mackin, FCLC ’76, is a retired financial executive turned New York City historian. As the founder of WeekdayWalks, he often guides people on strolls through offbeat areas of the city. In this richly detailed, photo-filled book, he focuses on his own neighborhood, writing about nearly 600 notable former residents of the Upper West Side. He highlights the famous (Humphrey Bogart, Barack Obama, and others), but he also celebrates the uncommon lives of scientists, explorers, journalists, and judges whose stories should be better known. He calls attention to women whose feats have been unsung, such as pilot Elinor Smith and nuclear physicist Harriet Brooks, and writes about the “Old Community,” a tight-knit African American enclave that counted Marcus Garvey and Billie Holiday among its residents. —Ryan Stellabotte

One year later, O’Donnell, the associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, also began working on a book-length study of race in the writings of O’Connor, whose estate formally endowed the center with a grant in 2017 to sponsor programming exploring the work of the famously reclusive author.

In a case of publishing kismet, both volumes were published earlier this year. Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor was published by Paraclete Press, while Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor, was published by Fordham University Press.

“It was kind of great, because I was getting to use two sides of my brain. There was the analytical side, which was doing research and writing about O’Connor in the context of the history of the time she was living in during the Civil Rights movement and analyzing her letters and her stories,” she said.

“I was also writing these poems, which were an imaginative enterprise in which I would channel O’Connor’s voice, enter into her consciousness, and have a conversation with her about things that mattered. They’re entirely fictional, but at the same time, I think they get at some essential truths about things that O’Connor believed.”

Although O’Connor is celebrated for short stories that she wrote in the 1950s and 1960s, such as those in the compilation Everything That Rises Must Converge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), she was a complicated figure whose attitudes toward African Americans were sometimes problematic.

O’Donnell addressed the issue in her critical biography Fiction Fired by Faith: The Life & Work of Flannery O’Connor (Liturgical Press, 2015), but ultimately felt she needed to dive deeper. For Radical Ambivalence, O’Connor’s estate enabled her to do just that, by allowing her to quote from archival letters that have previously been off-limits to the public.

When she sat down to read them, O’Donnell had already written three-quarters of the roughly 100 sonnets she penned for Andalusian Hours. Reading the letters changed the course of the rest of that volume; the later ones were darker, she said.

“I knew that O’Connor wrote some things that were unsavory, but actually reading them was nonetheless surprising and disturbing,” she said.

“I had to deal with that new understanding of O’Connor at the same time that I was writing these poems, which were much more playful, and not engaged in social issues. They were about things like her work, theological questions, her falling in love, her not getting along with her mother—everyday things about her life.”

“Radical ambivalence,” she said, is how she sums up O’Connor’s attitudes toward African Americans, who she wrote about, but never from their point of view. That was a conscious decision, O’Donnell said, as there was at the time no opportunity for whites such as herself to engage with black and brown people in a normal, natural way. Rather, relationships were governed by an elaborate code in which they spoke with each other in very formal, reserved ways.

“O’Connor often said, ‘I can’t write about characters who are African American, because I don’t understand them. Segregation is segregation,’” O’Donnell said.

“She understands her limitations, so she sticks to those limitations and works within them as well as possible.”

O’Donnell says there are important caveats to keep in mind when reading the letters, not the least of which is that many were written to friends and were therefore much more informal than published stories.

One of those correspondents, a friend born and raised in the South who’d moved to New York City and embraced progressive values such as racial integration. The two played a game where O’Connor would exaggerate and tell racially charged jokes, because she knew they would get a rise out of her friend.

“Reading these letters as a Flannery O’Connor fan, it’s very troubling. She’s very good at telling the jokes; she enjoys them, you can tell. She has a wicked sense of humor,” said O’Donnell.

O’Connor was also surrounded by family and friends who routinely used the N-word, and O’Donnell noted that for a writer whose Catholic faith was a driving force, it’s also noteworthy that she attended a racist church as well. In this area, O’Donnell said she drew inspiration for her book from the work of African-American theologians, including the writings of Bryan Massingale, S.T.D., the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics at Fordham.

“She never received communion from the hands of a black priest, she was never taught by a black nun, and she never worshipped in church with black people. She had no example set for her by her church of how black people ought to be thought about and received into the church,” she said.

In the end, the opportunity for O’Connor’s thinking on the subject of race to evolve was cut short, as she died from lupus one month after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“I’m quite convinced that had she lived past the age of 39, she would have changed her mind and her ways of thinking about the relationship between the races and integration,” O’Donnell said, noting that even George Wallace, the staunchly racist former governor of Alabama, saw the error of his ways at the end of his life.

“My hope is that the effect of the book is to deepen our understanding of her radical ambivalence towards African Americans and towards Civil Rights, an attitude conditioned by the historical and cultural context in which she grew up, and ultimately to deepen our understanding of O’Connor’s writing.”

If Radical Ambivalence is scholarly, Andalusian Hours is theatrical. Each sonnet is prefaced by an epigraph featuring an excerpt from O’Connor’s writing. The poems are chronological, making for an autobiography in verse, written by someone else. Only the final sonnet, “Poem’s Apology,” is written in O’Donnell’s voice, and in it, she writes, “Forgive me for these brief trespasses on your private mind.”

“More than one person has asked me, ‘Don’t you think this is presumptuous of you, to pretend to know the thoughts and words of Flannery O’Connor?’ And my response is, ‘Yes, absolutely, but this is what artists do,’” she said.

“We put ourselves in the position of other human beings and try to imagine who they are and try to clothe their thoughts with words. We’re compelled to do it because we love these people and we want to bring them, with all of their virtues and all of their flaws, to life.”

Suffice to say, this iconic short story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” penned by the writer Flannery O’Connor, does not end well.

On Saturday, Sept. 28, the story will be performed live at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

“Everything That Rises Must Converge: Race & Grace in Flannery O’Connor,” will pair an afternoon symposium with an evening performance of the 1964 story. The event is being hosted by Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, which in May 2018 was awarded a $450,000 grant from the Mary Flannery O’Connor Trust to support programming related to the author.

The day will begin with a panel discussion from 2 to 4 p.m. in Tognino Hall. The panel will be moderated by Curran Center associate director Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Ph.D., and will feature Rufus Burnett, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology at Fordham; Mark Chapman, Ph.D., associate professor of African American Studies at Fordham; and Karin Coonrod, a lecturer in directing at Yale University.

The symposium will be followed by a performance of the story by international theater troupe Compagnia de’ Colombari directed by Karin Coonrod, to take place in Fordham Prep’s Leonard Theatre at 7 p.m. It will be followed by a conversation with the actors.

O’Connor and Race

O’Donnell, whose forthcoming book Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor will be published next spring by Fordham University Press, said one of the reasons why this short story is so interesting is that O’Connor doesn’t paint race relations in black and white.  Instead, she creates characters who have internal complexity and who act out of mixed motivations. Everyone behaves badly, the ending of the story is tragic, and no one escapes some measure of blame.

In the story, the white woman, who has insisted her son accompany her on the bus since it was integrated, says in her conversations with him that African Americans shouldn’t mix with whites. She nevertheless engages with the son of the black woman when they sit next to them, and when she offers the boy a penny, his mother reacts with deadly fury to the white woman’s condescension.

“I’ve been teaching the story for many years, and it’s gotten more and more challenging to  discuss as the years have gone by, as we have a better sense of the tensions and dynamics that govern the relationships between African Americans and whites, both past and present,” she said.

The Myth of ‘White Innocence’

What’s complicated the task, she said, is the fact that while O’Connor possessed an ability—thanks to time spent living in the Northeast and the Midwest—to critique the white supremacy baked into the society in which she was raised, and excelled at writing about the relationship between African Americans and whites, she ultimately ascribes a quality of innocence to the benighted white woman in the story. The woman’s racism is not represented as a virulent force, based in violence and perpetuated by violence, but as a mistaken perspective.

In contrast to this, O’Donnell noted that during the same era O’Connor was writing her story, James Baldwin wrote that racial equality will only be achieved when the myth of “white innocence” is put to rest.

“That’s a concept that we in our time are getting a better handle on, but it’s not a perspective that O’Connor found compelling,” she said.

In fact, O’Donnell argues in her book that despite her best intentions, there are times when O’Connor subconsciously upholds some of the unjust racial practices of the South.

“It’s pretty clear that her sense was that the civil rights movement was very problematic, in part because of the insistence on the part of African Americans that desegregation take place immediately. For O’Connor, as for many white Southerners, the changes were happening too fast and threatened to undermine society. In addition, like most Catholics, O’Connor had a long view of history,” she said.

“[She felt that] you don’t change human nature and you don’t change society overnight by creating new laws. She thought it should be something that happens organically and slowly, and not all at once.”

The story is relevant in 2019, O’Donnell said, because it gives us an opportunity to understand how complex it was to live in that culture and in that time, to understand how fraught it was and how difficult it is for any society to change—a principle that applies to our own current cultural moment.

‘A Powerful Communal Experience’

O’Donnell attended a previous staged production of the story, which takes its dialogue verbatim from O’Connor’s pages. She said the transformation of a story read privately on the page to a drama performed publicly on the stage makes for a powerful communal experience.

“It’s a very interesting experience to witness this play, because as we are watching these characters sitting on the makeshift bus, fighting among themselves, we feel like we are on that bus, too, as it becomes a microcosm of America” she said.

“We are still fighting many of the same battles that we were fighting in 1964; they’re just no longer happening on the bus. They’re happening in other places.”

The event is free and open to the public, though registration is required. To register, visit the Curran Center’s event page.

The documentary, which tells the story of O’Connor through the eyes of contemporary writers and artists such as Tommy Lee Jones, Alice Walker, and Alice McDermott, is a mix of interviews, animation, and never-before-shown archival footage of O’Connor, whose life was cut short by illness in 1964, when she was 39.

The screening was followed by a discussion with the filmmakers, Mark Bosco, S.J., vice president for mission and ministry at Georgetown University, and Elizabeth Coffman, Ph.D. associate professor of communication at Loyola University of Chicago. The discussion was moderated by James Martin, S.J., editor at large of America Magazine, which co-sponsored the event, and attended by members of O’Connor’s family, including her cousin Francis Florencourt, Catherine and Randy Man, and Robert and Susan Mann.

A Rich Internal Life

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Ph.D., associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, the primary sponsor of the event, said that although O’Connor was forced to spend a great deal of time at her family’s farm in rural Georgia after she was diagnosed with lupus, her rich internal life provided more than enough grist for the film. O’Donnell, an O’Connor scholar who appears in the film, told the audience that the Flannery O’Connor Trust has bequeathed a grant of $450,000 to the Curran Center for use in programming related to the renowned author.

“Flannery O’Connor was doubtful her story would be worth writing a book about. She would likely be astonished to learn that not only was her life interesting enough to be the subject of multiple biographies, but was also exciting enough to make a movie about,” she said.

In their discussion, the filmmakers touched on topics as varied as the logistical challenges of making a film about a writer who appears in few pictures and even fewer films, the darkness of her writing, and her complicated relationship to the civil rights movement.

A Hidden Pain

Father Bosco said O’Connor’s reputation for a bleak outlook is easier to understand when one takes a fuller look at her life. Despite the fact that her father died of lupus when she was 15, when she herself began showing symptoms while living just outside New York City, her diagnosis was hidden from her for several years. Stints at the University of Iowa’s prestigious writing workshop and the Yaddo artist community in Saratoga Springs illustrated her enormous potential to be a larger part of the literary community at the time, but the disease forced her to retreat to her family’s farm in Milledgeville, Georgia.

“From the outside, she just looks difficult and hard, but once you get the key, it opens the door to all her stories, and you can just go deeper and deeper and deeper into them. And I think that that’s what we were trying to do with telling her life,” said Father Bosco, whose scholarship focuses much of his work on the intersection of theology and art in the British and American Catholic literary tradition.

“I teach Flannery O’Connor all the time, and when I tell them she was this Catholic woman who went to Mass every single day, they’re really surprised.”

Coffman, a film scholar and active documentary filmmaker, said it was also important to remember that she was diagnosed when she was 25, but lived another 14 years.

“Seeing how much work she created between then—you know, she really wrote with a death sentence over her head. She was so stoic about her illness, and rarely spoke about it, but she lived with it, and you see it coming out in her fiction,” she said.

Complicated Relation to Civil Rights

The panelists also addressed the fact that O’Connor chose to largely sit out the civil rights protests that were raging across Georgia at the time. Father Martin noted that O’Connor, when informed that Dorothy Day had arrived to support Koinonia, an integrated Christian community of farmers living in Americus, Georgia, responded, “All my thoughts on this subject are ugly and uncharitable—such as: that’s a mighty long way to come to get shot at, etc.”

O’Connor also chose not to meet James Baldwin when he came to Georgia, because she feared it would create a scandal and alter her public identity, and thus make it more difficult for her to observe and write about Southern culture.

“It’s not about covering up anything, nor is it ignoring what she was born into and the culture she lived in. I know that culture. I grew up in it too,” Coffman said.

“She was starting to confront it in her fiction. I may have started the research process with some questions about the potential racism, but I ended up feeling that with [stories such as]  Revelation, she worked through it.”

Bosco agreed, noting that O’Connor saw civil rights as a slow evolution and was very put off by Northerners coming down and telling Southerners how to solve their social problems.

“We have feminists who both love and hate Flannery O’Connor. You have people in race theory who love Flannery O’Connor and hate Flannery O’Connor, and write about her,” he said.

“We are delighted to be afforded this opportunity to serve as stewards of the endowment and to promote the work of America’s most distinguished Catholic writer,” said Alaimo O’Donnell, “and to help shape the future of Catholic literary studies.”

The Curran Center’s application was one of several submitted when the trust conducted a search for a university or center for Catholic studies to house the endowment. The application was accepted last December, and a formal agreement was signed on May 15.

The nearly $450,000 in funds—$50,000 a year for nine years—will allow the Curran Center to sponsor conferences, symposia, and other events that promote scholarship devoted to O’Connor and to Catholic writers who have left a mark on the American canon. A portion of the money will be used for programming while the remaining funds will continue to build the endowment.

Alaimo O’Donnell said trustees of the estate were impressed with the Curran Center’s work promoting Catholic writers, particularly last year’s conference, “The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination,” which featured 60 Catholic writers and attracted 400 attendees, and the 2012 symposium, “Still Alive at 60: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.”

For her part, Alaimo O’Donnell, has delved deep into the Catholic legacy of O’Connor in her book, Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith (Liturgical Press, 2015). She said that O’Connor has served as a gateway to literature for many Catholics who might not otherwise have found their way to the rich body of work written by Catholics. She described O’Connor as a Southern and Catholic writer, though not particularly influenced by her Irish heritage. The author’s work and life are also of great interest in the field of disabilities studies, Alaimo O’Donnell said, since she was diagnosed with lupus at the age of 26. She would die of the disease 13 years later.

“She lived with the daily reality of death; she lived the cross,” said Alaimo O’Donnell. “She wrote like her life depended on it, because it did. Writing kept her alive.”

The disease forced O’Connor to abandon the social aspects of her fledgling career, which included a post-graduate fellowship at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a residency at Yaddo, the famed artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York.

In the course of her career she would complete two novels and 31 short stories, most famously “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” She also wrote hundreds of letters, several to well-known literary figures, including her friend Robert Lowell and poet Elizabeth Bishop, and many to people who were not so well known, like Elizabeth Hester, a file clerk who admired O’Connor’s work. The letters were compiled after her death in a book titled The Habit of Being.

“She knew she was good,” said Alaimo O’Donnell. “Some writers stumble around trying to find their subject and their voice, but not O’Connor. Even in her letters she knew she was writing for posterity.”