English Teacher Weekly for Mar. 27th

Hans Emmenegger, Whirlwind

Welcome to English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities.

This week’s edition comes to you from the local coffee shop I escape to after school about once a week. It’s a little treat I like to give myself. I was served a hot cup of coffee from a beloved former student of mine who’s taking a gap year. A year as a barista isn’t a bad way to go, baking muffins, roasting coffee beans, chatting up the locals. Honorable work. Another former student was in line behind me who I hadn’t seen in about 15 years. She just got engaged. She was radiant.

It’s a joy to be a part of a community that grows in concentric circles over time. The heart of the teaching life is in the classroom, of course, but the depth of it, the unspoken part of it, comes from the movement of those souls whom you knew as students as they carry on with their lives. Every so often you get to be a part of it again. Each time it’s a blessing.

Although the overwhelming majority of ETWs are free for all, this one is for our paid subscribers. It’s my little treat to them for sponsoring my cups of coffee. Thank you for the support! It’s because of you that this project keeps running.

(If you would like a comped subscription to access the archives, etc., just send me a message. Don’t hesitate, especially if you’re a student, Substack creator, or a tightly-budgeted teacher like me.)

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Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 self-portrait via the NYT

Flannery O’Connor at 100

Flannery O’Connor’s 100th birthday was this past Tuesday. Here’s a tribute from Jamie Quatro, author of Two Step Devil, for The Paris Review. She takes a close look at the paintings of Blair Hobbs, whose recent exhibition in Atlanta features work inspired by the iconic writer. Quatro also considers what O’Connor’s childhood must have been like in Milledgeville, Georgia, during the mid-1920s:

Mary Flannery was born on the Feast of the Annunciation, the day marking the angel Gabriel’s announcement that Mary would bear the Christ child. O’Connor’s Irish Catholic parents, Edward and Regina, bracketed this festal birth by having her baptized on Easter Sunday, three weeks later. Each time I’ve visited O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, I’ve been moved by the Kiddie-Koop crib beneath the window in Regina’s bedroom, facing the twin green spires of Saint John the Baptist, the O’Connors’ church. The “crib” is a rectangular box with screens enclosing the four sides and the top. The cagelike design—a chicken coop for babies, really—was meant to allow mothers to leave children unattended. “Danger or Safety—Which?” one Kiddie-Koop advertisement read.

I can’t help picturing O’Connor as a toddler growing up “in the shadow of the church,” literally and figuratively, standing in the Koop and peering through a double scrim of screen and windowpanes. When her eyesight failed, she began wearing thick corrective lenses—another layer of remove. And when she contracted the lupus that killed her father, her body itself became a kind of cage. “The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place,” she wrote to her friend Sister Mariella Gable one month before her passing at the age of thirty-nine.

Jonathan Rogers

, author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor and

The Habit Weekly

newsletter, offers this reflection on O’Connor’s unique place in American literature:

In common usage, “like something out of Flannery O’Connor” is a license not to take a person or situation very seriously. But O’Connor DID take her grotesque characters seriously. “They seem to carry an invisible burden,” she wrote; “their fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity.” When we gawk at O’Connor’s characters and mock them, it is easy to assume that O’Connor must be mocking them too. We should be open to the possibility, however, that O’Connor is mocking US. In The Violent Bear It Away, Old Tarwater is a self-appointed prophet with a penchant for baptizing children without their parents’ or guardians’ approval. His nephew, the enlightened schoolteacher Rayber, is convinced that the old man is insane. The reader is inclined to agree. O’Connor, not so much. “The modern reader will identify himself with the schoolteacher,” she wrote, “but it is the old man who speaks for me.”

Here are a few podcasts episodes to celebrate O’Connor’s centenary:

A lot more to come after the jump!