Impossible

In 1946, a creative writing student in Iowa City begins a prayer journal. She writes in the first prayer in the notebook: “I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.” The very next sentence: “I want very much to succeed in the world with what I want to do” (O'Connor, 2013, p. 3). How can the student want both to push herself aside and to succeed? She puts God in an impossible position here, asking that He both “push [her] aside” and attend to her wish for success. At the same time, of course, she is showing her great faith in His problem-solving skills: whom else could one expect to resolve these mutually contradictory demands?

What the student wants to do had come very much to the fore in the year before she began this journal, when she arrived in Iowa City, enrolled as a journalism student. In the first weeks of her first semester at the university, she walked into the office of the director of the creative writing program to ask if she could sit in on classes there. “I am not a journalist,” she informed him, her accent so thick she had to write down what she was trying to say. “Can I come to the Writers' Workshop?” (Gooch, 2009, p. 117). By the next semester she had left the journalism school altogether and enrolled as a full-time student in the creative writing program.

The student was Flannery O'Connor, who would become one of the most durable American writers of the mid-twentieth century. At the time she began the journal she was a 22-year-old Roman Catholic from the Deep South of the United States—a decidedly disenfranchised minority in the 1940s. She was the daughter of an unsuccessful businessman who had tried to sell real estate in Georgia until succumbing to the disease that would kill him when his daughter was 15 years old (and her as well, when she was 39). At the time she began the prayer journal, she was enrolled as a full-time student in the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop for almost a year and was starting t