(NOTE TO EDITORS: Director Karin Coonrod can be reached at the Holiday Inn of Iowa City, 319-337-4058, or through the UI department of theatre arts, 319-335-2700.)

Flannery O'Connor's words come home to the UI in 'Everything That Rises Must Converge'

IOWA CITY, Iowa -- The spirit of Flannery O'Connor will return to the University of Iowa, where she attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the 1940s, when University Theatres Mainstage presents the world premiere of "Everything That Rises Must Converge, " a staging of three of her short stories, at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5 in the David Thayer Theatre of the UI Theatre Building. Additional performances will be at 8 p.m. Nov. 6, 7 and 11-14 and at 3 p.m. Sundays,
Nov. 8 and 15.

Guest director Karin Coonrod from New York is this season's Partnership in the Arts guest artist in the UI department of theatre arts. Partnership in the Arts invites prominent theater professionals to the UI to develop significant new works for the theater in collaboration with UI students, faculty and staff.

Coonrod stresses that the three stories -- "Everything That Rises Must Converge," "A View of the Woods" and "Greenleaf" -- will be presented in their entirety. "I did not want to do an adaptation," she says. "I wanted to take all of her words, which I think are absolutely stunning, and put them on stage. It's an exciting and very demanding process to get all those words on stage."

For Coonrod, bringing the stories of Flannery O'Connor to the stage has been a long-held dream, but the O'Connor estate has been very protective of her work. Permission for theatricalization had not been granted for decades, and even the prestigious New York Theatre Workshop was unable to secure permission for Coonrod to proceed.

"They're very protective, and rightfully so; the work is very special," Coonrod says." Her laugh is a huge laugh, and the ferocity with which she brings her vision to completion is something that is so compelling that when you finish one of her stories it never leaves you.

"It's deeply exciting that they let me do this. I had a long conversation with the estate on the phone and I assured them that I wanted to bring all the words to the stage. They were amazed that could possibly happen, and I said, 'I know it's madness, but I think that it can be done, I have a hunch, I have a deep hunch that it can happen.' "

O'Connor wrote about the South, and her characters speak in distinctly southern vernaculars, but Coonrod says that O'Connor's years in Iowa -- one of her few sojourns outside of Georgia -- had a profound effect on her career. "She was very inspired by her time in Iowa," Coonrod points out.

"The first collection of short stories came out from Iowa, and it was in Iowa that I think she made a shift. She was certainly experimenting with things that she didn't know so well and realized that she needed to concentrate on what she really knew. It's the South meets eternity."

O'Connor received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Writers' Workshop in 1947, but workshop director Paul Engle found funds to support her for an additional year so that she could work on her first novel, "Wise Blood."

Her career was cut short by lupus, but she became regarded as one of the most important voices in American literature. O'Connor was honored by a Kenyon Review fellowship in fiction, a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in literature and First Prize in the O. Henry Memorial Awards. The honors continued after her death in 1964, with the National Book Award for "The Complete Short Stories" and a National Critics Circle Award.

Coonrod says that apart from simply managing the mass of words, the challenge of transferring O'Connor's stories to the stage is balancing the dialogue and the narration. "There are the characters, who emerge with different kinds of southern accents, and then there's the narration, which is extremely carnivalesque and multi-voiced and funny," she says. "I thought that the stuff of theatre and the stuff of the Flannery O'Connor short story, with this wild cacophony of voices, could really work with actors. I clearly wanted to face the music to see if this could happen. I think it fleshes out beautifully in the theater."

She credits the acting ensemble with bringing the skill and commitment necessary to make the project a success. The UI actors range from undergraduates to faculty member Eric Forsythe, a veteran actor of stage, film and television. From New York, Coonrod brought one of her long-time acting colleagues, Ledlie Borgerhoff." It's a beautiful group," Coonrod says. "I'm really impressed with this ensemble."

Other artistic contributors to the production are set designer Chris Cook, costume designer Erin Howell-Gritsch, lighting designer Kelly PerkinsSmith (stet), sound designer Lindsay Kem, and dramaturg Robb Gries.

Tickets for "Everything That Rises Must Converge" are $15 ($7 for UI students, senior citizens and youth). Tickets are available in advance from the Hancher Auditorium box office. Any remaining tickets for each performance will be on sale one hour before curtain time at the Theatre Building box office. Tickets may also be purchased at a substantial discount as part of a three-play University Theatres Mainstage season package.

Hancher box office hours are 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. weekdays, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday and

1-3 p.m. Sunday. From the local calling area or outside Iowa, dial (319) 335-1160. Long distance within Iowa and western Illinois is toll-free, 1-800-HANCHER. Fax to (319) 353-2284. Orders may be charged to VISA, MasterCard or American Express. UI students may charge their purchases to their university bills, and UI faculty and staff may select the option of payroll deduction.

People with special needs should dial (319) 335-1158. The line is equipped with TDD for people with hearing impairment who use that technology.

For information on UI arts, visit http://www.uiowa.edu/~uiowacr/ on the World Wide Web.

The Holiday Inn of Iowa City is the corporate sponsor of Partnership in the Arts.

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(NOTE TO EDITORS: This is an except from the article "Flannery O'Connor: A Reminiscence and Some Letters" by Jean Wylder, published in the North American Review, Spring, 1970. It is intended as a sidebar to the story slugged "Flannery O'Connor's words come home to the UI in 'Everything That Rises Must Converge'." Use of the text, or any part of it, must credit the North American Review and the author.)

My first impression of Flannery O'Connor was that she looked too young and too shy to be a writer. We were graduate students at the University of Iowa and members of Paul Engle's Writers' Workshop during the fall and spring semesters of 1947 and 1948. On the opening day of class, Flannery was sitting alone in the front row, over against the wall. She was wearing what I was soon to think of as her "uniform" for that year: plain gray skirt and neatly ironed silkish blouse, nylon stockings and penny brown loafers. Her only makeup was a trace of lipstick. Elizabeth Hardwick once described her as "like some quiet, puritanical convent girl from the harsh provinces of Canada"; there was something of the convent about Flannery that day -- a certain intentness in the slight girlish figure which set her apart from the rest of us. She seemed out of place in that room composed mostly of veterans returned from World War II. Flannery was only 22 years old then, but she could easily have pas!sed for 17 or 18.

I don't believe she was to change very much in the next 17 years before her death. In the later photographs, showing her on the aluminum crutches that became a permanent part of her life, there remains that same schoolgirl freshness, a young gentleness in her face and expression. Only in the unsmiling eyes of the stern self-portrait is there evidence of the Flannery who wrote blood-curdling fiction.

It was her isolation from the other "writers" in the class that first drew me to her, and soon that semester I moved to the empty seat beside her. We and one other girl, Clyde McCleod (her father had named her Clyde), were the only women in the Workshop that year. Most of the others, the former GI's were tuned-in to New Criticism theories, and many sensitive young writers got shot down by the heavy onslaught of their critical fire. Stories were dissected like so many literary specimens; few stood up under the minute probing. Many years later when Flannery was speaking to a writing class at Hollins College in Virginia, I'm sure she was remembering those Workshop sessions at Iowa when she said, "Every time a story of mine appears in a freshman anthology, I have a vision of it, with its little organs laid open, like a frog in a bottle."

Sometime late that first semester I learned that Flannery had received the MFA degree the year before and that she had already published one story. "The Geranium," the title story in her MFA thesis, had appeared in "Accent" in the summer of 1946. And "The Train," also from the thesis, was scheduled to come out in "Sewanee Review" the next spring. Flannery was staying on at Iowa for another year because Paul Engle had gotten her a grant of money to live on while she worked on her first novel. The one person I had thought to look least like a writer on the opening day of Workshop had turned out to be the most promising writer there! From then on, I may have looked forward more to sitting beside Flannery than to the Workshop itself which, in those days, was something like going to a good movie. Writers read their own stories, sitting at the front of the room.

Flannery never entered into the Workshop discussions. I heard that when she was first in the Workshop in 1945, before she had published anything, her stories had not been well received and she had not tried to defend them. The only comment I every heard her make in class was the next spring. Andrew Lytle was in charge that semester during Paul Engle's absence from campus, and he asked her what she thought of the story we were discussing that day. By then, most of the students knew she was already a published writer; everyone in the room wanted to hear what she would say. In a perfectly dead-pan voice, addressing herself to the general emptiness of the front of the room, came her laconic reply: "I'd say the description of that crocodile in there was real good." The irony of Flannery's statement lay in the fact that the crocodile was the best thing in the story but had absolutely no meaning in the texture of the story itself. She had said all there was to say -- but she would have never offered that much if Mr. Lytle hadn't asked her.

I saw Flannery very little that fall except at the Monday afternoon Workshop sessions and occasionally on Sunday noon at the Mad Hatter Tea Room that used to be up over Bremer's Clothing Store, where I worked as salad girl. Flannery's boarding house didn't serve meals on Sunday, and so she came there. I can remember meeting her only twice on the campus or the street. Once she was going to the library to check out "Dead Souls." She said Robie Macauley recommended that book as one every writer should read, "so I reckon I'd better do it." (Years later she was to say that she supposed Gogol was an influence.) And the other time she was coming out of Woolworth's Five and Ten Cent Store where she had bought one cake of Palmolive soap. (I've thought about that single purchase since then, and it seems to me it says something about the uncluttered life she always lived. I doubt if Flannery ever bought two of anything at one time, unless it were peacocks or swans or bantam chicks. Her room at Iowa, when I saw it that one time, expressed the same kind of monastic simplicity: the neatly made bed, the typewriter waiting on the desk. There was nothing extraneous in that room except for a box of vanilla wafers beside the typewriter. She nibbled on cookies while she wrote, she said, because she didn't smoke.)

My friendship with Flannery continued the next semester. I would have liked to have gone to the movies with her or had a Coke with her, but it simply didn't occur to me that things like that could ever be a part of her life. I did, however, begin to consider myself her closest friend on the campus. Her favorite place to go in Iowa City was out to the City Park. Once, I walked out there with her on an especially bleak February Sunday afternoon to look at the two sad and mangy bears, the raccoons, and the special foreign chickens they had. It seemed a particularly desultory thing to be doing, and I was puzzled at how completely absorbed and interested Flannery was that day looking at these things which I knew she'd looked at many times before. She was still working on the novel then, of course (which was to be "Wise Blood"), although she never talked about it, and I knew nothing at that time about the zoo and park scenes in that book until I read it a few years later. But, I al!so realize now, her fondness for the zoo went beyond the fact that she may have been getting "material" for her work. Years later, in letters to me, she was to recall the City Park as almost the only asset Iowa City had to offer. The following letters begins with a comment on Iowa City housing and is dated December 28, 1952. She wrote:

. . . I remember those boarding houses in Iowa City very well and all the cold rooms I looked at. My landlady, Mrs. Guzeman (at 115 E. Bloomington Street), was not very fond of me because I stayed at home and required heat to be on -- at least ON. It was never UP that I remember. When it was on you could smell it and I got to where I warmed up a little every time I smelled it. One of these days I would like to see Iowa City again, but only for the zoo where those game bantams were and the bears donated by the Iowa City Lions Club. I am raising peafowl myself. They are beautiful; and contrary and expensive but I justify the expense on the grounds that I don't smoke or drink liquor or chew tobacco or have any bad habits that cost money. . . . One of these days I hope they'll be all over the place. . . .

That spring in the Workshop I heard Flannery read for the first time. It was a chapter from the novel she was working on and had made into a short story for the occasion (although it turned out to be for all time, since no trace of it ever turned up in either of her novels.) She called the story "The Woman on the Stairs," and it was under this title that it was published the following year in the August 1949 Tomorrow. Although the story has since been described as perhaps the most purely comic of any of her stories, the odyssey of Ruby Hill on the stairs, this woman "shaped nearly like a funeral urn," proclaims the sorry human state which underlies most of her characters who supposed that they are in control of like and are calling all the shots.

In many of the stories Flannery was to write later, she permits a moment of vision to descend on the main character -- very like the Joycean epiphany -- in which he may see himself clearly for the first time. The moment of insight, when her characters see themselves as sinning beings, comes from the working of grace for them. It is achieved through things which cannot be predicted. It is something mysterious which cannot be elucidated. Grace comes to the Grandmother of "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" in her recognition of the Misfit as her own child. It comes to Mr. Head of "The Artificial Nigger" through the artificial nigger, and to Mrs. Turpin of "Revelation" in the pig pen. But it does not come to Ruby Hill as she sits at the top of the stairs looking "down into the dark hole, down to the very bottom where she had started up so long ago," for she hears only the leery echo of her own empty words. Ruby Hill then may be one of Flannery O'Connor's truly damned characters, and the story, although exemplifying elements of the purely comic, becomes tragical in the sense that the character is denied any glimpse of self-understanding, and therefore salvation. She sits at the top of the stairs literally full of nothing, feeling the roll in her stomach " . . . as if it were not in her stomach. It was as if it were out somewhere in nothing, out nowhere, resting and waiting with plenty of time."

But few, if any, of us knew that afternoon in the Workshop when Flannery read this story that it was about original sin, that her vision embraced the early Christian concept of man's loss of innocence with the rejection of his first parents from the Garden, that she really did believe in evil and damnation and redemption. We knew none of these things, and I, for one, did not even know that day -- and not until several years later -- that Flannery O'Connor was a Roman Catholic.

Why then were we so strangely moved by her reading that afternoon which I suppose was the most memorable Monday the Workshop has ever had, before or since? As I remember her voice now, its slight Southern drawl enhancing the country idiom she was just beginning to perfect and was always to use, both in her characters' dialogue and as a kind of indirect discourse, and giving a humorous reinforcement to the irony in that story, I realize that her stories are always intensely oral in the highest sense of the story-telling art. It is a great loss that no recordings were made of Flannery reading her fiction. But, of course, her voice alone could not account for the feeling we had that afternoon that we were in the presence of a significant writer.

I think now it was because her lonely fiction magnifies the drab and the colorless, and we were stirred to a recognition of ourselves in the human predicament. Flannery considered herself a realist above all else. Her characters, no matter how freakish and bizarre they may seem on the surface, or how commonplace and white trashy -- no matter how unsettling -- speak home dark truths and, if anything, become almost too lifelike. As Ruby Hill climbs the dark step stairs, fighting off the knowledge of her pregnancy which she equates with death, so do we all in some lonely moment of our lives struggle with the old paradox that life begets death. We, too, live in the funeral "urns" of our bodies.

After Flannery finished reading the story, we sat there until Andrew Lytle gave meaning to our silence by saying Workshop was over for the day. For once, there was not going to be any critical dissecting. Flannery disappeared out the door to go back to her room upstairs at Mrs. Guzeman's. Most of the others took off for the Brown Derby on Dubuque Street, which was the writers' hang-out that semester. The Workshop afternoon was over. That he had said nothing about Flannery's story was a tribute to her genius. But I and Clyde McCleod wanted there to be something more -- some more tangible token of our admiration. We went around Iowa City on that late spring afternoon, walking into people's yards as if they were public domain, to gather arms full of flowering branches, taking only the most beautiful, and we carried them up to Flannery.

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