This is not how I planned to spend my summer. I wanted to sit by the pool and get a break from writing. After all, I told myself, it’s time to relax: You’ve written five books in nine years!

But it doesn’t look like I will get to the pool very much this summer.  So far, I’ve been hunkered down in my study, putting the finishing touches on a book about Flannery O’Connor, a book that almost didn’t happen – and would not have taken shape if it weren’t for the kindness of other writers who took the time to read an early draft and give me honest suggestions.

Some comments were a bit painful, but all of them helped me make some huge improvements. Now the editor at St. Benedict Press is having a go at the third (or is it the fourth?) draft, and I am again feeling the blows, most of them gentle, but all of them quite real, to my ego as a writer.

This man can take some of my choppiest sentences and give them a fluid feel. He can ask questions that I should have answered before, but now I go running to hunt down the answers in the hundreds of letters that Flannery published.

I am not writing a book about her stories, but about Flannery as a Catholic woman living in the Bible Belt. In college, I studied her soul-shaking fiction, but my professors studiously avoided the Catholic undercurrents, no doubt embarrassed by her deep faith.  Although some biographers have skimmed the surface of her day-to-day practice of Catholicism, it seemed the right time to plunge deeper.

I have almost given up on this book numerous times. When I had the first draft mostly completed, I realized that the process of doing the research had greatly exhausted me, and in truth, I am not really a researcher at heart. I don’t suffer footnotes gladly. I cringe at microfilm reels.  Besides, I had started writing fiction myself, and the nonfiction made it harder to unlock that other side of my brain, the one where fictional characters lurk, just waiting to be let loose on the page.

I stuffed the manuscript away in a closet. I told my husband I would abandon it. But this book on Flannery’s faith kept calling out to me — or was it Flannery herself? She has been dissected and probed by so many critics, and her stories have been taken apart, limb by limb. In her day, “nice” people shuddered at the violence in her stories, and today I have heard similar complaints: people confiding that her stories are just a bit too unsettling, a bit too graphic for their taste.

And the stories are dark, no doubt about it. There are self-proclaimed preachers who blind themselves, children who commit suicide, and families that get massacred at the roadside. But Flannery never wrote about these folks just for shock value, although perhaps she did want to separate the complacent from their cozy little clichés and comfortable categories. She knew she was writing for an audience that no longer believed in God, and so she had to shout into their ears and shake them by their collars to wake them up.

She did it because of her own deep faith in what was real beneath the surface of ordinary life: the Incarnation, the crucifixion and the Resurrection. If her stories were shocking, so are the Gospels with beheadings, stonings, lepers, paralytics, and the demon-possessed. Shocking too is the fact of God becoming man and dying on the Cross. But without that abiding shake-up in history there would be no salvation, and so Flannery wrote to show how grace works in our lives. It often comes from the Cross. It often comes when God hits us on the head to wake us up.

In her own life, the Cross was real: She suffered from the symptoms of lupus as well as the side-effects from strong medications, and died from the disease at age 39. She never married and had no children, but she left a powerful legacy in her books.

She died in the summer of 1964, on a blistering hot day in August, with unfinished stories hidden beneath her pillow. She lived not too far from where I live today. I have felt very close to her while writing this book, and not always in a comfortable way. At times I’ve felt her clucking her tongue at me or prodding me to do better. “Get rid of that cliché, for heaven’s sake” and “You need to come up with something better than THAT!”

The book will be published by St. Benedict Press this fall, as a testimony to God’s grace working in my life. After that, I plan to write me some fiction.  Let some of those pent-up characters loose on the page. No footnotes, but maybe some good, solid shocking moments.