Mary Gauthier

If you’ve been watching the new PBS series Case Histories, you very likely have heard Mary’s song “Mercy Now”.

On their home page for the show, they are featuring Mary and her music.  Check it out!

I’ve been re-reading Flannery  O’Conners Mystery and Manners, a collection of her unpublished essays and lectures,   brilliantly edited by her lifelong friends Robert and Sally Fitzgerald. This book is  a must read for her fans, but I think everyone who reads or writes would get something from reading this collection. Her wit and her wisdom shine like diamonds in the sun, and I find myself laughing out loud as I read this book again for the third time. Here’s a great paragraph about about writing fiction.

” One of the most common and saddest spectacles is that of a person of really fine sensibility and acute psychological perception trying to write fiction by using these qualities alone. This type of writer will put down one intensely emotional or keenly perceptive sentence after the other, and the result will be complete dullness. The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.”

Is this perfection or what?

The same things that Flannery says about writing fiction can be said of songwriting. Tom Waits says the songwriter is the Queen of the Teacup, the  King of the Thimble. In other words, it’s all the seemingly little things that matter most in a song. They add up to a great story, or they don’t. They make you feel, or they don’t. For me, the hard work of songwriting is finding the patience to sort through all of my BIG and GRAND ideas, sift them and sift them again until I end up with the bits of dust that matter most. A great song, like a great book, is not a collection of great lines, nor is it  a collection of  ”acute psychological perceptions”.  An artist creates a world for the reader/listener to enter into, and it’s done by the careful and deliberate use of small details, speaking with character and action, not about character and action. It’s hard, emotionally exhausting work, and as Flannery puts in Mystery and Manners:

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It’s a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system. If a writer is not sustained by the hope of money, then she must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or she simply won’t survive the ordeal.”

ditto songwriting.

The hope of being of some kind of service, to ones self, to truth itself, to other soul’s out there in the dark looking for connection, or as Flannery puts it, salvation, is the  sustenance most artists live on. It’s gotta be enough, or there’s no point even getting into the business of writing. If money is what you’re looking for, there’s about a billion easier ways to make money than writing. It was true in the 1950′s, when Flannery wrote these essays, and it’s even truer now.

Enough of that..here’s a true  treasure, it’s Flannery O’Conner at Vanderbilt University reading from her novel  A Good Man Is Hard To Find

and here: Flannery O’Conner reading “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Literature”

The internet is fantastic for treasures like this, enjoy!