Flannery O’Connor was accepted to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1945 and obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1947. She was then offered a post-doctoral fellowship at the Workshop and spent another year in Iowa City.

The story of her arrival at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, situated at the beginning of theComplete Stories, is many readers’ first image of the eccentrically named author: a woman, plainspoken, charming, shy and yet sure of her self, and with good reason, the story suggests, for she had been exceptional all along.

Her scholarship was is journalism, but she called on the director of the Writers’ Workshop, named Paul Engle, and made a special request in her best Deep South voice. He asked her to say it again. She did so. He looked at her as if she had spoken in tongues. The he gave her pad and pencil and asked her to write it down. In her schoolteacherly script, she explained herself: My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writers’ Workshop? 

 

Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.

Flannery O’Connor’s master thesis, “The Geranium: a Collection of Short Stories,” is held in Special Collections at the University of Iowa Main Library. The thesis contains several of Flannery’s now famous stories, including the eponymous “The Geranium,” which was the first story ever published by her. Flannery would go on to rewrite and republish this story four times, finally including it as part of her most famous collection Everything that Rises Must Converge. Flannery submitted this thesis to the Graduate College in June, 1947.

Flannery O’Connor 1925-1964 was accepted to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1945 and obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1947. She was then offered a post-doctoral fellowship at the Workshop and spent another year in Iowa City.

The story of her arrival at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, situated at the beginning of the Complete Stories, is many readers’ first image of the eccentrically named author: a woman, plainspoken, charming, shy and yet sure of her self, and with good reason, the story suggests, for she had been exceptional all along.

 

Her scholarship was is journalism, but she called on the director of the Writers’ Workshop, named Paul Engle, and made a special request in her best Deep South voice. He asked her to say it again. She did so. He looked at her as if she had spoken in tongues. The he gave her pad and pencil and asked her to write it down. In her schoolteacherly script, she explained herself: My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writers’ Workshop? 

 

Flannery O’Connor’s home away from home did not turn out to be the Currier house. […] Instead she found the antidote for her homesickness two blocks away at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, on East Jefferson Street.

During her graduate years at the University of Iowa, 1945-47, Flanney O’Connor lived at Currier House, a dorm for women, where she shared a room with two other students:

At Currier House, she lived with a couple of rumba-loving suitemates who cranked up volume on the record player. While remaining friendly toward them, she soon relished their weekend departures.