Outside of Milledgeville, Georgia, was the ClineOConnor farm, Andalusia. Seated on the veranda in a rocking chair overlooking the sloping hills was a badly crippled woman, slowly degenerating from lupus, living with a mother who loved her but was not on her wavelength, and living in a town largely unable to appreciate her at the time. She had a difficult hand to play. Her name is Flannery OConnor, and she always did her own thing. The truth is, Flannery was a complex and mysterious female writer who had a deep desire for mystery and privacy of self. So if there are things we do not know about her, so what? And if she would not eat eggs of chickens she personally knew, what of it? Should genius not be allowed some endearing personal and private idiosyncrasies? She did her thing. I am writing how I knew her and how I saw her and what she meant to me as a writer and thinker and believer. I would not have Good Sister Flannery, whom I saw as a nun without a habit, not be recognized as the virtuous as well as talented person and teacher she was. I had much unalloyed admiration of her, but how the reader sees her must be ultimately left up to the reader. I knew her and saw her as a part of the larger picture of Gods grace, which is working everywhere. By sharing some of these memories of her, I am very imperfectly trying to pass on some of the knowledge and humor she shared with me.
Outside of Milledgeville, Georgia, was the ClineOConnor farm, Andalusia. Seated on the veranda in a rocking chair overlooking the sloping hills was a badly crippled woman, slowly degenerating from lupus, living with a mother who loved her but was not on her wavelength, and living in a town largely unable to appreciate her at the time. She had a difficult hand to play. Her name is Flannery OConnor, and she always did her own thing. The truth is, Flannery was a complex and mysterious female writer who had a deep desire for mystery and privacy of self. So if there are things we do not know about her, so what? And if she would not eat eggs of chickens she personally knew, what of it? Should genius not be allowed some endearing personal and private idiosyncrasies? She did her thing. I am writing how I knew her and how I saw her and what she meant to me as a writer and thinker and believer. I would not have Good Sister Flannery, whom I saw as a nun without a habit, not be recognized as the virtuous as well as talented person and teacher she was. I had much unalloyed admiration of her, but how the reader sees her must be ultimately left up to the reader. I knew her and saw her as a part of the larger picture of Gods grace, which is working everywhere. By sharing some of these memories of her, I am very imperfectly trying to pass on some of the knowledge and humor she shared with me.
Millions of Scots have left their homeland during the last 400 years. Until now, they have been written about in general terms. Scottish Exodus breaks new ground by taking particular emigrants, drawn from the once-powerful Clan MacLeod, and discovering what happened to them and their families. These people became, among other things, French aristocrats, Polish resistance fighters, Texan ranchers, New Zealand shepherds, Australian goldminers, Aboriginal and African-American activists, Canadian mounted policemen and Confederate rebels. One nineteenth-century MacLeod even went so far as to swap his Gaelic for Arabic and his Christianity for Islam before settling down comfortably in Cairo. This gripping account of Scotland's worldwide diaspora is based on unpublished documents, letters and family histories. It is also based on the author's travels in the company of today's MacLeods - some of them still in Scotland, others further afield. Scottish Exodus is a tale of disastrous voyages, famine and dispossession, the hazards of pioneering on faraway frontiers. But it is also the moving story of how people separated from Scotland by hundreds of years and thousands of miles continue to identify with the small country where their journeyings began.
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