Flannery O’Connor Review

By Erin Semple
Staff Writer

Each spring, Georgia College & State University, Arts Unlimited and the Flannery O’Connor Review host a guest lecture in honor of alumna Flannery O’Connor.
This year’s speaker is Susan Ketchin, and the lecture is called “From the Original Tin Ear to Musical Prose: Flannery O’Connor and the Sacred Story of the South.” Ketchin will speak Monday, April 15, at 8 p.m. in the Arts & Sciences Auditorium. Her lecture will focus on O’Connor’s South and on how southern writers have been extremely encouraged by her work and views. She will also link O’Connor’s work and ideas with the southern music of her time and earlier.
“Ketchin is a marvelous speaker, and she will be very entertaining,” said Sarah Gordon, professor of English.
Ketchin is a respected scholar, lecturer and musician. She is the author of “The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Southern Fiction” and is an authority on religion in the fiction of the American South. She is currently completing a book entitled “It’s Gospel, Honey,” which features the role of music in the lives of southerners and includes field and studio recordings of inspiring songs on a CD. She is co-founder of The Tarwater Band, named after one of O’Connor’s characters, Francis Marion Tarwater. She is also the founder of The Angelettes, an all-woman, bi-racial group specializing in folk, blues and gospel.
Ketchin has taught creative writing, American literature and religion in Southern fiction at Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and at North Carolina State University. In spring 2001, she joined the English faculty at North Carolina State as Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing. In the spring of 1999, she was a Visiting Lecturer at Duke Divinity School, where she taught a seminar on religion on the literature of the American South. In the fall of 1997, she taught creative writing at Duke.
Her letters and papers in writing, editing, music and publishing are housed in Special Collections, Perkins Library, and Duke University. Ketchin has served as associate editor at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and fiction editor at the “St. Andrews Review,” “Southern Exposure” and “Double Take.” Most recently, she served as fiction editor at the University Press of Mississippi.
Her mother, Jewell Willie, is an alumna of Georgia College & State University, then Georgia State College for Women. She was editor of the college newspaper, The Colonnade, and designed cartoons for the paper. Her grandmother, Vermel Chamblain Willie, also went to GSCW.
This lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Sarah Gordon at 445-5568.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Apr 12 2002. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry