Authors Christina Brajkovich, Karen Mahoney and Roxane Salonen find faith inspiration on an epic road trip to the home of Flannery O’Connor. (Submitted photo)
Christina Brajkovich and Karen Mahoney never thought their 910-mile road trip to Georgia would lead to a journey of faith and their own book when they first hit the highway in 2014 to discover a famed Catholic author.
Their book, with Roxane Salonen, “Finding Flannery: A Travel Memoir Exploring the Mystique of Flannery O’Connor and the Legacy She Has Left Us All,” offers readers a deeper insight into O’Connor, who endured lupus, yet gave such strong evidence of God’s grace through her writings.
“Someone suggested this would make a really good book, and we contemplated that as we were winding down our trip,” said Mahoney, a longtime Catholic Herald correspondent who belongs to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Kenosha.
“Going to her home in Andalusia, her farm home in Central Georgia where she grew up and returned, was a profound experience.”
Brajkovich, Mahoney and Salonen all belonged to a Catholic writers group, and their discussions continually led to the topic of O’Connor’s writing that defined the second half of her 39-year life. Before her death in 1964, O’Connor created novels and short stories that explored Catholic themes, the struggles reflecting her own suffering and mortality and southern culture including the ills of racism.
“She was southern Gothic, kind of a grotesque, gruesome writer on the surface, but underneath it all, she had messages of grace and redemption,” said Mahoney.
“O’Connor was like the hard, gritty violence,” added Brajkovich, who lives in Janesville but is a member of the Institute of Christ the King at St. Stanislaus Oratory, Milwaukee.
She believed that every story hinges on the action of grace in a character’s life. “It’s like St. Paul where you’re struck by a bolt of lightning, and all of a sudden, your life appears before you in clear light. You’re like, ‘Wow, I am a sinner. I am in need of God’s grace.’”
They said that exploring her works sometimes feels like listening to heavy metal music that feels dark but offers openings of hope and grace.
“Here’s what it looks like without that grace — like if there wasn’t Christ in our lives, where would we be? She really shows the darkness and the fallen humanity as well as the need for redemption,” Brajkovich said.
“She’s also written a lot of personal correspondence letters to other writers, editors, students, people all over that really helps you understand her mind and the beautiful view and vision she has of a Christian vision of the world in need of redemption.”
The three authors made the book a true travelogue of a journey that became like a letter that O’Connor left them in personally discovering her mother’s dairy farm, the place where she lived the last 14 years of her life. They traveled there 50 years after she died of lupus.
“We pretty much roamed wherever we wanted to. We could see where she spent a lot of her time in her room and her bed with her typewriters, and her crutches were there,” Mahoney said. “We were able to go upstairs to this hidden area that nobody else goes where there were old news articles, letters from publishers, old beer cans, things like that that were just very private.”
“She suffered a lot in her short years of life,” Brajkovich added, giving droplets of what their book uncovers in powerful detail.
“Walking her footsteps, it really became like going to the relics of the saints, those people who inspire us so much. Being close to that was a real discovery of learning about ourselves, as well as discovering the power of her words and her legacy.”
The authors chose to pair their words up with illustrations by Andrea Meyer, whose artistry uses natural elements from within southeastern Wisconsin to paint works and scenes like the bird motifs the authors desired.
“They wanted to have an illustration to help the reader to know who is speaking,” said Meyer, a member of St. Gabriel, Hubertus.
“I had just recently done a series of paintings of birds, and they were up on my website. They stumbled upon that, the same kind of birds that they wanted, so that was really providential.”
It took more than 10 years before their revamped manuscript was accepted by En Route Books and Media, a Catholic publisher in Missouri.
“The fact that we persevered is something of Flannery’s spirit with us, to persevere, to think this can be a book someday,” said Brajkovich.
“She stuck to her art and her ideas, and eventually it paid off. So our friendship, too, just has kept rolling along through the years.”
Brajkovich summarizes what the book reveals, what their journey unveils and what O’Connor’s story illuminates about the authors’ own life callings — and our own.
“She really dedicated her whole life to writing and trying to be the best writer she could be and trying to glorify God in her writing,” she said. “A beautiful soul to discover.”
