Saint Flannery, Approximately: O’Connor and the Dogma of Creative Writing

Eric Bennett examines O’Connor’s legacy in an influential but often overlooked venue: the creative writing workshop. Bennett argues that creative writing programs have benefitted from O’Connor’s success story, but they have also mischaracterized her method as a writer. Bennett demonstrates how manuals and instruction in creative writing laud the practice of not knowing where one’s fiction is going during the writing process, and often some of O’Connor’s words get marshaled in support of this approach. Bennett claims that such uses of O’Connor both distort who she was and demonstrate how impoverished current theories of fiction often are.