Peculiar Crossroads Podcast

Learn about my lifelong history with the theatre and the joy of watching a play.

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Here, I talk about the act of listening to music, memories of taping songs off the radio, and what we have lost by streaming our favorite songs.

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Learn how a classic movie gave hope to a troubled teenager and paved the way to understand the hope of Christ.

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Last week, I discussed Flannery O’Connor and what her dark, dissonant, and yet hopeful stories mean to me as an author and a believer.

However, although her writing is intensely disturbing, it’s not entirely unexpected for Christian writers to be influenced by her. I’ve met many believers with similar journeys to mine who also see her as significant to their faith.

Beyond Flannery, though, my list of books that have inspired me as a writer gets a little weird.

Okay, maybe a lot weird.

I know this isn’t exactly shocking, but I devoured books when I was a kid. And if you grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, you probably read the same ones I did. The Boxcar Children. Anne of Green Gables. Hatchet. The Babysitter’s Club. A Little Princess.

I loved to read, and I also loved to tell stories, put on plays, and act out epic tales with Barbies and toy dinosaurs. It was all a lot of fun. But it never occurred to me that stories could do more than just entertain or that there was more than one way to tell them.   

That all changed when I started eighth grade.

One day, I went to the bookstore in my hometown of Kent, Ohio, and found a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The cover featured a black-and-white photo of a girl shot from the knees down, the hemline of her dress just visible. She wore saddle shoes, and one knee was slightly popped forward in a kind of attitudinal posture.

Based on that cover, I knew I had to read that book. I had a thing for the 1950s, so maybe it was the saddle shoes. The back cover mainly included notes from scholars declaring it to be one of the great novels and barely a sentence about the plot, so the—ahem—content of the book didn’t really register.

Regardless, I had a gift certificate for the bookstore, and it was on sale, so I bought the book, unaware that I was walking into the landmine that is one of the most controversial books of the last century.  

When I got home, I went to my room and started the book. As I began to read Nabokov’s intricate sentences and often sprawling prose, the reality of what I was reading sank in.

I was fourteen, so I thought the overall situation was gross. Or, as the kids today like to say, super cringe.

Yet, I was compelled to keep reading.

As the story unfolded, I periodically asked myself why I was so interested in it. I felt sorry for the characters, but I didn’t like them. In most of the books I’d read to that point, the lines between the good guys and bad guys were clearly drawn. I never had to question the characters’ motives, and the endings were always happy with some clearly-conveyed lesson or moral.

Before reading Lolita, I didn’t know that characters could be deeply flawed and hurtling toward consequences of their own making. I didn’t know that sometimes, they lie to readers and leave them questioning the characters’ true motives.

When I reached Lolita’s catastrophic conclusion, I knew I would never view fiction writing the same way again. I immediately knew those were the kinds of stories I wanted to write.

In last week's installment, I told a story about a lady I once went to church with who said that because I had such a great talent for writing, I should be writing fiction about people coming to know Jesus. When I tried to explain that I don’t write those kinds of stories, she pressed further, saying that I should because then I would be “truly pleasing God.”

This kind of thinking doesn’t just drastically limit storytelling for Christians. It compels us to clean up the world and polish it up so the dirty parts can’t be seen.

It’s not our job to clean up reality. That will only truly be accomplished at Christ’s glorious return.

If the world in its current sinful state doesn’t matter to God, then most of the accounts in scripture shouldn’t exist. A lot of the Bible is rated R—it contains violent battles, adultery, incest, cold-blooded murder, and people with horrific personal agendas whose actions have terrible consequences.

David held deep reverence for God yet committed a grievous sin against Him that impacted his reign as king. Jacob was cunning and deceitful. Ananias and Sapphira lied to the Holy Spirit to further their own reputations in the early church.

This is why so many authors turn to the Bible for character inspiration, tropes, and archetypes. It is a rich treasure trove of complex, flawed people. What’s more, they’re true stories about how God used all of them to further His plan for the world, whether they were vessels for honor or dishonor.

Perhaps that’s why stories like Lolita ring truer to me than most books in the Christian Fiction section. For better or worse, they’re closer to where we live.

However, though I credit Lolita with exposing these delicate nuances of storytelling and making me want to be a writer, I must admit that I view the book differently today. It may be a literary masterpiece, but the horrific realities of child trafficking and sexual abuse have made it much harder for me to stomach.

Reading Sarah Weinman’s harrowing book The Real Lolita, which tells the story of the real-life child abduction that likely inspired Nabokov, also significantly altered my perspective, as the similarities between real life and fiction are far too close for my comfort.

It’s okay to recognize that art that once spoke to you no longer fits how you see the world. Not all art is for every moment we live in, and sometimes we need to let things go.

Still, I’m grateful for the lesson Nabokov taught me about character development, motivation, and the often-messy nature of portraying the world as it is. That book with the saddle shoes on the cover? It’s still on my shelf, marked up from countless studies of the prose. My relationship to it has changed, but I don’t think I’ll ever fully escape it.

I’m interested to hear what you have to say on this topic. What stories have affected you despite being intensely disturbing and having deeply flawed characters? Drop your thoughts in the comment section.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit korimorgan.substack.com

Before we talk any more about me, we need to talk about Flannery O’Connor.

That’s because she isn’t just my favorite author. She is the author who makes me want to write. Her work is a prime example of what happens when Christian writers uncompromisingly tell the stories they’ve been given in their particular language and from their particular “country,” be it literal or metaphorical.

Of course, this describes any Christian writers who excel at their work and resist the temptation toward preachiness and propaganda. They understand that good fiction does not come from a message but a truthful, resonant story. This is true whether these writers are crafting fantasy, science fiction, or stories set in the real world.

But Flannery (we are on a first-name basis) represents a particular category of this. What happens when the stories a Christian is compelled to write are about the unceasing darkness of life in a sin-sick world?

Although she is my favorite author, Flannery’s characters—serial killers, swindlers, prostitutes, and the self-righteous—are among the most repulsive I’ve encountered in any story.

Yet, they are also among the most relatable. The novel Wise Blood played a significant role in my conversion to Christianity in college; in Hazel Motes, I saw my atheism for the repulsive, prideful rebellion that it was, and I saw his fate as a cautionary tale.

(Commercial Break: If that caught your attention, you’ll want to read my essay collection, Why I Dyed My Hair Purple & Other Unorthodox Stories, which will be out in January. In my essay “Wise Blood,” I recount this story in full.)

There are many beautiful stories written by Christians that feature more conventional light-to-darkness conversion narratives. But at that time, such a story never would have spoken to me. I was hardened against God and required something more aggressive—the “large and startling figures” Flannery spoke of crafting for an audience of unbelievers.

Flannery’s stories are indeed dark, so much so that many people see them as hopeless, but I argue against this. The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, and other books that Christian readers revere are so full of hope and light that it is radiant and blinding. In Flannery O’Connor, it seeps through a slowly-widening crack in a seemingly impenetrable rock wall. 

It makes me think of my favorite line from the brilliant singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn: “Kick at the darkness ‘til it bleeds daylight.”

I love stories of explicit hope—after all, the Gospel is the most stunning example of it. However, I’ve always had a particular bent toward darker fiction, stories where the lines between good and evil are blurred (come back next week for an example). I face an ongoing struggle with depression, and while one might think that these preferences only feed the melancholy, it makes me feel less alone.

There is a peculiar sense of hope that comes from seeing portrayals of suffering. It makes me praise God that though we now see through a glass darkly, we are destined for a new heaven and new earth.

I aspire to practice this in my fiction writing, as I have a particular audience in mind for my work, one that has experienced deep suffering over the past 50 years. My novel-in-stories, The Goodbye-Love Generation, takes place in my hometown of Kent, Ohio, where four students were killed during a deadly showdown between the Ohio National Guard and students at Kent State University in 1970.

The event decimated the lives of dozens of people in their late teens and early ‘20s, some of whom are relatives and close friends of my family, and my community has never recovered.

My novel centers around the Purple Orange, a fictional rock band flourishing amid Northeast Ohio’s thriving music scene in 1970. The shootings deal a massive blow to this, and over the next 50 years, they’re left to cope with the aftershock.

They respond to the trauma in primarily destructive ways, and much of the book was hard for me to write because of how much their actions ran counter to my Christian morality. But their behavior, dysfunctional as it is, is authentic and reflective of what I’ve seen among people I care about.

A woman I used to go to church with once told me that I was disappointing God by not writing stories about characters who find Jesus and instead writing about perceived degenerates addicted to sex, drugs, and foul language.

These allegations hurt, but knowing that people told Flannery O’Connor the same thing comforts me greatly in my own creative vision.

When one woman told Flannery that her work left a bad taste in her mouth, Flannery famously fired back, “You weren’t supposed to eat it.”

I can’t tell you where the hope is in The Goodbye-Love Generation. I’m writing a sequel, and the end of the current book will leave the characters on their way to a happier ending. But I’m not particularly interested in putting hope in my fiction for hope’s sake. I write the stories I feel drawn to tell and leave the rest to God.

Like Flannery O’Connor, I want to explore the ways the truths of my Christian faith intersect with creativity and produce art that helps us better see the afflicted but beautiful world we live in.

I’ll get into this more next time. In fact, I’ll share the book that made me want to be a writer, and you will be shocked—perhaps even scandalized—at what it was.

For now, what’s your experience with Flannery O’Connor? Do you have an author whose work you want to emulate? Feel free to share in the comments!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit korimorgan.substack.com