I am the only person on the place who is willing to underwrite, with something more than tolerance, the presence of the peafowl.

As with everything else she wrote, there isn’t enough of it.

This short collection of essays covers a variety of topics mostly about writing, religion, The South, but also, and delightfully, peafowl.

Here’s a great snippet:

“Over the years their attitude toward me has not grown more generous. If I appear with food, they condescend, when no other way can be found, to eat it from my hand; if I appear without food, I am just another object. If I refer to them as ‘my’ peafowl, the pronoun is legal, nothing more. I am the menial, at the beck and squawk of any feathered worthy who wants service. When I first uncrated these birds, in my frenzy I said, ‘I want so many of them that every time I go out the door, I’ll run into one.’ Now every time I go out the door, four or five run into me–and give me only the faintest recognition. Nine years have passed since my first peafowl arrived. I have forty beaks to feed. Necessity is the mother of several other things besides invention.”

Another interesting essay laments the notion that fiction ought to be about pleasant things or celebrate the joy and prosperity of life. She rebukes this notion. She also suggests that limits placed upon so-called Catholic literature help Catholic writers by creating boundaries around thought. She also defends the Grotesque in Southern Literature because its distortion and playfulness help to shed light on horrors of life.

Over all this is a great collection, and if you like her stories, you are apt to like these too.