Godspy II

Here is a new interview I did for John Romanowsky at Godspy. I have always thought that the first interview I did with Godspy several years back was the best one I’ve ever done. This one is a good follow-up. Here’s a snip…

We have to accept that the heart of drama is found in sin: betrayal, jealousy, greed, anger, fear, pride—that’s entertainment!—and the reason for the redemption, by the way. Drama finds its suspense in stories of human beings trying and failing because of their inner demons and, then, finally succeeding by winning out over those demons. You can’t take the demons out without creating stories that are sickly sentimental and absolutely useless to an audience searching for courage and inspiration on the screen. The great masters like Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Graham Greene, managed to talk about very real human darkness without wallowing in it.

Take Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, the story of a serial killer wiping out a family of five. There’s no gory description of the bullet tearing through flesh. She isn’t about smearing blood and guts everywhere so that her readers become like passers-by at a car crash craning to see what death looks like. She uses violence to get our attention so that she can talk about grace. As my older sister the philosopher once said to me, “It’s going to take the Church a hundred years to figure out where Flannery O’Connor left us in terms of literature.”