SHORT STORIES FROM THE COUNTRY OF EXILE
Pilgrimages out of our Homely Homelessness
"What is ... a writer going to take his country to be? The word is usually used by literary folk in this connection would be "world," but the word "country" will do; in fact, being homely, it will do better, for it suggests more. It suggests everything from the actual countryside that the novelist describes, on to and through those peculiar characteristics of his region and his nation, and on, through, and under all of these to his true country, which the writer with Christian convictions will consider to be what is eternal and absolute.
... it is the particular burden of the fiction writer that he has to make one country do for all and that he has to evoke that one country through the concrete particulars of that life that, he can make believable.
...The Christian writer will feel that in the greatest depth of vision, moral judgement will be implicit.
... of his stories called Rotting Hill Wyndam Lewis has written , " If I write about a hill that is rotting, it is because I despise rot." ...some write about rot because they see it and recognize it for what it is."
" When we talk about a writers country we are liable to forget that no matter what particular country it is, it is inside as well as outside him ...To know oneself is to know one's region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from the world. "
Flannery O'Connor - in 'The Fiction Writer & His Country'
{Published in 'Mystery and Manners ' Farrar, Stauss and Giroux, New York, 1957-1970
"Landscape is like revelation; it is both singular crystal and the remotest things." Geoffrey Hill
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About Me
- Wayne D Knoll
- I am a 4th-to-6th generation Australian of Silesian (Prusso-Polish), Welsh, Schwabian-Württemberg German, yeoman English, Scots, & Cornish stock; all free settlers who emigrated between 1848-1893 as colonial pioneers. I am the 2nd of 7 brothers and a sister raised on the income off 23 acres. I therefore belong to an Australian Peasantry which historians claim doesn't exist. I began to have outbreaks of poetry in 1975 when training for a Diploma of Mission Theology in Melbourne. I've since done a BA in Literature and Professional Writing and Post-graduate Honours in Australian History. My poem chapbook 'Compost of Dreams' was published in 1994. I have built a house of trees and mud-bricks, worked forests, lived as a new-pioneer, fathered-n-raised two sons and a daughter, and am now a proud grandfather. I have worked as truck fresh-food farmer, a freelance foliage-provider, been a member of a travelling Christian Arts troupe, worked as duty officer and conflict resolutionist with homeless alcoholic men, been editor/publisher of a Journal of Literature for Christian Pilgrimage, a frontier researcher, done poetry in performance seminars in schools and public events.
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