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		At Georgia College & State University, a celebration is underway in honor of Flannery O’Connor’s seventy-fifth birthday. In this issue, Judith Ortiz Cofer—a Georgia author and native of Puerto Rico—writes about her affection for her second language, English, and for two Georgia women who helped inspire that affection, Flannery O’Connor and Alice Walker. O’Connor lived in Milledgeville, where she attended high school and college then returned in her short life’s last decade to write her mature fiction. Walker lived a little while in Milledgeville then moved just up the road to Eatonton. Cofer lives in Athens, a little farther up U.S. 441, known locally as “The Antebellum Trail.” In my own imagination, this road extends not just from the Piedmont to the Appalachian foothills, but across time, connecting these three women who come from such different backgrounds. I’ve often experienced the strange connection old roads can evoke. A few years ago living in West Virginia, I abandoned now and then my I-79 commute and drove instead on U.S. Route 19 from Morgantown to Fairmont. Coal trucks were still abundant, slowed by a road that ascends, slopes, and winds through hills. A generation or so earlier, before the interstate was built, U.S. 19 was the main north-south highway in West Virginia, plummeting all the way to Bluefield, back then a day-long haul through the mountains. Today, you can cross the state from the Pennsylvania border just above Morgantown to Rocky Gap, Virginia, in less than four hours. But whenever I was on U.S. 19, I sensed myself falling back in time. I felt somehow connected to Somersville, to the New River Gorge, to Beckley, as if the road itself tethered me to those familiar places. Driving on interstates, I never feel connected to a place or time this way. I-77 runs north into Parkersburg, West Virginia, and onward to Ohio. Further south, the highway links Charleston, West Virginia, to Charlotte, North Carolina, but the connection triggers no memories in me although I’ve traveled that four-lane giant through five different states. But the old roads are different. U.S. 19 rises north to Pittsburgh, and in 1976, I found myself on that road for the first time, steering my father’s 1969 Chevrolet Caprice towards my college girlfriend’s house in Mount Lebanon, a suburb five miles short of the Fort Pitt Tunnel. Twenty years later, 100 miles away in West Virginia, the old road was able to pull me one degree of latitude north, take me back to my first trip driving alone across a state line. Route 19 crosses south through Virginia to Asheville, Atlanta, just east of Tallahassee, and then disappears in St. Petersburg. My wife and I drive on U.S. 19 to Blood Mountain Cabins, near the highest peak on North Georgia’s stretch of the Appalachian Trail, half way between Cleveland and Blairsville, Georgia. The house where my wife grew up in Atlanta is hardly a mile away from where the highway crosses through the city. * Many of our readers and contributors are traveling to Milledgeville, especially for our annual Georgia Festival of Arts & Letters, and for our spring workshops. March 8-11, the festival features Miller Williams, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Billy Collins, Jaimy Gordon, Marion Dane Bauer, and Juergen Strünck. I am especially pleased to announce that Arthur Meryash, winner of the Arts & Letters Prize in Drama, will attend the festival. His winning play Augustina, selected by Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winner Horton Foote, is published in this issue and will have its world premiere at the festival. This year, May 22-27, we are hosting the first Arts & Letters Creative Writing Workshops in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and scriptwriting. The editors of Arts & Letters will conduct several of the workshops. A&L regular essayist Dinty W. Moore will teach creative nonfiction writing—see his latest piece in this issue on hands, fathers, and working with tools. Two guest writers, contributors to issues two and three respectively, will teach Master Classes in Poetry and Fiction: Margaret Gibson and Bret Lott, who is also a member of the Arts & Letters editorial advisory board. The workshops feature small classes, one-on-one faculty conferences, faculty and student readings, a special Flannery O’Connor film and seminar by Dr. Sarah Gordon, GC&SU editor of The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, and much more. For more information about the May workshops, contact the Arts & Letters office at (912) 445-1289 or by email: al@mail.gcsu.edu. * In this issue of Arts & Letters, we continue our regular features, including the World Poetry Translation series, the Master Print Maker series, and the Mentors Interview Series. We are also publishing the first of a planned series of essay-reviews that consider new books from a single press. John Drexel’s essay, “Something Lucid Surrounded by Something Mysterious,” looks at four 1999 books by Louisiana State University Press poets Roland Flint, Jan Heller Levi, Deborah Pope, and Gibbons Ruark. Look for a similar review of another press’s new books in our fall 2000 issue. In addition to our regular features, we continue to publish poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from the best new and accomplished writers in the world. I would like to call special attention to Barbara Tran’s poetry sequence “In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words.” Tran was a finalist in our 1999 Arts & Letters Prize competition. Although she was not singled out by our final judges, I was impressed and chose to publish her work. Her publication raises to ten the authors we’ve published who submitted work to our 1999 competition. Good luck to all who submit work to our 2000 competition. I am pleased to report that next year the winners in poetry and fiction will also go on the road to Milledgeville for a special awards ceremony, October 27-28. Final judges Frances Mayes in poetry and Janet Kauffman in fiction will also attend, presenting the awards to our winners and reading from their own works during their stay in Milledgeville. * On her journeys north to New York and New England, before she settled back in Milledgeville, I wonder if Flannery O’Connor ever traveled up old Highway One, through Augusta, Columbia, Raleigh, and Richmond, then on to the big cities: Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. In Georgia, Highway One is a line of longitude that lies about half-way between Savannah, where O’Connor was born, and Milledgeville. From Augusta, the highway goes south to Swainsboro, slides east of Vidalia where they grow the world’s sweetest onions, on to Baxley, the former turpentine capital of the world, to Waycross, then across the Florida border to Jacksonville. In O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a family drives to Florida from Atlanta. They pass Stone Mountain, a sure sign that they are headed east out of the city, not directly south toward the Florida panhandle. The family stops for lunch outside “Toombsboro,” which may be “Toomsboro,” a small town just 20 miles southeast of Milledgeville, or a fictional town that takes its name from Toombs County, whose county seat is Vidalia. Either way, the story’s clues point toward Highway One. I wonder if O’Connor ever found herself on a stretch of U.S. 1, near New York or Boston, and felt a connection to Georgia, to the place where her stories are grounded, even to the Misfit, a man on the run, whose question tugs at her readers: “Does it seem right…that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?” I do know that I find connections to O’Connor all around me. The Arts & Letters office is just across the backyard of her mother’s house. Flannery, her mother Regina, and other family members are buried just a few blocks away in Memory Hill Cemetery. Sacred Heart Catholic Church is also close-by, at the corner of North Jefferson and East Hancock Streets. When I walk downtown, if I look hard enough, I glimpse images that could have found their way into her fiction: a sign advertising knives and scissors sharpened; a tatoo parlor; fruit and vegetable stands outside Joiner’s Market on North Wayne Street. I see a woman who resembles Mrs. Turpin, another, Mrs. Hopewell, Joy-Hulga’s mother in “Good Country People.” In Milledgeville, Flannery O’Connor is inescapable. Walk downtown, south on Liberty Street to Memory Hill Cemetery, along the road to Flagg Chappel Baptist Church, then up Clarke Street past the Old Governor’s Mansion, whose grounds adjoin O’Connor’s old house. If you keep both eyes open, you can’t miss her. Happy Birthday, Flannery. We work to honor and carry on the literary tradition that you and others have bequeathed this place.
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