As I have indicated before, I began my career as a librarian in a medium-sized public library in a small county of around 42,000 people.  As is typical in small communities, there were plenty of personal interconnections.  When I graduated with an MA in History in 1985 from a state college in this same county, I started work shelving and cataloging books in the public library.  With the encouragement, patience, and generous assistance from the library director, I and another worker in the library commuted to Emory University twice a week for two years to complete our Masters degrees in Librarianship (MLn).  I served as a reference librarian for most of my fifteen years there, but when the director left during my twelfth year, I was offered the position.  I served as the library’s director for three years.

One morning, during the spring of my last year, the husband of our children’s librarian walked into my office to say he had a proposition for me.  His wife was serving in this position at the library before I began there.  Her husband was a local attorney.  I knew them both very well — we attended social events and my first wife and I had even house-sat for them and had taken care of their two children for a weekend.  As it happened, he was the lawyer for the estate of a major American writer, who also was (and still is) one of my favorite authors: Flannery O’Connor.  She had lived a good portion of her life in this town where her family had deep roots going back to the early 19th century.  She spent the last thirteen years of her life at the family’s farm, called Andalusia, located on the north end of town.

His clients were two sisters who were also first cousins of O’Connor.  Flannery O’Connor died in 1964, but her mother, Regina, lived until 1995.  As executors of Regina O’Connor’s estate, these two women were also in charge of Flannery O’Connor’s literary estate, which was primarily administered through a trust that had been established by Regina O’Connor’s will.  As co-executors and co-trustees, one of their responsibilities was to establish a non-profit foundation to maintain Andalusia as a proper memorial to O’Connor and also to perpetuate her legacy as a writer.  They needed someone to help establish this organization.  They also needed someone to work with a sizable archive of personal papers, correspondence, writings, photographs, memorabilia, and artifacts belonging to Flannery O’Connor.  The archive needed to be organized, cataloged, and properly stored for preservation purposes.  The co-executors asked the lawyer to find someone who might be interested and capable of doing both of these tasks.  He came to my office in the library that spring day, explained the proposition from the estate, and asked me if I would consider taking the job as an independent consultant working for the co-executors.  I accepted, which changed almost everything for me.

I will no doubt dedicate several future posts recounting my experiences as a consultant and then later the director of the Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation that I assisted in establishing.  I was there for thirteen years — as long as Flannery O’Connor lived there.  That was long enough, or arguably, a bit too long.  While I can look back and think about plenty of mistakes I made and how I should have made different decisions, I don’t have any real regrets.  With a BA in English, an MA in History, and an MLn, I don’t think I could have been any better suited for the job with regard to my education and training.  I had the help of some talented and dedicated mentors, board members, volunteers, colleagues, and for a few years, a trusted co-worker and friend.  What I can state with absolute certainty is that this path that departed from my expected trajectory led me to some of the richest experiences I have ever had and offered me opportunities that other people with my education and training will, sadly, never enjoy.  I am humbly grateful, and hope that Flannery O’Connor would be pleased with the work we accomplished at Andalusia.