I'm a Southern writer from Georgia, and for me there is no better paradigm than the works of Flannery O'Connor. If I could choose my muse, she would be it.

I drove to Georgia College in Milledgeville to spend a week in the Flannery O'Connor Library where research is made available by prearrangement to graduate students and scholars. I had waited for months hoping for permission to be granted, praying they would not find me unworthy.

Once there, I immersed myself in over 6000 pages of original manuscripts and even a video of the author on a Today Show interview. Looking shy and scared to death, Flannery did not come across on television as a confident author who, at the time, was writing some of the finest literary fiction ever to come out of Georgia.

During my languid days of study in Milledgeville, I often wandered around in the library's reconstructed parlor furnished with O'Connor's personal things. My fingers brushed against hundreds of books: Katherine Ann Porter, Eudora Welty, Faulkner. The Russians: Chekhov, Dostoevski, Turgenev. I leafed through envelopes jammed with clippings funny, tragic, poignant each collected by the author for future projects that were never to be. I read her first diary, pencil-printed in a childish scrawl.

Flannery O'Connor was an enigma, a puzzling woman committed to her profession as well as to her religious belief system. Few students and scholars of her work ever considered her less than complex and most often left there with a desire to write dissertations, intrigued (or plagued) by her motivational skills. There were so many already written papers, in fact, that I could never have read them all.

At week's end, I had lunch with Flannery's cousin who was visiting in Milledgeville. She spoke warmly of Flannery during the meal, and after dessert and coffee, asked if I might like to see Andalusia, the farm where her cousin had raised her signature peafowl. I jumped at the chance.

A crooked red clay road led to the farmhouse, which stood a quarter of a mile from the highway. The house was nothing to brag about, and the surviving structures even less so. Indeed, at first glance, the farm appeared to be abandoned. Finding it rife with the ghosts of O'Connor's characters, I half-way expected to see Old Dudley or Tarwater, perhaps a scowling Hulga Hopewell limping toward me on her notorious wooden leg.

We walked the grounds while wind whistled through moss-strewn oak trees. From time to time, a crow would caw in the distance, another ghostly reminder of the long-gone peafowl that once dominated Andalusia. It has been said that Flannery loved the peacock's beauty, its strutting conceit, but secretly delighted in its ugly feet and annoying squawk ... God's sense of humor made visible in polar extremes.

I am not a literary scholar, and in fact if Georgia authors are likened to a Talmadge ham, then I am still hanging in the smokehouse. But I have lost count of the many enjoyable hours spent with O'Connor's words, and I am always left overwhelmed by the legacy left us by this Georgia woman. Flannery O'Connor captured on paper the heart and soul of more than a few Southerners.

I should be so lucky!