When she was in fifth grade, Mary Flannery one day made up her mind that she would no longer bother about correct spelling. For the rest of her life she remained what she called a “very innocent speller.”

When Flannery lectured to college students, she gave advice to writers, such as “the writer is only free when he can tell the reader to go jump in the lake.”  One student described Flannery’s talk as “the hit of the season.”

Flannery agreed to give many lectures because she wanted to help buy her mother a new refrigerator that “spits the ice cubes at you.”

While Mary Flannery read lots of books, fantasies like Alice in Wonderland terrified her, perhaps a sign of her vivid imagination.

Mary Flannery convinced visiting friends to sit in an empty claw-footed bathtub with two oversized pillows to listen while she read aloud from her favorite fairy tales and or from stories she had written. Sometimes she asked friends to do the reading so she could hear her own words read aloud in their soft, syrupy Savannah accents.