In its forthcoming issue, #94, Image will publish the college journal of Flannery O’Connor.  The journal, written when she was eighteen, is published by arrangement with the O’Connor estate and is prefaced by Jesuit scholar Mark Bosco, who has also made a documentary about the writer. It was Bosco who helped facilitate the publication: while researching O’Connor, he ran across the journal and made the arrangements between the estate and Image.

Image writes about the journal:

With her trademark wit already in evidence, the eighteen-year-old O’Connor entitled her college journal “Higher Mathematics.” In it she keeps a daily record of her thoughts, dreams, amusements, and fears for a period of forty days. She is conscious of her powerful literary and intellectual gifts, yet anxious about whether they will come to anything. The entries contain a range of reflections, from a critique of contemporary social science and the dullness of many of her college classes, to close observations of domestic life with her mother and extended family, to the disciplines she is already practicing as a writer.

Image cites O’Connor as a founding inspiration for the magazine. “Flannery O’Connor stood as a beacon for us. She was an artist of the highest caliber, read and appreciated by the larger culture, including those who did not share her religious commitments. … We’ve always referred to her as one of Image’s patron saints.”

An excerpt is available at the Image website:

Jan. 11, ’44. If I should begin to feel sorry for myself—however erroneously—I could easily move myself to a liquid-eyed condition, and that would be disastrous. I have such an affection for myself. It is second only to the one I have for Regina [her mother]. No one else approaches it. I realize that joyfully just now. If I loved anyone as much or more than myself and he were to leave, I would be too unhappy to want myself to advance; as it is, I look forward to many profitable hours. I have so much to do that it scares me.