Slow Acting Medicine

Flannery O’Connor, a renowned Catholic author, once described her short stories as “slow-acting medicine”. That is, she wanted the immediate impact of her story not to be so obvious; for it to linger in your system for a long time, changing your body and mind in ways scarcely known to you. When I saw her writing about this, I seemed to see these slow-acting medicines everywhere I looked – stories that are deceptively simple or sometimes impassive and obscure, but all the same have an incredibly long half-life, the change it provokes in you only noticeable long after the initial point of contact.

– Imya