Author Rick Bragg will take part in an Alabama Writers' Forum event June 21 in Fairhope. (Photo courtesy Zach Riggins)FAIRHOPE, Alabama — Rick Bragg considers himself fortunate, and indeed his experience and accomplishments attest to a life well lived.
He has traveled the world as a journalist, earned a Pulitzer Prize as a writer for the New York Times, and a Harper Lee Award as a distinguished Alabama author. He has produced five books including “All Over But the Shoutin’,” “Ava’s Man,” “The Prince of Frogtown,” “I Am a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story,” and “The Most They Ever Had.”
After many years as a single man, he married his sweetheart, Dianne, and has become a friend and mentor to his stepson Jake. Bragg’s funny and touching first-person account of their relationship appears in June 2011 edition of Southern Living.
Jake, now a teenager, has taught Bragg the value of patience — and of stepping out of your comfort zone.
“The funniest thing that ever happened to me in my life that didn’t involve me really embarrassing myself was when I was talking with Jake one day and someone asked me, ‘What’s your proudest moment?’” Bragg says by telephone from his office in Tuscaloosa. “Jake was sitting there, and me kind of being a smart-aleck, I said, ‘Well, I taught him how to cheat at cards.’
“Jake said, ‘Ricky, you didn’t teach me. I just caught you.’ And he’s right. Then he looked at me and said, ‘What kind of man tries to cheat a 10-year-old at cards?’ I’ve got to try to live that down somehow.”
Bragg knows that such vignettes produce grand memories.
“I got very lucky,” he admits. “I live my life very selfishly. . . . in terms of time. I was single for a long time. Now all of a sudden you can’t be selfish. I went and watched ‘X-Men’ the other day at the movie theater. I didn’t really want to go see ‘X-Men,’ . . . but the boy did, and the boy likes me to go with him. So, I watched me some ‘X-Men.’
When we were done he said, ‘What’d you think?’ I said, ‘Well, I thought it was pretty good. What’d you think?’ And everything you go through for two and a half hours is worth it for that three minutes of conversation.”
Like many men, the passing of time brings its own peculiar wisdom along with the requisite aches and pains. Rick Bragg will turn 52 in late July, and he cherishes almost all his memories. Whether it involved chasing the elusive truth through the fog of war in the Middle East, observing the folkways of his fellow Southerners or recalling his own upbringing in northeast Alabama, Bragg is a living archive of anecdotes, memories and snapshots.
Rick Bragg participates in the econd annual Read-a-thon at Page and Palette Bookstore in Fairhope in 2006. He will share a few of those when the Alabama Writers’ Forum presents “An Evening with Rick Bragg,” 7-9 p.m. Tuesday, June 21, at Centennial Hall on the Faulkner State Community College campus in Fairhope, Alabama. Books will be available for purchase; signing is courtesy of Page & Palette.
Tickets are $10 and are available at Page & Palette, online at www.writersforum.org or by calling 334-265-7728 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 334-265-7728 end_of_the_skype_highlighting, toll free at 866-901-1117 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 866-901-1117 end_of_the_skype_highlighting, or writersforum@bellsouth.net. Proceeds from tickets sales help support AWF programs.
During a half-hour phone interview, Bragg ranged far and wide as discussed, among other topics, the writer’s art and his observations in the aftermath of the April 27 tornado that devastated Tuscaloosa, where he teaches writing at the University of Alabama.
“You don’t gripe and you don’t whine about having your roof kind of being pulled apart by the roofers in pieces,” he says, “and you don’t even really gripe that much about the fact that all your trees are gone when a hundred yards away there were bodies.
“We were very fortunate — the whole neighborhood was fortunate in that regard. Not one person on our street of Glendale Gardens died. No one was badly hurt. Many were scared to death, and many of the houses were either destroyed or will have to be torn down.
“Our house was one of the lucky ones. We were at the lucky end of the street, and all that happened to us was, it tore our roof up pretty much. It took every shingle off one half of the house, but we wound up having to put down a lot of plywood and a big part of our roof we had to have redone.”
While such things are expensive, Bragg says, “how cheaply did we come out compared to so many people (who are) either in mourning or were touched, maybe like one or two people away, (by the loss of) a friend of a friend?
“I’ve never seen anything like this, and I grew up in northeast Alabama. Tornadoes were something that dropped out of the sky, sometimes killed people and left.”
In a recent piece for Southern Living, Bragg described the physical and psychological impact of the twister.
“I said, ‘This is off the scale, not just of our experience but even our imagination.’ The neighborhoods around our neighborhood don’t look like they were hit by a storm — they look like they were bombed.
“So many people took shelter in the house in the one place that didn’t disintegrate,” he says. “It is just eerie how many people did what they were told: They found that inner hallway, . . . that bathroom, you know, . . . that solid place under the stairs. All those old clichés that we live with all our life finally saved people in story after story.”
Bragg and his wife were in New Orleans and were coming back through Fairhope.
“Literally, because of technology, we kind of heard and read and watched the tornado come up landscape that we recognized on a computer screen,” he says. “And we were ready to rush home and neighbors told us, ‘Don’t. You won’t be able to get here.’ We came into town the next day.
“Some places it looks like there was never a house there. The houses were just destroyed — they were moved off their foundations, they were split almost in two, you know, and the closer you get toward our little place at the other end of the street, the better it gets. People are trying to rebuild and save their houses there; other places not.
“The same landscape that puts us in this peril also creates the kind of people that will pull together and fight against the hopelessness that something like this causes.”
Bragg wrote: “Give me a fellow with a chainsaw over a fellow with a clipboard any day. And give me some Hamburger Helper or a casserole carried by a neighbor over any X’s and O’s and promises.”
Bragg says his neighbors stepped in and did what they had to do.
“All those kind of clichés that people throw around about charity, kindness, stubbornness, perseverance and all that — they come true in a time like this. People were fantastic. I think I had every denomination possible cuttin’ trees in my yard; I had neighbors I’d never seen before. My stepson’s drama teacher’s husband was helping me cut a tree off my driveway! That’s pretty cool.
“Your heart’s broke by what you see; but at the same time it’s lifted by what you see.”
Bragg says the images were horrifying, made all the worse by the fact that he and his family knew people directly affected by the tornado.
“I’ve covered tragedy and killing and dying all my life,” he says. “This is the closest to my own mailbox, y’know, that such a thing had happened. I remember the tornado that destroyed a church in my home county years and years ago and killed a lot of folks including some children. I remember thinking how different it is when it’s your people. How understanding it more makes it more awful — and it was like that with this.
“Again, we were very fortunate in that all the children that I’ve seen run up and down the street are still running up and down the street, so I know how fortunate we are.
“I really do think that I may never, ever spend another day of my life that doesn’t involve some kind of chainsaw in some way.”
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Chainsaws make good war stories (and great country songs, for that matter). So do families, which provide the dynamic tension writers seek.
“The things that make you a good writer are not just turns of phrase and thoughtful causes,” Bragg says. “I think what makes you better are feeling things. I hate to sound ‘Southern’ about it, but it’s havin’ your heart broke over and over and over again. And losing hope, and finding hope, and being disappointed.”
The author speaks with obvious affection for his stepson, who he says “I could not ruin.”
“I have so many bad habits, and I probably would have shared some of them with him,” Bragg says, “You know, like I wanted him to be able to defend himself in a fistfight. Well, I’m sure he can — but he’d rather not, you know. He just turned into a good boy — and I think he was going to be a good boy whether I was around or not.
“But you know, seeing someone grow into a young man and look completely different . . . all those disappointments and all those little victories, and all those expectations, and seeing him whup his guitar and play a Johnny Cash song.
“All those things, pride and fear, you worry about ¤’em all the time — then you tell them to go out and have an adventure because you don’t want them to live afraid. All that complicated stuff, roiling around. How can that not make you a better writer? How can it not make you see around the corners of things and look into the heart of things.?
People can say all they want about life experiences making you a better writer, but I think disappointments and small victories and fear and anger — all those things that go into having a child in any way — they make you a better writer.”
Bragg regards Tuesday’s fundraiser for the Alabama Writers’ Forum as a labor of love and a tribute to the state’s impressive literary tradition.
“Y’know, it’s a funny time for our state,” he says. “People are in such need everywhere, in so many ways, and sometimes you can go dig up a stump for them. There’s not much I can do in that regard, except run my mouth a little bit and talk. And for the humanities I guess the thing to do is talk about writing and reading and all that stuff.
“Obviously, it’s an interesting and sometimes frightening time for arts and humanities, and you know it seems like reading itself is under assault. Technology certainly has affected the way that we look at reading.
“I say sometimes to both septuagenarians and to my students, there’s something in the dirt in this state that grows good writers. There really is . . . I don’t much believe in magic, but there is something almost mystical about the number of good writers that have come from this dirt, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the Black Belt dirt or the red clay where I’m from, or the sand down there on the Gulf.
“We’ve got so many good people writin’ so much good stuff, and sometimes, especially with beginning writers and young writers — and sometimes old writers — you don’t hear their voice unless there’s some kind of mechanism to fertilize that, you know, water it.
“I think that’s what groups like the arts and humanities do, whether it be a festival or a newsletter saying where people are going to be and what they’re going to be doing. Well, there are a lot of young people who desperately need that exposure, and they need an audience. I think the Alabama Writers’ Forum and the people behind the writing arts in Alabama, they do that.”
The Fairhope audience on Tuesday should be in for a treat, and Bragg vows he will keep the tone light and conversational.
“I think the something like this, the last thing we want is a lecture,” he says. “I think what I’ll do is read a little bit from maybe two or three books. I’ve always believed, because I’m an old newspaper guy, you have to grab people quickly in a book. So, I might just do the first pages.
“I begin most of my books with a long, long page-length paragraph. Everybody’s got a quirk, and that’s kind of what I do. I may just do that and talk about how vital it is to paint a picture and ‘hang it on the air’ in writing. I’ll try to use some examples, and that way the budding writers will have something to get from it; and readers will too.
“As usual, I really would rather talk with people than talk at them. I’ll probably do what I always do, which is way too soon in the evening turn it over to Q and A and just talk with people. I try to answer questions by telling a story, and really just have some fun.
“Whatever it might be, it will not be slow,” he says. “I won’t let that happen.”
Information supplied by Jeanie Thompson and the Alabama Writers’ Forum was used in this report.
Alabama Writers’ Forum presents “An Evening with Rick Bragg” featuring the Pulitzer Prize- and Harper Lee Award-winning author, 7-9 p.m. Tuesday, June 21, at Centennial Hall on the Faulkner State Community College campus in Fairhope. Books will be available for purchase; signing is courtesy of Page & Palette. Proceeds from tickets sales help support AWF programs. Plus, a silent auction for book collections by other Harper Lee Award winners from the inception of the award in 1997. Co-sponsors of the event include Page & Palette Bookstore, the Pensters Writing Group and the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts. Tickets are $10 and are available at Page & Palette, online at www.writersforum.org or by calling 334-265-7728 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 334-265-7728 end_of_the_skype_highlighting, toll free at 866-901-1117 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 866-901-1117 end_of_the_skype_highlighting, or writersforum@bellsouth.net.
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