Southern wit won the night, Friday, as a crowd of some 300 ticketholders gathered at the Maxwell Theater on Augusta University’s Summerville campus for an Evening of Southern Storytelling with writer Rick Bragg.
The AU Writing Project hosted the event in which Pulitzer-prize winning raconteur sat down with local crime novelist Brian Panowich for a winsome, winding conversation about writing, life as a Southerner, life in general, everything in between and what all these things might have to do with one another.
Literacy professor Dr. Rebecca Harper, who directs the AU Writing Project and organized Friday night’s event, has told TAP that this unique iteration of the university’s series of author talks was coordinated with the aim of drawing a wider audience from the community.
“I feel like Rick does a great job of reminding us that we don’t have to look any further than what we live every single day to write a story,” said Harper.
One of Panowich’s first questions for Bragg was how he could draw such compelling stories, as those found in his 10 volumes of acclaimed nonfiction, from fact.
“I basically get paid to lie for a living,” said Panowich. “How are you capable of making the ordinary and the mundane extraordinary, which is something that I feel like a nonfiction writer has to do in order to sell a story.”
In his response, Bragg highlighted his rugged Alabama pedigree, the subject of books such as Ava’s Man and The Prince of Frogtown.
“My people didn’t get in the newspaper unless they knocked some rich man off his horse–which happened,” said Bragg, who went on to underscore that the suffering and trials of those in his lineage, proved their lives extraordinary. “They sacrifice their bodies, their health, their lives, for their people. And in that sacrifice was the heroism, and that’s what made it remarkable. There’s nothing dull writing about a man… who loses his fingers, hands and arms in a cotton you know, there’s nothing dull about a coal miner. There’s nothing dull about, somebody picking cotton.”
Bragg regaled the audience with stories about his meeting renowned author Pat Conroy, his interview with Dolly Parton — his boyhood crush — for Southern Living, he “almost killed” Harper Lee.
During a cordial Q&A session, Bragg responded to a question by talking about how he came to adopt Speck, the rowdy, freckled stray that was the subject of his memoir “The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People.”
One avid reader of Bragg’s books traveled with her husband from northwest Ohio to see the writer in person.
“I’d like to apologize for being a disappointment up close,” said Bragg, before reassuring the fan that she could become an “honorary Southerner” by buying all of his books.
Bragg, who has covered a range of harrowing stories as a journalist from the Oklahoma City bombing to inner city crime in most of America’s biggest metro areas, said his attraction to darker subjects alongside a tendency to use humor in his literary observations is rooted in his belief that the best stories are about living and dying, “and that membrane in between.”
“By God, those are the stories that get attention,” he said. “Those are the stories that do give you notice, and those are the stories that one hoards. You stack enough of them up high enough you get someplace that you want to be. And that may sound cutthroat, but it’s the truth.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering business for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
