Published: October 13, 2008 06:17 pm         

Author Bragg speaks in G’dale

By Adam Smith

The North Jefferson News



Southern storytelling was on display Friday as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Rick Bragg spoke to residents at the Gardendale Civic Center.

Bragg, 49, was promoting his latest book, “The Prince of Frogtown.” The book is the third and final installment of his trilogy about his family which also includes

“All Over But the Shoutin’” and “Ava’s Man.”

His appearance was sponsored by the Martha Moore-Gardendale Public Library.

“The book was done for one reason and one reason only — I wanted to find people who could tell me one good story about my daddy,” Bragg told the audience. “I went and knocked on every door of every friend I could think of. Three times out of four they would say, ‘I don’t have one.’” But every now and then, someone would sit down and say, ‘Sure, I’ll tell you a story.’”

Throughout the course of his hour-long speech, Bragg read passages from the book, which juxtaposes his search for good stories about his alcoholic father with Bragg’s own journey of becoming a father for the first time.

“I got married four years ago,” he said. “I inherited a 10-year-old boy.”

Like his previous two books about his family or “my people” as he referred to them, his new book draws on the imagery of Jacksonville, the northern Calhoun County town in which he grew up.

One selection he shared with the audience references a favorite swimming hole of his youth, where he would spend summers with his friends drinking Nehi Grape, Orange Crush and eating mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches from twice-used aluminum foil.

In other selections, he shared passages about his father Charles and grandmother, Ava or other members of his family. Bragg said even if readers don’t know the people he writes about personally, most readers know someone like them.

“I do believe that’s the secret to these books,” he said. “We know what these people went through and we know the content of their character. We know how tough they had to be. I like my people, I’m proud of them and that’s why I devoted the biggest part of my writing life to talk about them.”

Bragg won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for feature writing with The New York Times. In 2003, he wrote “I Am a Solder Too: The Jessica Lynch Story.” He also works as a writing professor at the University of Alabama.