FEATURES
Rick Bragg comes to Pell City Saturday
Laura Nation-Atchison
06-27-2008
She doesn’t really mind being called persistent.
After all, that’s how Susan Mann gets the quality of programs she lines up for Pell City Library.
It was Chef Clayton Sherrod of Birmingham who teased her about it last year, telling during his presentation that it was largely due to Mann’s persistence that he finally got around to giving a program in Pell City.
Mann is assistant library director for the Pell City Library and getting good speakers who can entertain and enlighten is important to her.
This time, she set her sights on another visit from Rick Bragg and you guessed it-she got him.
It will be Bragg’s third visit in Pell City since Mann has been booking the programs, and with his new book just out, it was time for another.
Bragg will be at the Pell City Library Saturday, June 28 at 2 p.m. and the program is free for the public, thanks to a Strengthening Youth and Family Grant from the Alabama Public Library Service.
Since leaving The New York Times, Bragg has been on the faculty of the University of Alabama, teaching upper level journalism classes.
Mann said although Bragg has been traveling all over the country lately for speaking engagements, “it really wasn’t that hard to get him to come. He’s always so nice to us here.”
Plus, she said, there’s the pressure of Pell City’s “fan club” for Bragg, a large group of library patrons who are always ready to hear what Bragg might have to say.
“I think they expect that he’ll come and probably expect me to get him,” Mann said. “There is a big group here who just loves him.”
Bragg’s most recent book, “The Prince of Frogtown,” is the third book he’s written about his family.
Readers met his mother in “It’s All Over But the Shoutin,’” and then Bragg told about his grandfather in “Ava’s Man.”
Neither book had much in the way of “nice things” to say about Bragg’s father, Charlie.
But, in interviewing people who shared some of the elder Bragg’s life in and around the town of Jacksonville, Bragg made a discovery.
There were people who had something good to say about Charles Bragg.
During an interview just after “The Prince of Frogtown” was released in May, Bragg said one person he spoke to said his father cried about the way things went with his family, the years of drinking and fighting and finally, basically abandoning them.
And Bragg found out about the love letters his father wrote to his mother while he was in the Marines.
“But we never knew these things,” he said.
And most of all, his father never told anyone he was sorry for what happened, Bragg said.
Bragg’s father died at age 40.
Part of the impetus for writing “The Prince of Frogtown” came from the process of Bragg becoming a father himself.
“There was hardly a day that would go by that I didn’t think about my father,” he said.
Bragg got married a little over three years ago and a young son was added to his life.
In the introduction to the book, Bragg makes a comparison between his father and people in prison.
People are usually in prison because of the worst moment of their life, he writes.
“But that’s not all they are,” he said.
Bragg goes on to say he now thinks that the time with his family was his father’s own worst moment.
“But, that isn’t all he is, either,” he said.
Bragg was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for a collection of newspaper articles he wrote. He is a former writer for the Birmingham News, the Anniston Star and the Daily Home, among other publications.
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About Laura Atchison
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Laura Nation-Atchison is The Daily Home features editor.
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Contact Laura Atchison
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