Rick Bragg’s talk highlights humanity with humor

“God knows I’m a disappointment,” said Pulitzer Prize-winner and best-selling author Rick Bragg about his career choice of being a writer.

The laughter, like the crowd, filled the Buskirk-Chumley Theater on Saturday for the Monroe County Public Library and Friends of the Library biennial “Power of Words” lecture series, which featured the former New York Times reporter.

Bragg read selections from his autobiographical novels, “All Over But the Shoutin’” and “The Prince of Frogtown,” using his Alabama drawl to lay down the layers of humor, pain and life that gave his stories new meaning for some of his readers.

“I get caught up in the emotional part of the story that I haven’t really appreciated it for the writing,” Bloomington resident Marcia Meyer said. “It makes want to go read them again.”

Bragg admitted that captivating audiences with his stories is more of a family tradition with some adjustments.

“They were all great storytellers,” he said. “You inherit it. You read some good writers, then finally you get old enough when you can write a good book.”

Though humor eased Bragg’s message, his meaning wasn’t lost on the audience as he read his tragic story about a guitar player who lost his arm while working in a cotton mill and questioned how many in the audience were from first-, second- and third-generation families who worked with their hands. His question received a majority of outstretched hands in response.

“It’s like preaching to the choir,” Bragg said. “I don’t think I’m presumptuous to think I’m leaving anything that wasn’t already here. I’m just honored to be here.”

Audience members said they appreciated his work for highlighting the blue-collar working-class.

“Learning about something else is always important,” resident June Wickboldt said. “It’s good to open your mind to different situations.”

Bragg opened a forum for the audience to ask him questions, which in turn allowed Bragg to use storytelling skills to talk about his relationship with his youngest stepson, his mother and his feeling of inferiority of being a writer in a conversation with a big working-class man on a plane.

So when Bragg was watching the bulls on his mother’s farm, he said he decided to change his story.

“I’d say ‘I raise bulls,’” he said. “That’s a manly art,” Bragg said.

However, while walking through the fields one day, Bragg said he was chased by two bulls and left to protect himself behind an oak tree until both grew bored. He had to have bulls removed, and his mother replaced them with miniature donkeys.

“Now when I’m on that plane with that big guy, I look him square the eye and say, ‘I’m a writer.’”