Truth Teller Spotlight: Bryant Mangum, belle-lettrist, scholar, storyteller.
“I often wonder if I am violating the sanctity of the hearts of the writers I teach and write about when my research carries me into the details of their private lives …” Bryant Mangum sees himself mostly as a scholar — and he is in fact an eminent expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald in particular and the...
Truth Teller Spotlight: Bea Chang, Essayist.
“Traveling helps me figure out the right questions to ask. It is the writing afterward—sometimes long afterward—that feels like seeking and revealing the truth in the answers to those questions.” For Bea Chang, who contributed the memoir “The River My Father Promised” to our “Maps & Legends” issue, life is–literally–a journey. At the...
Irish Storytelling: Broad Street Runs Through It
Ireland’s 1976 Tidy Town winner, “Ireland’s Best Kept Town,” casts its Broad Street past thatched-roof cottages. The rural homes of Adare in Limerick County maintain the same thatched style of a century ago (see the pictures below). Gathering wheat straw, reeds, heathers and sedges into thick clumps, the townspeople built their thatched roofs to be resistant to quickly spreading...
