FLEX TIME AUTHOR ON CAMPUS
Colum McCann’s best-selling novel TransAtlantic was summer reading for all Upper Schoolers in 2015.
and Mexico. It was the late 1980s: U2 had just hit its stride — an international sensation touring the world. McCann, their unknown compatriot, was in for a back-roads tour of a different kind. He crossed paths with a camp ranger in Pennsylvania, a brutally poor family in Mississippi, a gay couple in New Orleans living in the heart of Bourbon Street, a group of Native Americans in Gallup, N.M., and a man who taught him how to build bicycle wheels in Trinidad, Colo. It didn’t take him long to recognize that the people he met all shared a common yearning. “They all had a deep need to tell a story,” McCann said. “I met people every single day who literally shook my soul.” He also learned lessons that pierced him to the core. “At the heart of it, I learned how to listen to someone and about the great
Gift of Listening, Receipt of Treasure By Mike Kennedy ’99
T
you,” he said. “This is part of the currency of storytelling — the giving and the receiving.
HE 21-YEAR-OLD Irishman
paper by the age of 21 — found he didn’t
And it’s the ability to listen that is perhaps
crossed the Atlantic, took resi-
have any stories to tell.
most important.”
dence in an overcrowded house in Hyannis, Mass., bought a type-
writer, and set about writing a novel. But the young Colum McCann — a
58 | TIMES
value in having somebody else listen to
And so — with almost nothing to his
Long-haired and bearded, McCann
name — he embarked on a quest to find
completed his maiden voyage of listening
and gather them, trading in his typewriter
as an older and a wiser man — and one in
for an 18-speed Schwinn and joining a
need of money and a job.
journalist in Dublin by age 17, a columnist
friend on an 18-month bike trek across the
with his own page in a national news-
United States and into parts of Canada
So, settling on the creek beds of Texas, he assumed responsibility for a wilderness
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