Irish Writer: 'Put Yourself in the Body and Mind of Someone Else'

The 21-year-old Irishman crossed the Atlantic with literary dreams floating in his mind.

 

He took residence in Hyannis, Mass., with 20 of his fellow countrymen, bought himself a typewriter, and set out to write a novel.

 

Only Colum McCann — a journalist in Dublin by the age of 17, a columnist with his own page in a national newspaper by the age of 21 — didn’t have any best-selling stories to tell.

 

And so — without much of anything to his name — he embarked on a quest to find them, trading in his typewriter for an 18-speed Schwinn and joining a friend on an 18-month bike trip across the United States and into parts of Canada and Mexico. 

 

It was the late 1980’s. U2 had just hit its stride as an international sensation and was touring the world.

 

McCann, indeed, was in for a tour of his own.

 

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 McCann long to realize that these people all shared one thing in common. 

 

“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 people and about the great value in having somebody else listen to you,” he said.

 

“This is part of the currency of storytelling — the giving and the receiving. And it’s the ability to listen that is perhaps most important.”  

 

McCann, long-haired and bearded, completed his journey a changed man with many new perspectives on life.

 

He next ventured to the creek beds of Texas, where he ran a wilderness program for juvenile delinquents. The 23-year-old McCann led groups of six boys at a time out into the middle of nowhere for three-month stretches, teaching them survival skills and reading them literary classics like The Catcher in the Rye and The Grapes of Wrath.

 

Gang members and street thugs with checkered, harrowing pasts, McCann said, began to love the world and experience it in brand new ways.

 

“They got their stories off their chests,” he said. “Their ability to sit down and tell their stories gave themselves and each other hope for a better life. They began to believe in the prospect that things might change in their favor.”

 

At 25, McCann finally went to college, enrolling at the University of Texas and focusing on his writing career.

 

He’s now the author of six novels and three collections of short stories, winning worldwide acclaim and the 2009 National Book Award for his 9/11 novel Let the Great World Spin. His novel TransAtlantic (2013), this summer’s all-school read for Upper School English students, was an international bestseller.  

 

He’s also the co-founder of the non-profit global story exchange organization, Narrative 4, and he teaches at the MFA program in Hunter College in New York City.    

 

McCann, who spoke to students and faculty at the Maher Avenue Campus on October 29, implored the audience to think long and hard about his professional craft — and about life in general.

 

“Good writing should put you in the body and mind of somebody else. It enables you to become other,” he said.

 

“I encourage you to expand your mind, your heart, and your sense of empathy by dwelling in literature. I challenge you to understand what it means to be somebody else.”