Monday Convocation | Colum McCann

January 27, 2017

Colum McCann spoke with two classes on Monday. Students were given the opportunity to ask him questions about his life, writing, and storytelling. ©Ashleigh Mower for Cate School

“Do something that does not compute in the vast scheme of things,” Irish-born writer Colum McCann advised students during Monday’s Convocation, “but don’t tell your parents I said to,” he joked. By way of example, he described his two-year, pre-college sojourn across the United States and Mexico by bicycle more than 25 years ago where learned to listen to people’s stories – a skill McCann described as the most valuable acquisition in his journey of becoming a writer. “It was a moment of great grace for me, when I learned that my job was to learn how to listen.”

Tales of his impromptu and adventure-laden cross-country trip was just a fraction of what McCann shared with students and faculty on January 23, when he made a brief but impactful visit to Cate. The author of TransAtlantic, the School’s “common read” for the 2016-17 academic year, McCann also has nine other books and countless non-fiction pieces to his credit — as well as an Oscar-nominated documentary. His sprawling and deeply interconnected novel Let the Great World Spin won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2009. Yet McCann’s humility, humanity, and love of words and narrative came through clearly for students, who peppered him with questions about his writing process, his method for writing dialogue, and whether he sees himself in any of his characters.

“My feeling has always been that the best way to connect, and maybe, possibly, the most vital way to connect is through stories and storytelling” offered McCann, cohering nicely to the School’s current inquiry question, “What connects us?”

Students, faculty, and guests sat rapt as he read from a series of columns he’s written aimed at young writers. His accent, an Irish lilt with twenty-odd years of living in New York layered on it, brought an urgency to his call.

Colum McCann addressed the community on Monday evening during Convocation. He spoke about his travels in his early 20s and read excerpts from his blog and book, TransAtlantic. ©Ashleigh Mower for Cate School

“The problem with so much of our reality, young writer, is that it operates from a flat surface, a screen, and it does not address itself to the contoured world we live in. So get off the couch. Get out the door. Onto the page. Justify your rage. Take pleasure in the recklessness of your imagination.”

McCann spoke of his early attempts at writing fiction, at which he admitted he “failed miserably.” The author encouraged students to embrace failure, which he called an extremely vivifying thing – I know that’s not often said to you, especially at the high school level, but failure to me admits ambition and there’s nothing better than you, and the people around you, trying to do that which seems impossible.

During two writing workshops held in a Schoolhouse classroom earlier in the day, McCann queried students on their favorite books (they ranged from the Harry Potter series to Pride and Prejudice and Love in the Time of Cholera) and their writing processes. He explained his need to develop an obsession with a particular topic or idea – TransAtlantic, he related, started with his obsession with Frederick Douglass, who as a slave and anti-slavery lecturer visited Ireland just as that country’s crippling famine was beginning. The other sections of the novel, about the Irish peace process, and the historic transatlantic flight by Alcock and Brown, commanded just as much devoted research, he explained.

Freshman Liza Borghesani, who attended one of the workshops, tried to get McCann to hone in on just how he creates a narrative. “So you do you all your research, and you have your material – then how do you decide what to include,” she queried.

In his answer McCann likened his method to a composing a symphony, and through practice knowing intuitively when to bring in particular language and detail. “Here’s a bit of piano here, and now it’s time for the violin, and let’s bring up the contra-bass here, but,” he emphasized, “but you have to know all it of first.”

In one of the workshops he spoke of the non-profit Narrative 4, which he co-founded. Narrative 4 rests on the principle of “radical empathy”, in which participants pair up to tell hear one another’s stories, and retell them, having switched narrators.

After joining students and faculty at formal dinner (he joked that Cate provided him with best dressed crowd he’d ever spoken to, and that he should have shined “m’shoes”) McCann sat down with a small group of faculty in a wide ranging discussion about authors, teaching, reading, and poetry. He shared that he no longer accepts Christmas gifts from his children– instead he asks them to learn and recite a poem for him in lieu of a scarf or socks. “Above all, I am interested in the sound and music of poetry.”

As grateful as the Cate audience seemed for his wide-ranging advice and writerly wisdom, McCann seemed genuinely delighted in Cate’s natural beauty and the company of students and faculty on the Mesa. “You know how you can just feel that in a place, that there are things going on? It feels acutely alive,” he noted. “I’m honored to be here.”