RICK BRAGPulitzer-Prize winning New York Times reporter Rick Bragg's name may sound haughty, but the Alabama-born best-selling author/straight-shooter isn't one to put on airs. He'll appear at readings and book signings in blue jeans and a T-shirt or a simple oxford. He prefers good, solid, put-meat-on-your-bones cuisine, even when it inevitably does just that. He's not a big fan of fusion of any sort, actually, unless it's words fusing to paper. Writing is his life. More importantly, Life is his writing.Since getting his start some 20 years ago, Bragg has written his way to the top of the journalistic mountain at the Times. He's also published two memoirs, Ava's Man and All Over But The Shoutin', which have become bestsellers and popular with readers and critics both above and below the Mason-Dixon line.

In anticipation of his Novello Festival of Reading appearance Saturday at the Great Aunt Stella Center, Creative Loafing recently chatted with Bragg by phone. Here's part of what he had to say.

On covering tragedy: "I cover a lot more places than the South. The title doesn't mean anything, but it's "Roving National Correspondent.' I work all over the world for the papers, but I think what it boils down to is the best stories in the papers are not happy. I cannot in my lifetime remember more than one story that I was really proud of that was the story of someone doing something extraordinarily good. I've written a lot about people doing something extraordinarily bad to each other. The only story I've written about someone who did something extraordinarily good was Oseola McCarty, the old Mississippi washer woman who worked a lifetime for nickels, dimes, and pennies and, when she saw she was dying, gave that money away so other people wouldn't have to work as hard as she did. But, as the old clich goes, you don't report on the plane that lands safely. I was in Haiti for awhile, and I covered the Oklahoma City bombing and the Susan Smith trial (in Union, SC). Oftentimes, the things that seem most important are the horrible things we do to each other.

On the news people are interested in: "The extremes are what we are interested in, as sad as it sounds. The fist fight is so much more interesting than the cuss fight. The cuss fight is so much more interesting than the discussion. Because no one really gives a damn about the discussion. I've covered three military interventions, and the paper has always sent me because it's a fist fight. On a big scale. But they've never sent me to cover Washington, which is a discussion. If we had one fist fight a week in Washington, think how careful people would be with insulting each other. They dog-cuss each other in this "civil' tone, which makes me sick."

On Southern culture and its preservation: "Some of the best barbecue I've had is in strange places. Birmingham has frickin' delicious barbecue. Kansas City. North Carolina has delicious barbecue. And the common denominator here is they actively do it. They don't talk about it, they do it. (As far as the academic side), you've got be real careful to not go on safari (with such efforts). One thing I'm most proud of with the two books is that they tell of a blue-collar heritage, one that's not always pretty. But they also help preserve some of the beauty of that culture, or so people tell me."

On being known as a Southern writer: "If I were apologetically Southern, It'd be different. . .But I've always been the opposite. This really is the way I talk. This isn't an affectation. There was a time when I started out that it would have been much better not to be Southern, and to go ahead and embrace that self-loathing. But there ain't nothing less attractive than a self-loathing Southerner."

Rick Bragg appears this Saturday at the Great Aunt Stella Center at 7:30pm. The event is sold out. -- Timothy C. Davis