A RURAL ODYSSEY - Living Can Be Dangerous is the story of Mick O’Brien’s growing up on a small wheat farm in Central Kansas in the 1940s and 1950s. It tells of his Irish-American, Catholic, pioneering farm parents, the religious and moral beliefs of that tradition and the consequences of living out the same. Mick and his siblings inherit that tradition. Growing food, farm chores, raising and caring of livestock, field work on the tractor, and harvest provide the family subsistence, but not without danger. School, sports, fun with buddies, and imaginary games fill Mick’s teen age years. Music, singing and the guitar, and a special friendship are an important chapter of that time with unplanned consequences. Unforeseen challenges and the unpredictable dangers of life fill the O’Brien’s days as well. Work and play, joy and sadness. Mick tells it all as it happened.

Letters from Brazil II is a continuation of Letters from Brazil, 2017. Mike Gaherty, now an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, is back in Brazil to continue research and begin the battle for publication in a “publish or perish” academic world. He now has a Brazilian visa as journalist- researcher in his role of writing occasional “Letters” to the New York Times’s international section and is working in liaison with the Department of Research–Western Hemisphere Analysis of the US State Department (INR–WHA). “Letters” will chronicle what he sees and experiences in Brazil – politics, economics, and especially, daily life under the evolving military regime. The Brazilian intelligence agencies, the DOPS and the SNI, are aware of his role and keep constant surveillance on his activities. Life gets complicated as Mike juggles romantic interests both back at home and in Rio de Janeiro. And research evolves to treat the relationship between the folk-popular stories in verse (“literatura de cordel”) and MPB (Brazilian Popular Music), especially regarding the composer, singer, and musician Chico Buarque de Hollanda and his efforts to write and perform in Brazil while battling with the general’s censorship laws under AI-5. There are many surprises for Mike—some pleasurable, a few dangerous. Life for a researching professor turns out to be not as pedestrian as might be expected.

A Professor Takes to the Sea: Learning the Ropes on the National Geographic Explorer, Volume II, 2014 and 2016, continues Professor Curran’s experiences on board this great expedition ship. No longer a rookie but almost, Curran recounts early efforts to join the ship crew, staff, and guest speakers on a return trip from Salvador da Bahia to Buenos Aires in 2014 (with an Atlantic Crossing from the Cape Verde Republic thrown in) and the 2016 “Atlantic Odyssey 108” trip from Ushuaia, Patagonia, to Madeira with surprises in tow. Secondly, the book details Curran’s contributions of speaking of Brazilian and Portuguese culture and preparing the guests for the places to be seen in Brazil and Portugal’s Madeira. And as in volume I, it details the trip itself “At Sea” with the focus on educational talks by guest speakers and recaps by the naturalists and “On Shore” with cultural and historical vignettes of the places visited.

A Professor Takes to the Sea: Learning the Ropes on the National Geographic Explorer Volume I “Epic South America” 2013 tells of Professor Curran’s experiences on board this great expedition ship on the 2013 voyage. The book recounts early efforts to join with the ship crew, staff, and guest speakers in the collective task of providing an enriching experience for the guests or passengers. Secondly, it details Curran’s contribution of speaking of Brazilian culture and preparing the guests for the places to be seen in that country. Finally, it details the trip itself: “At Sea” with the focus on educational talks by guest speakers and recaps by the naturalists and “On Shore” with cultural and historical vignettes of the places visited.

Letters from Brazil: A Cultural-Historical Narrative Made Fiction recounts the adventures of young researcher Mike Gaherty in Brazil in the turbulent 1960s. It tells the story of his research on Brazilian folklore and folk-popular literature (with inevitable amorous moments along the way) while dodging encounters and threats from agents of the DOPS, Brazil’s chief espionage and anti-communist, anti-subversion agency. The nation’s military revolution of 1964 and subsequent evolution to dictatorship are the background for Gaherty’s ups and downs in Brazil’s Northeast, the Northeast Interior, Salvador da Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, the Amazon, and a final harrowing time in Recife.

Diary of a North American Researcher in Brazil III is the last in the series “Stories I Told My Students.” It is the continuation of the author’s love affair and odyssey in Brazil, this time from 1988 to 2005.

The volume brings to the present moments lived in Brazil and is written much more in the framework of a travel diary in Brazil. Short vignettes about people and places flavor the book. There is emphasis on academic conferences with many “Brazilian Stories,” the publication of works in Brazil, and more important, times shared with “cordel” poets, professors and researchers of Brazilian literature, folklore and “popular literature in verse.”

“Relembrando – A Velha Literatura de Cordel e a Voz dos Poetas” realmente consiste em três estudos importantes sobre o cordel: 1. A revisão e tradução da tese doutoral de Curran de 1968 2. O aumento de um dos capítulos da tese tratando o poeta pioneiro, o mais conhecido de cordel, Leandro Gomes de Barros 3. A publicação de uma série de entrevistas escritas, já históricas, com quarenta dos poetas e editores de cordel do fim dos 1970.

"Travel and Teaching in Portugal and Spain – A Photographic Journey" is another in the series "Stories I Told My Students." It follows the pattern of previous books on Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, and Colombia. The book tells the tale of travel in Portugal and travel and summer teaching in the Arizona State University summer program in Spain in 1987.

The format of the book combines notes from the travel diary, vignettes on the history of the places visited, and in particular, notes on major literary figures like Luís de Camões or Miguel de Cervantes. Major universities like the University of Coimbra in Portugal and the University of Salamanca in Spain are highlighted. Emphasis is also given to places and fi gures of the Catholic tradition like the Cistercian Monastery of Alcobaça in Portugal and the stories of Santa Teresa de Jesús, San Juan de la Cruz, and Ignacio de Loyola in Spain. All are represented in the 256 photos in the book.

This book is a photographic journey of fifty years of research on Brazil and its folk-popular poetry, the "literatura de cordel." The photos taken by the author over these fifty years are divided into three parts: 1. The poets and the printers of "cordel" 2.The intellectuals, informants and friends associated with the research and 3. The fairs, markets and scenes of folklore related to the research. Each photo, when applicable, is followed by a description of the scene or person. This archive includes many persons and scenes that are no longer present in Brazil thus documenting the reality of those times. The book is a companion book to the complete story of the story-poems and their authors seen in his recent "Portrait of Brazil in the Twentieth Century - the Universe of the 'Literatura de Cordel'".

The Universe of the "Literatura de Cordel" is Curran's most recent project. It is the English version of a major work published in Brazil in Portuguese in 2011 by Ateliê Editorial, "Retrato do Brasil em Cordel." Curran returns to "Portrait" for several reasons: primary is his strong feeling that the amazingly broad view of Brazil in the twentieth century seen in the thousands of booklets in verse from the "cordel" represents a major aspect of Brazilian culture in that century. Second, because there are many important bodies of folk-popular verse in the Western Tradition, all "distant relatives" of the Greek and Roman Epic Traditions, and because Brazil's folkpopular poetry is one among them, and because a very large reading public interested in such things does not know Portuguese, this volume in English strives to make the tradition available to such readers.

MARK CURRAN taught Spanish American Civilization at Arizona State University in a career spanning forty-three years. His Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Jesuit Saint Louis University prepared him for this endeavor. Intermittent study, travel and research in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico took place from 1962 to 2000 with emphasis on modern Indigenous centers and famous Pre-Columbian sites.

This book is entitled "Travel, Research and Teaching in Guatemala and Mexico. In Search of the Pre-Columbian Heritage." Volume II. Mexico.

MARK CURRAN taught Spanish American Civilization at Arizona State University in a career spanning forty-three years. His Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Jesuit Saint Louis University prepared him for this endeavor. Intermittent study, travel and research in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico took place from 1962 to 2000 with emphasis on modern Indigenous centers and famous Pre-Columbian sites.

This book is entitled "Travel, Research and Teaching in Guatemala and Mexico. In Search of the Pre-Columbian Heritage." Volume I, Guatemala.

This book combines anecdotes of travel with commentary on the Spanish Colonial Heritage of Colombia. The travel took place in 1975 on a sabbatical leave when Curran and traveling companion, his wife Keah, spent several months in Colombia. The chapters follow chronological time, places and events of the trip: Medellín and Santa Fé de Antioquia; Bogotá and environs; Girardot, Cali, Popayán and Silvia in the West and South; the Archeological Site of San Agustín; Boyacá State as seen in Tunja, Villa de Leiva and other smaller towns; Cartagena de Indias, and finally, Isla San Andés, the “Microcosm of the Caribbean.” The book delineates important aspects of the colonial heritage: religious, residential and military, of four centuries of colonial and national life. It also emphasizes colorful and at times humorous vignettes of travel and comments on local life and events. The tale is told in an informal way, Curran relating all as if in a conversation with the reader. The book is richly illustrated with images from the travels.

"Coming of Age with the Jesuits" chronicles a young man's formative years from 1959 to 1968 studying on the undergraduate level at Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Missouri, and for the Ph.D. at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. Between junior and senior year Curran had his first educational experience in Latin America studying at the National University of Mexico and traveling to Guatemala. This would lead to an increase in his love of languages and area studies and a future teaching career committed to the same at Arizona State University. The book is not an academic treatise on the Jesuits or their method of study, the "Ratio Studiorum," but rather a chronicle of the experiences in their schools by a young man introduced to Jesuit ways and discipline followed by serious study along with college fun and travel. Students from the 1960s will surely recall, relate to and enjoy similar moments in their own days with the Jesuits. The book chronicles as well the on-going process of growing up of a small town farm boy experiencing the big city, college, foreign travel and the next step of serious study with more precise career goals on the graduate level.

Mark Curran grew up on a family farm near Abilene, Kansas in the 1940s and 1950s.  Abilene, aside from being a beautiful small town with many historic buildings and Victorian style homes on shaded streets, is famous for its role in the early cattle drives from Texas and as a railroad shipping center for livestock to the East, cowboy days, and being the childhood home of Dwight D. Eisenhower, head of the Allied forces in World War II and later President of the United States. The farm was on a half-section of land, producing wheat, alfalfa and corn, and was nearly self-sufficient in providing food for the family. Curran believes his experience of growing up was typical of the times in the United States and represents a way of living which has nearly vanished. He also believes his experience is shared by many people who now live in urban areas but share many of his memories.

São Paulo: Editora Ateliê. 2010.

This book is Curran's most recent as an active professor and researcher of "cordel" at Arizona State University.  It represents an entire career of reporting on and writing of "cordel."   Curran sees it as a cumulative effort of his 45 years of travel, study and writing about  "cordel" and as "paying a debt" to the poets, publishers, and public of Brazil as well as to mentors and friends from a career lasting from 1966 to the present.  In short, it is a continuation of his "namoro" or love-affair with the country and its people.  Curran is retelling the "story" of "cordel."  Since he believes "cordel" is indeed a folk-popular epic of Brazil, the book takes the form of ten chapters.  Each is lengthy and Curran counsels patience, reading one at a time, but insisting on arriving at the book's end which really is only the beginning.

Professor Curran made more than twenty research/travel trips to Brazil from 1966 to 2005 traveling from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the South, up the São Francisco River in Minas Gerais and Bahia, through the major and minor cities of Brazil’s Northeast, and to Belém and Manaus in the Amazon Region.

Salvador:FundaçãoCasa de Jorge Amado  -- Fundação Casade Rui Barbosa, 1981, 95 pp.

This monograph was published on the occasion of the celebration of fifty years of literature of Jorge Amado in Bahia in 1981.  Because it was part of the Amado celebration covered by television, national news magazines and Vargas Llosa for Peruvian television, Amado appeared at the book signing and Isto É included an article on Curran and the book in its feature article of that week’s issue.

The book is modest in size and specialized in scope, but is of value if one enjoys reading Jorge Amado, recognizes his role in Brazilian fiction and wants to see just one, small facet of his novelistic technique.  Its thesis derives from Amado’s own statement that his novels in large part owe a large debt to the humble masses [povo] and their own folk-popular culture and that he indeed is a “teller of stories” heard from the poor.

Recife: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 1973, 91 pp.

This monograph represents part of Professor Curran’s Ph.D. thesis; it was the first book published by a foreign scholar on the cordel in Northeast Brazil and the first to use the term “literatura de cordel” as its title.  The book  represents study and fieldwork in Brazil during 1966-1967.  The first chapter is a description and explanation of cordel, emphasizing information on the poets, their method of reciting or singing the verse in the marketplace and their sales-distribution network.

Madrid: Editorial Orígenes, 1991, 211 pp.

This book was commissioned by Editorial Orígenes in Madrid with the purpose of making Brazil’s cordel tradition available in a bilingual text to Spanish readers.  Its owner was cognizant of the relationship between the folk-popular poetry tradition of Spain’s romancero, its offspring the poesía gaucha y gauchesca of Argentina, the corridos of Mexico and Brazil’s cordel.  The book consists of an introductory chapter to the cordel in Spanish and an anthology of fourteen well-known story-poems from cordel , among the most famous and indicative of the “vast universe” of cordel.  The text of each of the poems is in facing colums: the Brazilian Portuguese original on the left, the colloquial Spanish translation on the right.  Each poem has an introduction in Spanish which explains its thematic type.  One has an excellent idea of what cordel is all about after reading this book.

This lengthy book on perhaps the most visible poet and  publisher of modern cordel, Rodolfo Coelho Cavalcante, Alagoan but longtime resident of Salvador da Bahia, is simultaneously biography, anthology and analysis of RCC’s almost fifty year career production of cordel.  But it is more because through RCC’s role as propagandist of the poets and poetry of cordel since 1955, one in effect sees the evolution of the same during one-half of its existence in Brazil.

Salvador da Bahia: Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado, 1990, 197 pp.  Preface by Jorge Amado.

Part One treats “Cuíca the man, the poet, the popular reporter” and is based on interviews, newspaper and magazine articles and the poet’s own statements in his poems.  Part Two is an anthology of excerpts from Cuíca’s documental cordel on Bahia and the nation. Cuíca is the opposite side of the coin of his contemporary and competitor, Rodolfo Coelho Cavalcante: he is the “Hell’s Mouth,” [Boca do Inferno] of Bahian cordel from 1940 to 1964.  A popular, semi-literate Gregório de Matos from the masses, Cuíca wrote biting satire on local scandal which got him into trouble, and only appeals to friends with “pull” and even to President Getúlio Vargas managed to keep him out of hot water and even then, not all the time.

São Paulo: Hedra, 2000. Introduction and organization by Mark J. Curran

Professor Curran was asked by Hedra Publishing House in São Paulo to organize this anthology and write the introduction. The volume is one of fifty planned, each highlighting the career and accomplishments of a major writer of “cordel.”

Cuíca de Santo Amaro, the folk-popular “hell’s mouth” of Salvador da Bahia, a title earned  by virtue of  his story-poems written during thirty years, from the 1940s, 1950s to the mid-1960s, documented in the most complete fashion the daily life in the city of Bahia de Todos os Santos: the hard times for the poor, the customs and moral expectations in the city of Salvador in those days, the crimes, the natural disasters, and perhaps most important, the scandals of private and public life in Bahia. In addition, Cuíca chronicled the political times in Brasil.  He was known as a less than perfect artisan of verse, but as a wonderful poet-reporter.

São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1998, 283 pp.

Professor Curran’s latest book takes a different tack.  Its thesis is that the news stories from Brazil’s literatura de cordel in their entirety comprise a valid and important alternative source for Brazilian history in the twentieth century – not that they are history, but that they are invaluable for the learned historian as one of many sources to write history. The idea is based on Pedro Calmon’s seminal História do Brasil na Poesia do Povo (1929) and a reading of  E.  Bradford Burns’ and Thomas Skidmore’s classics on Brazilian history.  The book was favorably reviewed in Veja and literary supplements in São Paulo and Brasília.

Brazil’s Folk –Popular Poetry.  “A Literatura de Cordel”
A Bilingual Anthology in English-Portuguese.
Mark J. Curran | Trafford Publishing Co. 2010

This anthology of the "cordel" story-poems is intended primarily for an English speaking audience.  The author knows of no other such endeavor.  It introduces the "cordel" to this new public in an informative introduction.  The anthology itself has as its inspiration Curran’s much larger "Portrait of Brazil in Cordel" [Retrato do Brasil em Cordel] published in 2011 by Ateliê Publishing House in São Paulo, Brazil.  It thus envisions the "cordel" as a folk-popular Brazilian Epic, and provides a sampling of "cordel" in its ten story-poems.