I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELLSince I’m living with the violence and trouble in my brain, it’s kind of a relief to write about it, to get it on paper, to put it in context, to find meaning in it.
More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes
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There are dozens of emails daily, gardening, lots of dishes (where do all these dishes come from?), daily family emergencies, and, of course, the petting of the donkeys. The smell of donkeys is heavenly, and their he-honking is the sweetest music. I feel calm just thinking about them.
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I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.
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I’m of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
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Since I’m living with the violence and trouble in my brain, it’s kind of a relief to write about it, to get it on paper, to put it in context, to find meaning in it.
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I can’t personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write.
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The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn’t very good.
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I was just about to earn my Master’s along the way, but I knew something was wrong because I found myself crying all the time.
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It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.
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When I was little, we lived on 8 acres and my mom had a horse. But when I was 7, my mom kicked my dad out, and then in order to feed us five kids, she got critters cheap or for free and raised them for food.
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The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.
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I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn’t do it, then you were out of luck.
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I’m not much interested in my own self when I write. I’m interested in what I observe out there, what’s going on around me.
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Nobody tells young writers it’s okay if you’re not very good, you’ll get better. So I just thought I’m not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That’s how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.
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The great thing about fiction is that I don’t have to settle on an answer to any troubling question, or even a solution.
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As a writer, I can live somewhat independently, occupying nooks and crannies and finding meaning there. I can even live in my mind a good portion of most days.
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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I’ve heard.
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A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you’re finished, it’s really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.
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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
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I do different work, teaching and running around visiting universities and bookstores, and that prevents me from writing. But it’s nice to be wanted as a writer.
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Men didn’t understand that you couldn’t let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do.
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I worked probably fewer jobs than most people, or fewer real soul-killing jobs than other people. I’ve been a typist, a typesetter, a keyliner, cappuccino-maker. I think I’ve been pretty lucky.
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Where I live you’re not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.
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My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They’re very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness.
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I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
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I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in the new-millennium America.
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So maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I’m interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL