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We all screw up, but the women I write about don’t have back-up plans or money in the back or resources to fix what they have broken.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

That’s where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and ’50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Three Tractors Truck
In fact, when I finally realized I was really going to write, when I was about thirty-four, I was working on my Ph.D. in Mathematics.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Fact Four Realized Way Writing
Any of us who listen to the news or listen to stories our neighbors tell are accustomed to violence.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Brain Understanding Writing
I like living near my family, and near the people I understand the best. The landscape of Michigan speaks to me, and the humility and humor of the people here makes sense. It just feels right to live here, in a place where I don’t dare put on airs.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Humility Landscape People Speak
We know that we need to explore desire in fiction – many say that the only way a story exists is that a character feels a strong desire – and nature is the place where creatures act on their desires in the most pure way imaginable.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Character Emotional Strong
I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Needs People Writing
If you have someone falling out of the boat, you’d have to drag the boat up the river and film the same scene ten times, every time, dragging the boat exactly where it was up the river.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Boat Fall Film Rivers Scene Time
Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Bars Man Men Old
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Better Trying Writing
I can’t personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Fighting Morning Writing
I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Specificity Thinking Writing
I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Black Degrees Training
I’m of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Bars People Stories
You can’t beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Beats Married Writing
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Context Meaning Trouble Violence
I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Adventurous Felt Obligation

We all screw up, but the women I write about don’t have back-up plans or money in the back or resources to fix what they have broken.

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We all screw up, but the women I write about don’t have back-up plans or money in the back or resources to fix what they have broken.

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Popular Authors

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