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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

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

Broken Money Plan Resources Screw
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 was never a big reader as a kid. My imagination wasn’t captured by books very often. It was captured more often by boys and partying and riding horses.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Book Horse Party
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Daily Donkeys Emergency Gardening Smell
I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

People School Writing
Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Feet Scary Years
That’s why I have to be a fiction writer, because I can’t remember what just happened or where I went last week or what movie I just watched with my husband. I’m better off just making things up.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Fiction Husband Lasts
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 a regular class I don’t focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Class Ideas Thinking
That was a mistake, I guess, going out to California. They have these things called guidance counselors in high school. They drink a lot of herbal tea.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

California Mistake School
For ‘King Cole’s American Salvage,’ I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Car Hook Kings Love Watched
A Life in Men is a joyful, ambitious novel that is also an adventure traversing three continents, as well as a meditation on love, sex, and, most important, friendship, which can overcome time, distance, and even death.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Adventure Distance Important Sex
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

Best Character Emotional Fashioned Interested Old Work
Mostly the natural landscapes work as a sounding board for my characters, so they can understand themselves, and it acts as a mirror in which we readers see ourselves.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Character Different World
I’m very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Interested Puxxling Situation Tough
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Dad Horse Kicked Kids Mom Order

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.

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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.

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Popular Authors

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