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All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Adventurous Felt Obligation
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Character Function Order Themselves Urban
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

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

Black Degrees Training
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
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 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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Country People Realized Skills Writing
The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn’t very good.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Truth Writing Years
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
I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn’t do it, then you were out of luck.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Luck Thought Writing
It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

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

Specificity Thinking 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
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Consume Men Passion Sleep Work
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
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

All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns.

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All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns.

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Popular Authors

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