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Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

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’ve worked behind counters serving food, and I’ve lived on the circus train, and I’ve led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I’ve been a key liner for a newspaper, I’ve done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Country Keys People Worked
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Findings Mind Portions
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
I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Chaos Life Order Pro
The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn’t very good.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Truth Writing Years
My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They’re very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Cautiousness People Smart
After a year, it was great to get out of L.A. and return to Hyde Park. Since my grandparents lived in Hyde Park, I had been coming there since I was a tyke.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Grandparent Hyde Years
I’m of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Bars People Stories
My normal writing day involves three hours of actual writing, before noon, and the rest is just feeding the writing. There is teaching (so I can afford to write), travel to be planned and executed.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Teaching Thinking Writing
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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Nice Running Teaching
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
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
Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Feet Scary Years
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
Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I’ve heard.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Heard Novel Percent

Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.

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Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.

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