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 CAMPBELLI loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.
More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes
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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.
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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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I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.
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I hope that my stories serve as explorations and help show readers how and why real-life women don’t always make the “correct” decisions in the face of economic and sexual troubles.
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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.
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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I’ve heard.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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