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I’m of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

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

Bars People Stories
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 was just about to earn my Master’s along the way, but I knew something was wrong because I found myself crying all the time.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Crying Found Master Nobody Something Tell
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
I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Black Degrees Training
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
Where I live you’re not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Dwelling Miles Quarters
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 of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.

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I’m of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.

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Popular Authors

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