Bonnie Jo Campbell
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Bonnie Jo Campbellis an American novelist and short story writer. Her most recent work is Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, published with W.W. Norton and Company...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
writing married beats
You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
love kings car
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. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.
shooting entertainment target
I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it's something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.
couple husband real
We have a shotgun we inherited from my father-in-law, a paranoid Englishman living in Texas. I have a .22 Marlin rifle, similar to the one Annie Oakley had, and my husband has a .357 Magnum pistol. All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns.
writing years truth-is
The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.
writing math thinking
Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you're often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally.
beautiful stories proof
A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.
adventurous obligation felt
I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.
school writing people
I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.
writing thinking specificity
I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
writing character men
I love writing about men. To get by in the world you have to know how men think. Not that all guys think alike, but women tend to think about more things at the same time, an overgeneralization, but I find it easier to make my male characters focus than I do my female characters.
mother husband gun
I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me something doesn't seem right. I have my mother's boyfriend, Loring Janes, read to make sure I get everything right with the machines and guns.
character car office
Some people tell me they would be afraid of my characters, but I tell those people [that] they meet these characters all the time. They just don't care about them when they meet them, at the gas station, the car wash, the post office even.
sleep passion men
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. Men didn't understand that there was nothing big enough to exempt you from your obligations, which began as soon as the sun rose over the paper company and ended only after you'd finished the day's chores and fell exhausted into sleep against the background noise of I-94.