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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

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Bonnie Jo Campbell
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 14
Novelist
Writer
Kalamazoo
Michigan
Metal
Truck
Metals
Neighborhood
Pickup
Several
Tractors
Three
Trucks
Live
Scrap
Pile

More quotes by Bonnie Jo Campbell

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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.
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I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck.
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The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.
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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
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I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them.
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I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
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Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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
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Where I live you're not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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.
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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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!
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I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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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. We milked a cow, raised chickens, pigs and beef cattle. We heated our one-story house with wood and stayed cold all winter.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I like to go where the life is.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I think back when I was kind of a crappy writer, I really did know my time was better spent working and having adventures and seeing the world.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they're not being written about much anymore. 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