Quote

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.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

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Bonnie Jo Campbell
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 14
Novelist
Writer
Kalamazoo
Michigan
Discovered
Particular
Intention
Simply
Wrote
Common
Number
Stories
Creating
Themes
Writing
Among
Collection
Good
Collections
Numbers
Theme
Wasn

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The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.
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I like to go where the life is.
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You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
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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.
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Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.
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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.
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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.
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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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I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
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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.
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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.
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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'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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.
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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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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.
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