In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.
Bobbie Ann Mason
I wanted to be somebody, go somewhere, do something with my life.
In the country in Kentucky, people are just amazed that anybody in New York wants to read about their lives.
Reading can be just feeding, but smart reading takes us further. The classroom is one way to go deeper, but we can't stay in school forever.
Bruce Springsteen's world is where everybody did these terrible jobs, if they had jobs at all, and he wanted something better.
In the 1980s, Vietnam emerged in our culture as a legitimate and compelling topic for discussion rather than something to be hidden in shame.
We had a cistern for water. My grandmother churned butter and made lye soap. She and my mother did the washing in a wash kettle outdoors, using a fire to heat the water. That's the way they did the wash until the 1950s.
The farm is one field to the east of the railroad track that used to connect New Orleans with Chicago. The track runs beside Highway 45, an old U.S. route that unites Chicago with Mobile, Alabama.
I was very bookish and shy. I didn't have playmates, ever.
I grew up on the precursors to rock and roll, rhythm and blues.
I read many riveting escape-and-evade accounts of airmen and of the Resistance networks organized to hide them and then send them on grueling treks across the Pyrenees to safety. But it was the people I met in France and Belgium who made the period come alive for me. They had lived it.
My mother watched the skies at evening for a portent of the morrow. A cloud that went over and then turned around and came back was an especially bad sign.
Some people will stay at home and be content there. Others are born to run. It's that conflict that fascinates me.
Memory is a powerful thing for a writer.
The small family farm is dying; people's lives are being dislocated.
Working with food was fraught with anxiety when I was a girl. Like all farmers, we were at the mercy of the weather, and we lived in fear of crop failure.
Reading is so private, and it is often a reader's habit to finish a book, close the covers, and plunge into the next one without a backward glance.
Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period - the Sixties - I rejected those things when I went north.
I suppose the desire to go to town helped make me ambitious, and the allure of the worlds that came in over the radio also helped. But the rewards of growing up on a farm were far greater in many ways than life in town.
Most of the time I was in the Northeast, I lived in the country, and I think that helped me to discover my material for writing.
I lived on the farm with my parents and grandparents. I had no playmates as a young child, and I was indulged. I helped my grandmother piece quilts, and we made pretty albums, an old-fashioned pastime. We cut poems and pictures out of magazines.
I rejected the traditional notion of 'women's work,' but I never thought of my early ambitions in a feminist way, exactly. Primarily I rebelled against apathy and limited education. I was rejecting a whole way of life that I thought trapped everyone.
I often say flippantly that the short story is... shorter; you can be done with it more easily. It's much less of a commitment of time and energy than a big project like a novel or long nonfiction book.
I like to play with words and the sounds of words - that's extremely important to me.
In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.
When I was growing up on our 53-acre dairy farm, we were obsessed with food; it was the center of our lives. We planted it, grew it, harvested it, peeled it, cooked it, served it, consumed it - endlessly, day after day, season after season.
Mama was a natural cook. At harvest time, she would whip up a noontime dinner for the men in the field: fried chicken with milk gravy, ham, mashed potatoes, lima beans, field peas, corn, slaw, sliced tomatoes, fried apples, biscuits, and peach pie.
Because we lived only a mile outside the town of Mayfield, I was acutely conscious of being country. I felt inferior to people in town because we had to grow our food and make our clothes.
During the Cold War, workers proudly contributed to national defense, but the carelessness and haste in handling toxic waste created a nightmare of pollution for subsequent generations.
Physicists must feel they are in the most exciting field in the world. Their minds must be afire.
I have heard from many readers since 'The Girl in the Blue Beret' came out. The story of my airline pilot, former B-17 bomber pilot Marshall Stone, on his search to find the people who helped him during World War II has struck a chord.
I'm not very articulate. The reason I write is because I don't talk.
Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.
I grew up 150-200 miles from any city. You simply didn't have much connection with the outside world. So my dreams were always to get out. It's a familiar kind of thing, I think, for anybody in a small town.
I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, 'In Country,' which was published by Harper & Row in 1985.
'In Country' is about a high school girl's quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born.
'In Country' was also made into a film, which opened the story up to a broader audience.
It was a romantic dream to be a writer. It seemed like a calling.
You have to realize that, when it comes to the South, we carry around a lot of baggage. The South lost the war, and I spent years denying my culture.
With the accent, it's an internal dialogue that Southerners have with themselves. We kind of carry around that shame, that feeling of being inferior to the North. I think I did lose some of the accent for a while. Because when I was a graduate student, I was terrified at having to get up in front of a roomful of smart New York kids.
It was important for me to understand who I am and where I came from. To get a hold on why I do certain things.
The way I see it, a clever cat prowls but calls home occasionally.
My father had all these great names for our cows. Bossy and Daisy and Petunia and Turnip. One of my jobs was to round up the cows before milking. I'd go out back with the dog and bring them in.
I was too shy to do anything but read, but there was nobody to tell me what to read.
I never, ever talk about writing to anyone at all.
Rock and roll is about desire, about wanting something better. I think my characters all want something better. My understanding of the rock and roll dream is that a kid in an isolated place or a small town or an underprivileged world could transcend it somehow.
Writers want to be reread. They want to think that their words don't just flash by but deserve some reflection.
Sometimes a book I'm reading is so terrific that when I finish, I simply turn back to page one and start all over again to see what I've missed, to experience it again, more deeply, or because I don't want to let it go.
My father-in-law was a pilot. During World War II, he was shot down in a B-17 over Belgium. With the help of the French Resistance, he made his way through Occupied France and back to his base in England.
Writing a novel about World War II and the French Resistance was a challenge both sobering and thrilling.
