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" 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. "

Bobbie Ann Mason

Child

Farm

Grandparents

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Bobbie Ann Mason

Early

" The way I see it, a clever cat prowls but calls home occasionally. "

" 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. "

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" Physicists must feel they are in the most exciting field in the world. Their minds must be afire. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I like to play with words and the sounds of words - that's extremely important to me. "

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" It was a romantic dream to be a writer. It seemed like a calling. "

Bobbie Ann Mason

Calling

Romantic

" I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, 'In Country,' which was published by Harper & Row in 1985. "

" 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. "

Bobbie Ann Mason

Life

Growing Up

" 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. "

" 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. "

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" I grew up on the precursors to rock and roll, rhythm and blues. "

Bobbie Ann Mason

Blues

Rock And Roll

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