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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Bobbie Ann Mason

Men

Harvest

Dinner

" 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. "

" 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. "

Bobbie Ann Mason

Early

" 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. "

" 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. "

Bobbie Ann Mason

Growing

Growing Up

" In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story. "

" I'm not very articulate. The reason I write is because I don't talk. "

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

Bobbie Ann Mason

Calling

Romantic

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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

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

Bobbie Ann Mason

Blues

Rock And Roll

" In the country in Kentucky, people are just amazed that anybody in New York wants to read about their lives. "

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

" 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. "

" Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero. "