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" 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. "

Bobbie Ann Mason

Used

Farm

Old

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

Bobbie Ann Mason

Blues

Rock And Roll

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

Bobbie Ann Mason

Calling

Romantic

" 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 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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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