BAM: Actually, I think it would be very difficult, without an intimate knowledge of the sounds and nuances of the language. Sometimes I think that what is most important to me about the sound of the prose is just not something that will be noticed! Even in English.
CDM: History, tradition and legacy are essential concepts in your writings. Your characters are not completely disentangled from their roots. In your story “The Heirs,” the narrator explains how the main character appreciates a box of her family’s letters, pictures, and a stick of dynamite. The objects, somehow, narrate her family’s past. There is a respectful approach to the materiality of memories: “Nancy saw herself in this group of people, lives that had passed from the earth as hers would too. She felt comforted by the thought of continuity, even if a stick of dynamite could be called an heirloom” (Nancy Culpepper, 202). Do you play with objects as somehow speaking for your characters?
BAM: I don’t really know how to answer that. I’m usually dealing with objects like sticks of dynamite on a fairly literal level. This is what makes them work for the reader ultimately as symbols or narrative objects or whatever. If you get the surfaces right, in the right combinations, at the right angle, then they will embody in the larger story those themes, symbols, concepts, etc., that entertain the classroom.
CDM: When observing these details that surround you, do objects ever work as triggers for stories? How?
BAM: Very often it is an image of some sort that sparks the inspiration for a story. That stick of dynamite found in a box of letters may very well have been the trigger for that story. In the opening of “Shiloh,” Norma Jean is lifting weights. The novel In Country was initially inspired by the sight of a couple of teenagers selling flowers on a street corner, but that scene was eventually dropped.
CDM: In the article “Honoring her Fathers” (Mason, 2011, Book Reporter) you narrate your reconciliation with the South by re-establishing a bond with your father. I was intrigued by your choice of the verb “to gravitate” in order to create the metaphor:
But in the last years of his life we found common ground as I gravitated back to the land. We shared a love for animals. He liked to have a small dog with him in his car, so they could go motivating down the road listening to Chuck Berry. I got my musical tastes from him.
For me, your use of the word “gravitate” also suggests gravitas in the sense of “dignity.” How do you convey this Southern gravitas, which is still often ignored in cultural representations and the media?
BAM: “Gravitate” is from modern Latin “gravitare,” to move, from Latin gravitas, weight. In that quote, I was more concerned with the echo of “gravitating” in the word “motivating,” a word Chuck Berry uses in his 1950s song “Maybellene.” (“As I was motivatin’ over the hill, I saw Maybellene in her Coupe de Ville.”) Motivating implies purpose, and Chuck Berry’s creative misuse of the word suggests he is motoring purposefully—with a strong motive! Maybelline has been untrue and he is speeding after her. I don’t know if you can get gravitas out of that sense of vitality and purpose. And humor. As for my father, I’d think of humor before I’d think of gravitas.
CDM: Female friendships are a constant in your writing. In the story “Bumblebees,” three women have decided to move to a farm together and work and live off the land. You portray their intimacy in the following way: “With the three of them cooped up, trying to stay out of each other’s way, Barbara feels that the strings holding them together are taut and fragile, like the tiny tendrils on English-pea vines, which grasp at the first thing handy” (Love Life, 109). Three women confront their fears within the narrow limits of the house, creating a sense of tension and annoyance, simultaneously with a strong loving bond. How do you recall your own experience of living in a house full of grandmothers, mothers, and sisters?
BAM: I don’t remember it exactly that way, and “Bumblebees” is fiction. I grew up with one grandmother, one mother, two younger sisters. My grandmother and mother were always working with food. And they made our clothes. I wanted to read books and escape farm life! That was the tension for me, but I’ve imagined these women in “Bumblebees” who choose that life.
CDM: But you eventually moved back to Kentucky; would it be fair to say that you also “chose” that life after having left it behind?
BAM: Not entirely. I had escaped the narrow confines of the cultural and economic expectations and I was able to come back on my own terms.
CDM: I am really interested in the volume Missing Mountains: We Went to the Mountaintop but It Wasn’t There (2005), where you contributed an article denouncing the disastrous environmental effects of mountaintop mining. Here you show your commitment to the preservation of the American landscape. Previously in 2000 you published the article “Fall-Out: Paducah’s Secret Nuclear Disaster” in The New Yorker, which conveys a disappointment with Kentuckians for their passive attitude towards the poisonous presence of the nuclear plant in their land. You generally praise the resilience of farmers but also mentioned then that the lack of drive to fight for their rights was not surprising “in an agricultural region, where farmers forgive the forces they cannot control.” Do you ever reflect this attitude in your characters?
BAM: Yes, I would say so. My novel An Atomic Romance features a man who works at a uranium enrichment plant, within a culture of denial. For the nuclear-fuel workers, it is a matter of livelihood. It is too scary, too uncomfortable, for them to ask too many questions, so they close their eyes to the dangers.
CDM: How do they reconcile their instinct of survival and resilience with their love for the soil and landscape that might be endangered?
BAM: I don’t know about those folks, but I think that often people in denial about something can find convenient rationalizations, and often they seize on wrong-headed beliefs that prevent them from having to confront what they fear.
CDM: Talking about your novel An Atomic Romance, is it true that Salvador Dalí’s Atómica Melancólica (1945) served as an inspiration for it? When did you come across the painting and what was your reaction to it? The connection of these two artistic pieces became significant for me in reading the following words about the main character Reed, the engineer with a passion for astronomy: “He tried to imagine what an astronaut would see, peering down on that patch of green earth with its gray scar, the earth still steaming from its little wound” (50–51). Are we peering through those scars in Dalí’s painting?
BAM: The painting wasn’t an inspiration. It was just a pleasing discovery that seemed to corroborate the impulse of my novel or reflect its concerns. I don’t remember when I became aware of it, certainly when I was well into the writing of the novel. I tried to see the painting in 2005 in Madrid but it was not on display.
CDM: In April 2012 you read a poem from Wendell Berry’s Leavings in the National Endowment for the Humanities program at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Berry was selected by the NEH to give the Jefferson Lecture, a prestigious honor granted by the federal government for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. I find a strong connection between his lines and your work. Allow me to quote Berry:
I will be leaving how many beauties overlooked?
A painful Heaven this would be, for I would know
by it how far I have fallen short. I have not
paid enough attention, I have not been grateful
enough. And yet this pain would be the measure
of my love. In eternity’s once and now, pain would
place me surely in the Heaven of my earthly love. (2010, 71)
Could you tell us why you chose this poem and what it means to you?
BAM: I did not choose the poem. It was chosen by the program planners, perhaps with the approval of Wendell Berry. I was merely asked to read it aloud at the program. I do like the poem and agree with its joyous embrace of the delights in this world, as opposed to those promised by heaven. Yes, heaven would be this world, with all my favorite pets, and my family still here.
CDM: Later in the year, in your speech “Don’t Live a Throwaway Life” at the 2012 Earth Day Awards Ceremony for the Kentucky Environmental Quality Commission, you declared: “Growing up on a farm taught me to be observant, to pay attention to every detail in front of me—a bird feather, a funny bug, a patch of moss. This is a habit of mind I have found indispensable for writing fiction, which after all is like piecing quilts from scraps, something I learned from my grandmother” (Mason, 2012, Courier Journal). Could you elaborate on how being observant influences your creative process?
BAM: For me, stories are made out of tiny details stitched together. I consider that growing up on a farm provided me with the richest textures and sensations as well as a solid grounding in the natural world. I didn’t have many books when I was growing up, but I did have bugs and chickens and blackberries and cows and an infinitely complex world to explore.
CDM: It might be in the complexity of a simple life, a rural life, where elements of the landscape sometimes articulate intimate emotions for people. Christie, the mother of quintuplets in the turn-of-the-last-century novel Feather Crowns, dreads the death of her babies. She observes one of them: “It was the one that made Christie see the dark winter branches of a rained-soaked tree, with the deep blue sky coming through from behind. She heard him cry—a strong, healthy cry” (88).
Is Christie decoding nature, with the sharpest skills, as if it were a book to be read?
BAM: I seem to recall that in that novel Christie associates specific imagery, particular sensations, with each of her five babies. It is a blending of the senses and feelings. She is attuned to the natural world and her babies are part of it.
CDM: I would like to talk to you about a paradox I have myself encountered in reading Southern literature and that is related to this contemplative attitude we have been discussing and the idea of storytelling in the South. Eudora Welty wrote in her essay “Place and Time: The Southern Writer’s Inheritance”:
It is nothing new or startling that Southerners do write—probably they must write. It is the way they are: born readers and reciters, great document holders, diary keepers, letter exchangers and savers, history tracers—and, outstaying the rest, great talkers. Emphasis in talk is on the narrative form and the verbatim conversation, for which time is needed. Children who grow up listening through rewarding stretches of unhurried time, reading in big lonely rooms, dwelling in the confidence of slow-changing places, are naturally more prone than other children to be entertained from the first by life and to feel free, encouraged, and then in no time compelled, to pass their pleasure on. They cannot help being impressed by a world around them … (163)
This paragraph summarizes the primary contradiction I find in Southern literature: characters are storytellers and yet, at the same time, they are introverts. When you are creating a character, do you find any compatibility between these two traits?
BAM: Well, these two traits can’t be true of every character, and I can’t say that I have given this idea any thought in my own writing. I don’t recognize much of what Eudora Welty says about “great talkers.” I’m not a natural storyteller, I didn’t grow up with a traditional storytelling Southern background, and my characters are probably mostly introverts. What affected me was the sound of talking, perhaps because it was not a constant. The sounds came out of silence, so they were surprises—noticeable, memorable. At any rate, most of my characters are restrained in their speech and often reveal more by saying less. In many situations it is difficult for them to speak, and that is a tension that is more interesting to me than listening to the storyteller who never shuts up.
CDM: Without imposing literary labels on your writing, and as a closing remark, are there any writers, storytellers, that you feel close to?
BAM: An author I feel especially close to is Alice Munro because our backgrounds—growing up on farms—were so similar. Reading her autobiographical works is especially interesting to me. Of course her fiction is so widely adored. I can only regard it in stunned admiration. My favorite writer is Vladimir Nabokov, the word wizard. And his life was worlds away from mine. His writing genius too, but I do feel I share something of his sensibility. And we were both exiles.
CDM: What are you currently reading?
BAM: Right now I’m reading Anna Karenina (1877). And before that I read a nice novel by Judy Troy, The Quiet Streets of Winslow (2014), and Frederick Barthelme’s new novel There Must Be Some Mistake (2014). Recently I also read Sweet Tooth (2012) by Ian McEwan.
CDM: Would you like to finish up our interview by commenting on your current work? What have you been focusing on and devoting your days to lately?
BAM: I have been writing stories, all of which either take place in California or have some link to California. I am imagining a book called “California Stories.” Some of the stories are very short—forays into flash fiction. I have three flash pieces in a special flash-fiction issue of Frederick Barthelme’s online journal, New World Writing. And I may be doing some more collaboration with Meg Pokrass. She tickles my funny bone.
CDM: Thank you very much, Ms. Mason. Please, keep your pen close to the page for our delight.
BAM: Thank you for bearing with me.
2paragraphs.com Interview
By Joseph Mackin
What do you like least about writing?
In a way, what I like least is the thing that is best—that state of mind when your Muse kicks you off a cliff and you go flying without any thought given to gravity. You just go. I often have an airplane image in my mind, taking off or landing. Somehow in that state, the energy is directed and you get into the story and you don’t have to stop until you run out of gas.
That is the best feeling, when it happens. But the worst thing about it, the worst thing about writing, for me, is how that exalted Muse-lifted state in its defeat of time—its timelessness—robs me of time because I don’t remember it that well. I recognize that I did it, but where did the time go? Suddenly it is six o’clock. Where was I? Writing a novel is like that for big chunks of your life, not just an afternoon. Someone asked me how long I spent writing the novel “Feather Crowns.” I thought for a moment and said three years. The next day I had to correct my memory; maybe it was four years. For me the first year of writing a novel is the agony of the blank page, the all-too-obvious presence of time—empty time when I am sitting there fooling around, wishing I could get to the jumping-off place. And then come four or five years (who knows?) of disappearing into the novel. Eventually, seeing the finished book, I know I did it somehow, but I don’t remember it. I know I was in there, and it was intense, and I recognize the complex workings of it. But the time disappeared—so quickly. I always hesitate before launching into another novel. It had better be worth it or I won’t go near it. It has to steal me, kidnap me.
Copyrights and Permissions
“All Shook Up.” New Yorker, March 4, 1994. Courtesy of the New Yorker.
“An Appreciation of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.” In You’ve Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe. Edited by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.
An Atomic Romance. New York: Random House, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Chapter 1 used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Big Bertha Stories.” In Love Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Reprinted by permission.
“Bobbie Ann Mason.” By Craig Gholson. BOMB 28 (Summer 1989). http://bombmagazine.org/article/1218/bobbie-ann-mason. Interview commissioned by and first published in BOMB magazine. Copyright © by BOMB magazine, New Art Publications, and its contributors. All rights reserved.
“Bumblebees.” In Love Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Reprinted by permission.
“Canyon Where the Coyotes Live, The.” New World Writing, Spring 2014. htt
p://newworldwriting.net/back/spring-2014/bobbie-ann-mason/. Copyright © 2014 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Reprinted by permission.
“Car Wash.” New World Writing, Fall 2015. http://newworldwriting.net/back/fall-2015/bobbie-ann-mason/. Copyright © 2015 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Reprinted by permission.
“Charger.” In Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail. New York: Random House, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Corn Dog.” New World Writing, Spring 2014. http://newworldwriting.net/back/spring-2014/bobbie-ann-mason/. Copyright © 2014 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Reprinted by permission.
“Coyotes.” In Love Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Reprinted by permission.
“Cumberbatch.” New World Writing, Spring 2014. http://newworldwriting.net/back/spring-2014/bobbie-ann-mason/. Copyright © 2014 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Reprinted by permission.
Elvis Presley. New York: Viking Penguin, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Introduction used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Falling.” New World Writing, Fall 2015. http://newworldwriting.net/back/fall-2015/bobbie-ann-mason/. Copyright © 2015 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Reprinted by permission.
“Fallout.” New Yorker. January 10, 2000. Courtesy of the New Yorker.
“Family Farm, The.” In Clear Springs. New York: Random House, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Feather Crowns. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Excerpt reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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