Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes
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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.
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'In Country' was also made into a film, which opened the story up to a broader audience.
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I grew up on the precursors to rock and roll, rhythm and blues.
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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.
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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.
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'In Country' is about a high school girl's quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, spent a couple of months hiding out in France in 1944, frantically memorizing a few French words to pass himself off as a Frenchman, but his ordeal had not inspired in me any action until I started taking a French class.
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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.
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Writing a novel about World War II and the French Resistance was a challenge both sobering and thrilling.
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Bruce Springsteen's world is where everybody did these terrible jobs, if they had jobs at all, and he wanted something better.
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Memory is a powerful thing for a writer.
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I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, 'In Country,' which was published by Harper & Row in 1985.
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I'm not very articulate. The reason I write is because I don't talk.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I like to play with words and the sounds of words - that's extremely important to me.
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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 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.