maybe gail and i should start with short stories......

ok, so today is the birthday of bobbie ann mason.........fitting for derby day....this is from mpr.....born in Mayfield, Kentucky (1940). She grew up in rural Kentucky, the daughter of dairy farmers. When she got to high school she realized just how different she was from the city kids. She became the first member of her family to go to college, and she eventually got a PhD from the University of Connecticut. She wrote her dissertation about the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. By the time she was done, she said, "I was so sick of reading about the alienated hero of superior sensibility that I thought I would write about just the opposite."

She began to write short stories about people in her home state of Kentucky, people who grow up in Southern suburban housing developments, drive trucks for a living, listen to Bruce Springsteen, and spend all their time watching TV and going to Wal-Mart. She got an encouraging rejection letter from The New Yorker magazine when she sent them the second short story she'd ever written. Over the next two years, they rejected nineteen more stories, but they finally published the twentieth. Her first collection, Shiloh and Other Stories (1982) got great reviews, and made her one of the most prominent writers of the so-called New South.

The title story from her collection Shiloh and Other Stories begins, "Leroy Moffittss wife, Norma Jean, is working on her pectorals. She lifts three-pound dumbbells to warm up, then progresses to a twenty-pound barbell. Standing with her legs apart, she reminds Leroy of Wonder Woman."

Mason has gone on to write many more books of fiction about her native western Kentucky, including Love Life: Stories (1989) and the novel Feather Crowns (1993). Her most recent collection of short stories is Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (2002).

Bobbie Ann Mason said, "I have always found it difficult to start [writing] with a definite idea about a character, or even a definite emotion. . . . But if I start with a pond that is being drained because of a diesel fuel leak, and a cow named Hortense, and some blackbirds flying over, and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere."