bobbie ann mason....

ok, so.......this from writer's almanac.....It's the birthday of the novelist and short story writer Bobby Ann Mason, (books by this author) born in Mayfield, Kentucky (1940), She grew up in the country, the daughter of dairy farmers. She became the first member of her family to go to college. She got her Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut, writing her dissertation about Vladimir Nabokov. By the time she was done writing it, 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."

So she started writing short stories about people back in Kentucky, people who grow up in suburban housing developments and who drive trucks for a living and listen to country music and spent their time watching TV and going to Wal-Mart.

She sent her second short story to the New Yorker magazine. They sent her an encouraging rejection letter. They rejected 19 more stories over the next couple years and then published the twentieth. Her first collection came out in 1982, Shiloh And Other Stories, followed by other books, including Love Life, the novel Feather Crowns and her most recent collection, Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail.

Bobby Ann Mason who said, "I've always found it difficult to start with a definite idea, but if I start with a pond that's 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."


recall, if you will, gentle readers....that i was introduced to bobbie ann mason a few weeks ago at the u of kentucky english department awards ceremony....and that i did not think she looked like a writer.....which was encouraging to me, because i do not think that i look like a writer either.....and maybe that similarlity will be inspirational to me.....