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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

Categorized in : Life Work Education Women

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

distance flying ideas

One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself.

Bobbie Ann Mason

counting cat one-day

One reason to fashion a story is to lift a grudge.

Bobbie Ann Mason

grudge fashion stories

I don’t know, it is a very quiet rebellion. […] I don’t get angry. I sit quietly in the corner and say 'no'.

Bobbie Ann Mason

corners rebellion quiet

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

chicken dinner time men

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

go me growing-up life

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

railroad farm old new

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

failure girl fear food

In the 1980s, Vietnam emerged in our culture as a legitimate and compelling topic for discussion rather than something to be hidden in shame.

Bobbie Ann Mason

hidden something shame culture

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

roots dream home country

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

grow clothes food people

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

Bobbie Ann Mason

new new-york country people

Some people will stay at home and be content there. Others are born to run. It's that conflict that fascinates me.

Bobbie Ann Mason

me conflict home people

It was important for me to understand who I am and where I came from. To get a hold on why I do certain things.

Bobbie Ann Mason

i-am understand me important

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

think me time country

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

farm pictures parents child

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

you time long book

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

something me writing people

When I was growing up on our 53-acre dairy farm, we were obsessed with food; it was the center of our lives. We planted it, grew it, harvested it, peeled it, cooked it, served it, consumed it - endlessly, day after day, season after season.

Bobbie Ann Mason

farm day growing-up food

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

cold-war pollution cold war