As soon as you start to worry that the literary world is dominated by writers who have never traveled outside the confines of academia, you meet someone like Bonnie Jo Campbell. Yes, she possesses many degrees (a bachelor’s in math education and another in philosophy, a master’s in math, and an MFA in creative writing) but her list of adventures is as impressive as her resume. A self-proclaimed “farm girl” from Michigan, Campbell has scaled the Swiss Alps on a bicycle, traveled with the circus, and led bike tours through Eastern Europe and Russia. She also practices karate and kobudo and trains donkeys.

In April, Campbell released her second collection of short stories, “American Salvage” through Wayne State University press. Her first collection, “Women & Other Animals” won the AWP Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1999, and her novel, “Q Road” was published by Scribner in 2002. Her newsletter of journalism and anecdotes, “The Letter Parade” was written up in the Village Voice, and she also has a poetry chapbook coming out in October. She lives with her husband and two donkeys just outside of Kalamazoo, Michigan, and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University. I met with her in Kalamazoo to talk about her pre-writing life, her entrance into this “competitive writing thing”, and why she’s chosen books over a big, fancy house.

BOOKISH US: You definitely didn’t travel the stereotypical “go to college, get an MFA, put-a-book-out” career path. How did you end up working for the Ringling Brothers Circus and scaling the Swiss Alps on a bicycle? What does “scaling the Swiss alps on a bicycle” actually mean?

BONNIE JO CAMPBELL: When I was young I just thought I should do everything, so I was lucky enough to have an uncle take me on a bike trip to Eastern Europe. We used to take a lot of trains on these bike trips, and on the way back from Bulgaria, we were on a train going through the Swiss Alps, and my uncle said, “You should really get off and bike here, you know. This would be a really neat thing to do.”  I think maybe he had done it before. I didn’t really know this guy very well, but he was very adventurous. He’s my cousin’s dad, and he said, “Oh, you’ll really like it.” So me and this other guy just got off the train and decided to bike over the tallest pass on the Swiss Alps. I was 17. I didn’t know what I was doing.

BU: And how did you come to travel with the circus?

BJC: I was just out hitchhiking with this boyfriend, and I thought he was not really being that nice to me. We were in Phoenix and there was a big sign up saying the circus was in town. He wasn’t being very nice, and I said, “Well, if you’re not nice, I’m going to go join the circus.” And he was like, “Oh, you never would.” And I was like, “Oh, shit, now I’ve got to go join the circus.” He had dared me to do it, so I had to go find the circus. I found the circus and just hung around until I got a job selling sno-cones. It was great because I got a room on the train and I did that for five months. I did their whole summer thing. It was fun. I liked it. I smoked a lot. I was in great shape, because you have to run up and down the stairs and carry the sno-cones above your head, and it was really heavy. I had to smoke just to make myself not quite so much of a goddess. I made a lot of money, too, because I was the clean sno-cone vendor. Most of them were a little grubby, so everyone wanted to buy sno-cones from me. Then for years after that, whenever the circus was in town, I would always go work for them.

BU: Where do you think this “need to do everything” came from?

BJC: I was actually a big scaredy-cat, and I still am. I’m scared of doing everything, but I’ve always felt an obligation to do everything, like you owe it to this life to do everything you can think of. I think even at the root of it I kind of knew I need experiences to write about even before I was writing. In my family, people love to tell stories and talk about funny stuff. If you don’t do anything, you don’t really have anything to talk about, so I knew I had to have some stuff to talk about. But I am always scared. I always hitchhiked, because we were really poor and nobody had any money, but I thought “God, I can’t not let having any money stop me.” I was always hitchhiking, which was so unsafe. I can’t believe I did it. Message to mothers—don’t let your teenage daughters hitchhike. It’s bad. But I’m glad I did, because it meant I got to go to the coasts, whenever I felt like it, basically. Whenever I could steel my nerves.

BU: You earned a master’s degree in Mathematics in 1992. Most of us bookish types don’t really do math. This makes you some sort of alien creature.

BJC: I know. I really like math. I think in my life I’ve had a series of crises where I thought I was really stupid, so I had to prove to myself I wasn’t stupid. I think I was going through one of those periods, so I was like, “Okay, I’ll study math, because if I can get a master’s in math, then I know I’m not stupid.” In my family, there were a lot of mathematicians, so I’ve always liked mathematicians. Mathematicians and physicists are such fabulous people. They’re huge supporters of the arts, and then we over here in the arts are scoffing at mathematicians and scientists, or at least we’re saying what they’re doing isn’t of that much interest to us. We want their cures for cancer, but besides that. I just love mathematicians, and I was kind of good at math. I also thought that as far as getting a job, it was easier to get a math teaching job than to get an English teaching job. I never wanted to be in this competitive writing thing. This is really scary to me. Everybody wants to write. If I go to speak in a library, more than half of the people are trying to be writers, desperately trying to write, and desperately trying to get published. I’ve always shied away from competitive environments, so I think that’s why it took me until 35 to admit that I wanted to write. I tried everything to avoid it.

BU: Your first story was actually published before you entered an MFA program.

BJC: Yes. Here I was in a PhD program in math. I was going to go all the way. I decided that the only way I could justify doing this MFA program is if I had a story published. So I had just one story published.

BU: Do you remember writing that story?

BJC: Yeah, that was in my first collection. I remember writing it. It was so amazing, because I learned how you write, and I learned that it’s just hard work. That to me was so eye-opening. Writing is just hard work. I can work hard; I’m a farm girl. So to learn that you didn’t have to get it right the first time or the tenth time, or the hundredth time, but you could just keep writing that story. I was like, “Yes, I can do this.” I also got more patient. Every day, when I was in this Math PhD program, I woke up and revised this story, every day for months. I got to realize the zen aspect of writing. You just live with the story. Actually my math advisor calls me one of his success stories, because he got me out of math and where I belonged.

BU: Did you continue to send work out when you were in your MFA program?

BJC: A little bit, not too much. I guess I did more than most of the students. Probably in the last year of the program, I was sending out pretty much all the time. There were some periods, probably at the very end, where I was sending out a piece of work every day. I’ve actually gone back to revisit that practice recently. It’s so easy to get out of the habit of sending out work, and so you make yourself send something out every day. It’s the business aspect of writing, and you just do it, you don’t fuss too much about it. You use the best knowledge you have that day to know what to send out where, and hopefully, occasionally, you make a good choice about where to send it to.

BU: What was your rate of acceptance at that point compared to now?

BJC: When my first book was published, I had a one-and-a-half percent rate of acceptance. I was sending out hundreds of things. Then as soon as the book got accepted for publication, I was able to take those stories and send them to the magazines and say, “Hey the book’s going to be published. Look, publishable stories.” So it shows that it’s not really a fair business. I had a definite advantage once I knew the book was going to be published.

BU: What do you feel was the most valuable thing you learned from your MFA program?

BJC: For me, the main thing was to have a group of friends and colleagues who were doing the same thing I was doing. What I was doing seemed very foreign to me, coming from a math background—all this writing and all this sending out work, and all this critiquing other work. It was all very strange to me. I need to have that group of people to help figure it out. And then I learned so much about my own work from Jaimy Gordon. Having a teacher like her, who likes your work, is worth so much more than money.  She always had faith in me, probably more faith in me than I had in myself, and she taught me.

I think it was smart that I waited to go into a program longer than some people do.  I worry that if you go into a program too early when you don’t have enough writing behind you, you won’t get as much attention from the faculty.  I think I lucked out in having a faculty member take an interest in me. I do worry a little bit about people who go through the program with no one taking a special interest in them. But maybe not everybody needs that. I think you can make the best use of the writing program if you’ve been writing as much as possible. That’s not to say I was, since I was doing other stuff too.

BU: I want to spend some time talking about the new book, “American Salvage.” One thing I liked about it is that it feels very much like a cohesive collection, but there’s not a forced connection between the stories. How did you know you had a cohesive collection?

BJC: It’s hard to figure that out, because I got the collection accepted at Wayne State before it was a cohesive collection in my view.  I didn’t realize it wasn’t quite all there, and I ended up swapping out stories. For instance, I didn’t have “The Yard Man” in there, which is really the most important story in the collection in some ways. When I finally realized it was about the turn of the century, that it was about these kind of people with these kind of skills, who were basically trying to make it in a new economy where those skills were not of value. When I realized that was going on, it allowed me to make the final adjustments to the collection.

BU: The stories almost seem to take place in one community, even though there is not a particular place named.

BJC: In the acknowledgments I say that it’s in Comstock. I acknowledge Comstock, Michigan, because it’s there. It should feel that way, with maybe the exception of the last story. It’s people living anachronistic lives to some extent. That’s why that last story, the farm story belongs, because being a farmer, with something other than a gigantic farm, is anachronistic.

BU: I am actually writing a collection set in Southwest Michigan and I’ve been encouraged to connect the stories and set them in one specific fictional community, turning it into a “novel in stories.” I am actually finding that limitation fruitful, but I liked that your collection did not have that sort of self-imposed connection.

BJC: I feel very lucky that nobody pressured me to do that. My first collection was basically all the stories I’d written, and this collection is not. I have a whole other collection that hasn’t quite found its shape yet, so this was nice in that I got to pick the stories that went together. I didn’t write them intending to write a collection. Every story I take on its own terms. I would find it stifling to try to connect them.

BU: The stories also feel like they could not take place anywhere else besides Michigan. How big of an influence is the place?

BJC: Place is my big deal. My people are my big deal, my tribe, and they are who they are because they’re right here in Southwest Michigan. Yet after my first collection, I got fan letters from the Southern United States saying, “You got it just right. It feels just right.” I was kind of surprised, although Michigan does have connections with certain parts of the South, especially Kentucky and Tennessee, because we actually have a lot of people whose families are from there.

BU: Even though the stories are supposed to take place at the turn of the millennium, in many ways it captured the feeling of what’s going on in Michigan right now—this lost, somewhat dispirited feeling that’s in the air.

BJC: We’re ahead of the curve, because we went into recession 10 years ahead of the rest of the country. Finally, we beat everybody else. The book is actually getting all of this national press, which is surprising for a book from a small publisher. I had 10 years to write about these things, and suddenly these things are happening to everybody—the methamphetamines and all this kind of despair that’s going on, so it’s sort of striking a note nationally where it might not have ten years ago.

BU: Several of your characters in the book are dealing with meth addictions, and your depiction of the drug seemed very realistic. Was that difficult to write about? What kind of personal authority do you think a writer needs to write about things like that?

BJC: I don’t know if I could write as much as about cocaine because I don’t know coke people, but I do know meth people.  I haven’t used meth, but in my circle, there are probably about five people who have involved in meth, have done jail time and have been addicts and have been hospitalized, so I do have some experience with it. I’ve seen that despair that it brings. But the word in law enforcement is that no one recovers from it, and that’s not true. I’ve seen people recover from it.

I’m sort of a scaredy-cat writer. I don’t write about anything unless I know it pretty well.  I have one story that takes place in Romania, and I only wrote about this part of Romania because I had ridden that very same stretch of rode five times and knew every landmark and knew it really well. I am really am cautious about writing about things I don’t know.

BU: You definitely have some journalistic instincts it seems.

BJC: Oh, absolutely. I am mostly journalist; that’s what I think of doing. That’s what the newsletter often was, and that’s what I would’ve studied if they’d had that major at the University of Chicago.

BU: Your books have all been put out by different publishers. “American Salvage” was just put out by the Wayne State University Press “Made in Michigan Writers Series.” Can you tell us a little bit about the process of getting each of your three books published?

BJC: If you win a contest, then that’s where it gets published, and that was University of Massachusetts [as with the first collection, “Women & Other Animals”] and they’re a wonderful publisher. Anyone would be happy to be published with them, I think. When I sold the novel a few years later, then that was with a mainstream publisher. They also reprinted the stories, so I was basically with one publisher and they had both my books. When I had a new collection, my agent said, “Nobody wants your collection, so just publish it yourself.” I’ve heard this from a lot of people. That’s why I went out and sought my own publisher. I’d entered the collection in a couple of contests and I hadn’t won, so I sent it to Wayne State for this “Made in Michigan” series.

They were so good. They let me have a lot of freedom with making the collection exactly how I wanted it. I did make changes, and they were very tolerant and supportive.  They let me have input on the book cover, which is important, because you’ve got to sell that. The thing is, with a small press, you are personally doing a lot of selling of the book, so you really want to have a cover that you love. Then if you’re like me, you can put it on refrigerator magnets and temporary tattoos. In any case, you’re going to be looking at that cover a lot.

BU: You seem to have fun with the marketing side of it.

BJC: I think that’s part of my early training as a human. You need to make fun and story out of everything. You need to do things that are worth talking about, in a way. You can have a book and do nothing, and then there will be nothing to talk about. But if you make it fun…That’s why it’s fun to have the party at Bell’s [Brewery, in Kalamazoo] because who wouldn’t want to have a party at Bell’s. I don’t love the marketing. I would rather not have to do it, but of course I’m going to make it fun.

BU: What’s a typical summer day like for you at this point in time, when you’re not teaching?

BJC: It’s basically: write the morning, write until noon for three hours, and then run or bike, and then have lunch with my fabulous husband who then goes off to work at 2:30. I’m the envy of all writers, because I have a fabulous spouse who’s always gone, so I never get tired of him. In the afternoon, I try to do any work that I have to do. I critique work for friends, then I also do farm chores and gardening and that kind of stuff. I wish I could say I always read and write in the evening, but sometimes other things come up, social obligations.

BU: You recently won a poetry chapbook contest from the Center for Book Arts Letter Press. Have you always written poetry or did you go through a recent poetry writing phase?

BJC: Oh, gosh, poetry is pretty new to me.  Starting to write poetry was my midlife crisis.  I had been realizing there were all sorts of stray bits that weren’t fitting into stories.  There were truncated stories and strange images and jokes that were something different.  So I started writing at least one poem a day, and I took a class with Diane Seuss, and I guess I’m hooked now.  I love writing and reading poetry.  I meet regularly with a local poetry critique group.  For me, poetry is fun and breezy.  Even the dark stuff is breezy because I don’t have to fit it together with plot and character and setting. Kim Addonizio chose my poetry chapbook as the winner for the Center for Book Arts Letter Press Poetry Chapbook contest.  I’m going to NYC to accept the award and see the chapbook in October.

BU: What advice do you have for would-be writers?

BJC: About the writing life, you have to know that is a decision that is going to factor into all other decisions. You have to know whether this is this the time you’re going to write or if it’s the time to do other things. For example, my friends have all bought nice houses, and I live in this half-finished swamp house. My friends have nice houses, but I have books. So it’s a trade-off. I don’t travel right now. I will travel someday again, but I don’t right now. As far as publishing, I think we need to think of publishing as part of our job. As far as the writing, just keep being interesting. Fascinate on the page at every moment.

Read more about Bonnie Jo Campbell at www.bonniejocampbell.com. Find “American Salvage” at your local bookstore or wsupress.wayne.edu.

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