Bonnie Jo Campbell

Music Credit:  “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd  Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

“The Waters,” written by Bonnie Jo Campbell, narrated by Lili Taylor. Used courtesy of Recorded Books.

Jo Reed:  From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works. I’m Josephine Reed.

(Audio book excerpt)

You just heard Lili Taylor read an excerpt from the audio book “The Waters” by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

Bonnie is an author celebrated for her profound connection to the Midwest and her evocative portrayal of place. Her latest novel, "The Waters," follows three generations of women living on an island in a swamp in Southwest Michigan who find themselves grappling with their place in a shifting world.  While at the periphery of the island across the bridge on the mainland are the men of the town, who struggle with their own sense of displacement and masculinity. Campbell’s work masterfully explores themes of identity and community, blending fairytale tropes with gritty realism. Bonnie Jo Campbell joined me to talk about  the themes of her novel, her writing process, and the challenges of creating this immersive story over the course of eight years.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Oh, well, it's a pleasure.

Jo Reed:  And I would like to begin by having you just tell us a little bit about "The Waters." How would you describe the book?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Well, I never have a way of doing it, and I always wing it, and it's always different, but I would say The Waters is a fictional place that would be in Southwest Michigan. And the book "The Waters" takes place there in a swamp, basically, that is filled with every kind of wildlife imaginable in a Michigan swamp, and there's a group of women--  a family who lives in the swamp and has always lived there in a very traditional way.  And as times are changing in the community surrounding them, the women are becoming scapegoats for all the troubles of the community, and I wanted to explore what was happening in the three generations of the family: Hermine, who is the old grandma of the family, whose job it is to create herbal medicines from the plants in the swamp, and her granddaughter, whose name is Dorothy, but they call her Donkey, and she's an aspiring mathematician, though she doesn't go to school, and she's 11, and in between those two is Donkey's mother, who is kind of a wild woman who can't stay put and finds the need to roam around. And in the surrounding town, which is a farming community, there are some of the struggles that we're seeing in rural American communities today.

Jo Reed:  Okay, I think that's a good summary to get us going. I do not know a better scene-setter than you, because the landscape is so central to the story and to its characters, and I love that the first chapter you really establish place. This is where we are, and I'm so happy there's a map.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  <laughs> Even though it's a very local map, but because everything takes place really within the equivalent of a few blocks, a square mile, it's all about juxtaposition, and anyway maps are fun.

Jo Reed: I love maps. I really do.  By the time I was finished with the book, I really had it geographically set in my mind.  Talk about how place is just so central to all of your work.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, I guess you could almost say I'm a landscape writer. Midwest writing is sort of a mixed bag. We don't necessarily have an identity as Midwestern writers. We have a lot of what the Southern writers have, but we also have what the Western writers have, which is landscape, and I find that once I figure out exactly where my story takes place -- I usually begin with a few characters in a story, but then once I realize where these people live, then I can understand really who they are. I do set my stories in Southwest Michigan or someplace in Michigan most of the time, and that's just because it's the place I know the best, and I think I can write most authentically about it. And because I'm so involved in connecting people to their landscape, writing about a landscape I know so well really works. The truths of the human heart exist everywhere. You can find them in any place, so I think it's wise for a writer like me to locate the action in a place where I know every plant, I know every tree, I know every bird that's making a noise, I know what frogs are out, and it really helps me, and I do believe that people-- at least in my fiction, I completely believe that people are who they are because of the landscape in which they're embedded.

Jo Reed:  Well, as you say, the landscape is so precisely drawn. It feels very real and very gritty. And yet at the same time you begin your book with "Once upon a time," and there really are fairytale tropes throughout the book. Take the premise: here's an old woman who's a healer-slash-witch with three daughters who live on an island without men. It’s wonderous and yet it is also grounded.  

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Well, it's fun that I enjoy fairytale tropes and elements of fairytales, and I've used them in a lot of my work, but I never start with them. I always start trying to write the most absolutely realistic story I can write. I really try to write a gritty, on-the-ground story of what really happens when people are in a place, and what happens is it takes me so long to write. I'm a very slow writer. This book took me eight and a half years, and as I write and rewrite and rewrite, the book begins to become more true and more authentic.  I think for me anyway, and I think this would happen for others if they chose to be as slow as I am, that what eventually emerges if you're really pursuing the truth in a given story, in a body of material, is that you find your way back to the old eternal stories, and those eternal stories often are fairytales. I never intend to do this, but what I find is that as I make the story more true, I find myself telling an old story.

Jo Reed:  Yeah, I think often the more precise one gets, the more universal at the same time. It's like the paradox of art.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, it's great. Yes, it really is the great mystery of fiction anyway that the more precisely located a story is-- something happens when we're very particular.For me it's that connection between character and landscape often.

Jo Reed:  I'd like to flesh out just a little bit more about our three main female characters, our three generations, and beginning with Hermine, who is also known as Herself. As we said, she's a healer. She's an intensely strong woman who is also very, very determined.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  And she's old and she's angry at the changes that she's seeing in the community. She knows that even though everyone in the community uses her medicines, she kind of taken for granted. Because she's a strong female and she's feared, she is also kind of reviled by a lot of people in the community, and she understands that even though she's very powerful personally as a character and a human being, she's very vulnerable. She has no way to defend herself, and a bullet is a powerful thing, and there's plenty of them in this community, and so she's at kind of a turning point where her job that she's done all this time is kind of in question. I mean, the swamp is changing. She relies on herbs that may not be growing in the future because of the pollution, and the way the community is kind of turning against her she's herself at a kind of turning point.  It was fun to make a character called Herself, because I come from an Irish family where we had a Himself, <laughs> and, you know, "Does Himself want another cup of coffee?" And so I thought it was fun to do a matriarch instead of a patriarch.

Jo Reed:  And then there's Rosie, Rose Thorn, her daughter, who you describe and show within the story as someone who  brings this lightness of spirit and joy that attracts everyone around her. And yet, she is still judged by that town. 

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, again, like her mother, she's integral to the community in a lot of ways, in a different way than her mother. She's almost socially integral to the community. Everyone wants to know what she's doing. Everyone is curious about her. She's very beautiful. And I've always been interested in beauty as a characteristic of characters. I actually think beauty is a curse. I know it's a cliché, but I am very serious about that. And so Rose Thorn is beautiful. She's fascinating to other people. She looks very lazy. She looks like she's not doing anything, and this is a hardworking community that very much prides itself on being hardworking, so when they see Rose Thorn appearing to just be lounging around-- she likes to read books and drink beer and smoke cigarettes, but she's rather exhausted with the social implications of who she is, that everyone's in her business. Everyone is constantly projecting something onto her. And I've known people like this in communities where they appear to be doing nothing, but socially they're doing something very important. And in this community, she's the one who's best able to bridge the gap between the family of women who wants to live an old-fashioned kind of life and this new community, and so she's kind of the key to figuring out how everyone can live together.

Jo Reed:  And then Dorothy or Donkey, Rose's child, who's being raised by Herself because Rose is not to be bound by anyone, including her child-- I mean, and then there are certainly circumstances around the conception of that child that's fraught, but Donkey is such an interesting character. How old is she when we meet her?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, she's 11. And I often write about sexual violation and about teenage girls and sexual issues, and so I was enjoying writing about a preteen who was very involved in her mathematics. In her soul she's a mathematician, and I really enjoyed that here we are in a very natural environment, and mathematics can seem on the surface very much at odds with that, but I wanted to show the ways in which she can love both, and I guess I love both as well. I studied mathematics for a long time, and I think that there are ways that her experience in nature is enriched by her love of mathematics. It's putting the wildness that she sees-- it's putting that into a kind of order.

Jo Reed:  Yeah, when I was reading the book, I felt like, well, what math gave her was certainty and safety. When her mother returns, she has a hard time saying "I missed you. Where were you?" but she can say "You were 4,187 miles away."

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, exactly.

Jo Reed:  That's the safe thing to say. <laughs>

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah. And I mean, nature can be overwhelming, I mean, if you've ever spent time in nature where you're really at the mercy of natural forces, and I created an environment-- the environment of the swamp very much is in flux all the time. It's vulnerable to the weather. It's very foggy. Often you can't see well there. And so, yeah, she's hungering for some kind of certainty, and it provides that for her.

Jo Reed:  Yeah. And then we have this almost Greek chorus of men.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah. Thank you. That's what I was trying for.

Jo Reed:  And they are literally-- they're kept off the island. There is a literal bridge that goes from the island to the mainland, and the women on the island can kind of hear the men on the mainland. There's a recklessness. They will shoot on occasion, but they are a very interesting bunch in this town of Whiteheart, Michigan. So who are these people? Who are the people in this town?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, it's meant to be a Midwestern town, very Michigan-ish, as I say. These are the kind of people I-- the kind of men I grew up with. They know how to fix things. They all came from a farming background, but the farms have been lost. I mean, the way that farming happens now it's not small farmers. Everyone sold out to the big farm. And these men have a troubled masculinity. It's kind of hard to talk about. It's almost as though you can only talk about it in fiction. And my book "American Salvage"-- I really explored this. We're seeing a kind of discontent in men in rural communities, especially white communities and I'm exploring where this comes from, I guess. And the men from this community were of farmers. One of them still is a farmer. Another one is a farmhand, but the others have had to move on. They have the old farmhouse, but the land's gone, and they have to work in factories and machine shops. And that doesn't engender in their souls the kind of meaning that farming did, and the men feel it generations later. These men feel it. There are plenty of men who can move on and move into-- what do we call it? Are we still in the information society? I'm not sure. But certain men are still connected to a kind of masculinity that's not really working for peaceable communities. I think that's safe to say.

Jo Reed:  Or a frustration of being denied something intrinsic to their nature, working that land. And I'm not romanticizing it at all. It's hard work. We all know that.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Right. And that's the challenge, is in the book there's one section where I do romanticize it a little bit just to make the point to show what's missing.

Jo Reed:  Whiteheart, as the name implies, is a town of white people. There are no indigenous people. There are no African American people. Why did you come to that decision to place a story in a white town?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, I know. That was a big decision, and it worried me a lot. This is another thing. When I answer this question, I'm still pondering how it works, but I think it's safe to say that this all-white community makes clear within itself what the problems are. It's that very lack of diversity that calls attention to itself. That lack of diversity is a big part of the problem of the community, and you can see that they still find a way to scapegoat anyone who is different than they are, and in this case it's this group of women. I wanted to actually show this community-- rather than presenting maybe an idealized version of it that would be more diverse, I wanted to show it in all of its problematic nature. I think we're very aware of the Native American element that lies below the surface of this town. I mean, Hermine is not Native American by blood, but she was raised by a Native American woman who was the last of the Native American herbalists of this town. And some of the names of the places are Native American, and we're very much aware that Native Americans are not there and that their traditions, which are only barely holding on-- when those traditions are gone, the town is really going to miss it. Even those last vestiges that exist in these women in the swamp are critical to the way the town works., and I think you could say to some extent the book is about whiteness. And I don't even know what that means, but it is.

Jo Reed:  Well, you named the town Whiteheart. 

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  I'm not pretending it's anything other than that.

Jo Reed:  Yeah. Animals figure so prominently throughout this book, dogs, of course, but also donkeys. Was this informed by your own connection with donkeys? I mean, Dorothy's nickname is Donkey. There are two wonderful donkeys in this book.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, I love donkeys. I've often tried to put them in stories, and it never worked before. So when I put them in, I said "Let's just try this. What would be the animals that these people would have?" And it made sense. And I really enjoy the behavior of donkeys, and it just made perfect sense on this farm that the only domestic animals are donkeys and chickens, and all the other animals around are wild animals. Actually Titus has some cows, but for these women the wild animals are more important.

Jo Reed:  Well, let's talk about rattlesnakes, shall we?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  <laughs> 

Jo Reed:  They cover that island, and Dorothy becomes convinced she's related to one in particular. Talk about her fascination with these snakes.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, well, Dorothy is of an age, 11, where she's very interested specifically in the things she's told to leave alone and to stay away from. And I enjoy, first of all, writing about snakes very much, as I've written quite a bit about snakes in my stories. Snakes are wonderful because they stand in as a symbol for everything. They represent evil in the Bible. They're also on the staff of Asclepius. I probably said that wrong, Asclepius. And they represent healing, and the rattlesnake is dangerous and poisonous, and the snakes are also the most grounded of creatures. And I'm very interested in the level to which people are grounded in this story. The women of the island are very grounded, and often the people of the community have become ungrounded, and that's maybe part of the problem. So I really enjoy working with snakes, but it's very important to me that if I work with an animal it's really got to be-- it isn't just a symbol. It's really got to absolutely behave like the animal it is, and this particular rattlesnake is very reclusive and only lives in certain areas. It's almost been wiped out. It's been wiped out in most of its terrain, most of the places it used to exist, but I imagined it could still be at full force in the swamp, and I really enjoyed that. And if you've ever known about creating rattlesnake venom, it's really an interesting process, because it does involve milking these rattlesnakes. So once you introduce something like a snake to which everyone has a strong response, then you have a way of putting characters together and having them not just react to each other but react powerfully to something in the story. So everyone has a reaction. Some of the men want to shoot the snake. Others of them want to catch it. Hermine wants to milk it and then eat it. So Donkey-- naturally she's a vegetarian, and she wants to befriend this snake, which is probably one of the more challenging things to do with a rattlesnake.

Jo Reed:  Yeah. You have an omniscient narrator, so our point of view is shifting throughout the book, and it's shifting from minor characters to the major ones. How did you arrive at that decision? And I wonder what were some of the challenges and opportunities in writing it this way?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  I know it was a crazy thing to do, because I started out telling the story just from Donkey's point of view, and I liked it. I'm really a fan of "True Grit," and that book is just a marvel of using a powerful young person's voice to drive a story forward. When you're reading "True Grit" by Charles Portis, you are just driven forward. I mean, that's why it makes such a good movie. And I wanted to do that initially. I thought that was going to be my project, but material has a way of becoming what it will become, and I realized that I had a stronger story to tell. I had a more powerful use of the material that became available to me when I expanded. Okay, so initially I was going to just use Donkey's point of view, and then I thought "Well, no, actually these other women-- their point of view is very interesting." Rose Thorn really is somebody who I wanted to explore and to show to people in really all her humanity. I had been writing these men from the outside without including their points of view, and I had a terrible realization that they were absolutely integral to the story and that they weren't two-dimensional characters. They absolutely needed to be three-dimensional characters. And it gave gravity to the situation if I treated them as full characters and really-- because that's what I found myself doing anyway, was really sympathizing with these troubled men. And it made it kind of more of a symphonic book, I guess, with all these different voices and the narration forcing the reader to not settle with one point of view but to keep exploring.

Jo Reed:  Now, just a little bit about you. You were born and raised in rural Michigan?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah. Well, just outside Kalamazoo. It's just a small town. My mom decided at a young age to become a farmer when she got divorced from my father. And she had five kids, not much child support, and decided to be a farmer. It was just a funny thing to do, and suddenly we were a farm. <laughs> We had eight acres, and suddenly we had milk cow and chickens and a whole different crew of people around, and it was a wild kind of life. I grew up on kind of a little swamp beside our property, and just everything was always-- including my mother, everything was oozing with fertility and having farm animals and hearing frog song and lots of kids around. I grew up with lots of neighbors and kids, and it was a very rich way to grow up. I should confess. One thing that seems most fairytale-ish about the book is to have a small island with a bridge to the mainland, but my grandparents actually lived on a tiny island in a river, in the Saint Joe River, and they had just a walking bridge to their house. So that fantastical element of the story is kind of based on reality. And we as kids spent a lot of time in the water, and we were very aware of all the nature and fertility around us.

Jo Reed:  And what about writing? Did you know you wanted to write when you were a kid? Did you write when you were a kid?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  No, I wasn't really a reader or a writer as a kid, but I very much was a philosophical child or a psychologically oriented child. I just wanted to watch people. I didn't really want attention on me. I just wanted-- I used to hide behind the couch, and I would listen to people talk. And to me that was just endlessly pleasurable. I was running around with the kids as well, but I was very interested in adults even as a kid.

Jo Reed:  You went to graduate school for both math and writing. Did you flip a coin? How did you come to writing?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  I know. I always wanted to write. I mean, I was the editor of my high school paper. I wanted to write, but I never had any confidence, and nobody else in my family went to school. My grandparents had gone to college, but nobody else around me went to college, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know where to go to college. I didn't know about applying for financial aid. All that stuff was very confusing. And then I thought "Oh, you've got to be practical," and writing-- especially because I knew I wasn't brilliant. I'll tell you. I'm not actually a very good writer. I'm just a really good rewriter. I'm a really good reviser, I should say. So my early drafts of books are no better than anybody else's that-- I just try my hardest. I should say it took me many years to learn this. So I was trying to write. Meanwhile, I was studying math to be practical, because I knew I could always get a job if I with a math degree. I studied math education as an undergrad, and then I studied pure math as a graduate student, and I knew that I could get a job at that, but all the time I kept writing. I was in a PhD program for mathematics, and finally my PhD advisor, he told me-- he said "I think you're doing fine, but I think you should go take a writing class just to see what happens." And so Dr. Art White was my PhD advisor, and he said he felt kind of bad, because once I took a graduate-level writing course, I never came back.

Jo Reed:  <laughs> Bonnie, in putting "The Waters" together and writing "The Waters" over all these years, what character or what aspect of the book was the most challenging for you to write and get right?

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Yeah, I mean, it's all challenging.  I find male characters a lot easier to write because I think I can write them with a singleness of focus, but I think for my female characters they're always thinking about 20 things at the same time. And it's very hard for me to get a through line for the women characters to get the plot element for the female characters because there's so many possibilities with my female characters. They can go so many different ways, and also they're so vulnerable. And I never want to write characters who are victims, but at the same time I see how vulnerable these women characters are.  So I try to get that balance right, where women are empowered, but I can't be unrealistic about it. I can't write a superhero woman, because I need to write it realistically. And the truth about writing is it's just a matter in those final drafts of getting every single thing to be authentic and to feel true and right and I want to give dignity to really complex feelings.

Jo Reed:  Finally—what is next for you, which is really a terrible question because you just spent eight years on this and I’m asking, “okay, what’s next?”

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  <laughs> No, it's an okay question, because I don't want to take eight and a half years to write my next book.

Jo Reed:  <laughs> But I do think you should have some time to sit on your laurels for a while after eight years.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  No, not even a minute. I'm not going to sit on any-- and that's the thing, is that's why writers can never become full of-- well, I can never become full of myself, because immediately I'm immersed in something new that is a mess and is not anywhere near being finished, and so that allows me to be very humble at every moment about being a writer. So I'm working on a story-- well, one aspect of it sort of bloomed out of this novel. I have a dinner scene in this novel, and it's long. It's about 45 pages, but it initially was 110 pages, and I really wanted to write a long dinner scene, but I realized I had to cut it back for this book. So I'm writing a book that's one long dinner scene basically, so that should be interesting.

Jo Reed:  And that will be great. I look forward to it. Bonnie, thank you so much, and thank you for this book. I really loved it. I love your work, and I was so immersed in this book. I was telling a friend "I swear to you you can smell the landscape and feel the air when you're reading it."

Bonnie Jo Campbell:  Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate you saying that. It makes it all worthwhile when I hear from readers who really could find themselves in the book in some way.

Jo Reed:  That was Bonnie Jo Campbell talking about her recent novel The Waters. You can keep up with Bonnie at Bonnie Jo Campbell.net. My thanks to Recorded Books for allowing us to use an excerpt from the audiobook The Waters, narrated by Lili Taylor.

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts—leave us a rating! I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.