Bobbie Ann Mason

With the accent, it's an internal dialogue that Southerners have with themselves. We kind of carry around that shame, that feeling of being inferior to the North. I think I did lose some of the accent for a while. Because when I was a graduate student, I was terrified at having to get up in front of a roomful of smart New York kids. ”

The small family farm is dying; people's lives are being dislocated. ”

I was very bookish and shy. I didn't have playmates, ever. ”

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. ”

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. ”

I like to play with words and the sounds of words - that's extremely important to me. ”

Sometimes a book I'm reading is so terrific that when I finish, I simply turn back to page one and start all over again to see what I've missed, to experience it again, more deeply, or because I don't want to let it go. ”

I wanted to be somebody, go somewhere, do something with my life. ”

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

I grew up 150-200 miles from any city. You simply didn't have much connection with the outside world. So my dreams were always to get out. It's a familiar kind of thing, I think, for anybody in a small town. ”