The Brooklyn Rail

“If you have a problem you don’t know how to solve, write about it,” Bonnie Jo Campbell advised my fiction writing students during a Zoom call in fall of 2022. At the time, she was deep into revisions of what would become her just-released novel, The Waters, where Campbell puts such beliefs into practice, exploring a web of troubles about mothers and daughters, healers and violence, and the love that inextricably ties us together.

Bonnie Jo Campbell has been shedding light on the rural Midwest since the publication of her 1999 juggernaut, Women and Other Animals. Her stories have long featured women and men struggling to squeeze out a living. And with each book, they have found themselves in situations that place this adversity alongside larger social issues. Nowhere is this more spellbinding than in The Waters. In the book, Campbell holds up a vision of a world that is lyrical and thought-provoking and easily one of her best. After being named the January Pick for the Today Show’s “Read with Jenna” Book Club as well as Oprah Daily’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2024,” her gritty realism heads mainstream.

I first met Bonnie Jo Campbell when she served as visiting professor at Bowling Green State University, where I was an MFA student. During workshops, Campbell would frequently bring snacks (she is fond of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups) and regale us with stories of life with her two donkeys.

I was delighted to conduct this interview with Bonnie Jo over email about the slipperiness of point of view, how novels continue to school her, and whether or not she considers The Waters her most autobiographical novel to date.

Melissa Fraterrigo (Rail):  I loved everything about Donkey—her passion for math, her desire for Rose Thorn’s boyfriend, Titus, to be her father, and even her certainty that she is related to a snake. Dorothy (Donkey) is growing up without her mother, which leaves her with only her whip smart intelligence and questions about her place in the world, a combination that leads to a great deal of mischief and mayhem.

Bonnie Jo Campbell: Thank you, Melissa, for taking the time to talk to me! Yes, my dear Donkey character was the initial inspiration for the book. When people ask me why she loves math, I can only say that this was how she came to me, and I accepted her love of math, and the whole novel formed itself around her. Only later, after I put her on a small island in the swamp, did I learn how much she loves nature, especially the aspects of it that she can measure and calculate. She also loves the mysteries of nature, but when she feels overwhelmed, she returns to what she can measure and know with absolute certainty. I was a child left to my own devices the way Donkey was, and I found plenty of joy, mystery, and trouble. Parenting is different now, and we are not allowed to benignly neglect our children, but I am allowed to raise my fictional girl any way I want, and I love what she becomes as a result of figuring things out for herself. I love the ways in which she is fearless and determined, and I also love her vulnerabilities. Because she is growing up surrounded by women, she craves the company of men, and I think we all know the trouble that that can bring on!

Rail: In The Waters, while we spend more time inside the hearts and minds of Donkey and Rose Thorn, we have “privilege” of all characters. David Jauss, in Alone with All That Could Happen, mentions that point of view can be used “to manipulate the degree of distance between the characters and the reader in order to achieve the emotional, intellectual, and moral responses the author desires.” Can you discuss the process of selecting an objective point of view for this book and what it accomplishes?

Campbell: During my first years of living with these characters and their world, I was working in third person, through the point of view of Donkey. That’s a risky thing to do, to tell an adult story through the eyes of an immature person. At that time, I envisioned Donkey a little older, like the fourteen-year-old protagonist of True Grit. In fact, I was so inspired by True Grit that I then rewrote a draft of the book in the first person. I admire Charles Portis’s ability to drive that story forward simply by the force of Mattie Ross’s determination. Well, I didn’t like what came out of that—I found that I not only wanted to tell a girl’s story, but I wanted to tell a story of the whole family, and then the whole community.  

The omniscient point of view is thrilling when it works, and it usually doesn’t. Sometimes people call a roving third person omniscient, but I’m employing a larger omniscience, which is to say, I’m writing in God’s point of view, going backward and forward in time to show how things have changed for the people of this town, even staking a claim for what it all means, in addition to having access to how everybody feels at any given time. This is challenging for a couple of reasons, and it is why the book swelled to 650 pages at one point. There are so many choices of where the narrative can go that it can be hard to decide which is the most important in the moment. Also, it can annoy the reader if not done well; when the narrator knows everything, then it can seem coy to the reader if any information is held back, which can make plotting more difficult. At every point, I have to keep readers very focused on what I am showing them, so they aren’t too distracted by what I am not currently showing. 

Rail: The novel could be described as being about coming to terms with change and loss. Rose Thorn must reckon with her past and Donkey has to let go of her belief that she is responsible for anything bad that occurs. Do you think this is at the root of the problems that Rose Thorn and Donkey experience? What role do you see mothers and daughters in your work? 

Campbell: Change and loss—isn’t that what growing up is all about? And we all have growing up to do! For me a big part of any story of young people is about the loss of innocence. After all, it’s a story we all have in common, from the Bible on down—in that story, if there’d been no tasting of the fruit, there would be no growing up and becoming adults who are responsible for making their own decisions. And I think a part of this is letting go of ideals and principles and facing reality in the form of other human beings with different opinions and goals. Part of our job as humans is to do that without despairing or giving up. And I hope that can be part of the experience of the reader as well—I know it was part of my experience as the writer. As I was writing, I was hoping the women would “win” and somehow beat the men, but that’s not really a great goal. The goal in this novel of community is to find a way we can all coexist. And I didn’t want that to be boring—I wanted coexisting to be kind of exciting. 

Rail: Congratulations on Michigan Salvage, the first scholarly collection of your work! Lisa DuRose, one of the book’s editors, is working on your biography. In addition to essays about your stories, the book also, according to Michigan State University Press, “features lesson plans and writing prompts meant to spark discussion and encourage further investigation into these stories and novels. This essential and teachable collection makes plain Campbell’s contributions to contemporary American literature.” This must make you want to leap out of bed in the morning! And yet you write stories about rural America and shine your lens on unpopular characters suffering from addiction and poverty and disease. In your work, individuals who our culture may not view as lovable are portrayed with a great deal of love. 

Campbell: It is a great crazy-great honor to have my creative work become the subject of study and inquiry. I mean, it’s a dream and a thrill to have my efforts at communication with the reader reciprocated by some talking back! I go into every story I write with a great seriousness and with determination to work it through and get to the heart of my characters and families and communities, and this recognition tells me that this challenging work is worth it. I’m not somebody with a drawer full of story attempts, so I’ve taken every story very seriously. But I really never imagined garnering this kind of attention. 

With all bright light comes some hint of darkness, so I worry that I don’t deserve the attention and also that I won’t be able to create new work, so I try to just keep my nose to the grindstone. Writing is humbling every day. As for the nature of my characters, I bring the light and the dark there too—I wouldn’t have it any other way. And if I have a job in this world, it is to show you the characters and communities I care about that you would otherwise not know. Like Flannery O’Connor, I want to introduce the reader to these people in their full, outrageous humanity. Where she and I differ is on the love part. I think she is confident God will love these people, so she doesn’t have to—I’m less confident about God’s plan, so I worry about all my characters the way a loving mother would. 

Rail: The residents of your fictional Whiteheart, Michigan, are as polarized as any other American community. Men walk around with rifles slung over their shoulders, and the women, as you note in your book trailer, do what they want. Led by the formidable herbalist Hermine “Herself” Zook, this includes making medicine that can trigger bleeding in a pregnant woman. Yet the book refuses to hold anyone in contempt. Were you conscious of this during drafting? 

Campbell: If I had a superpower as a writer, it would be that I am not judgmental. Even in real life, when I feel judgmental or self-righteous, I know I am screwing up because I am no longer listening. Readers can judge my characters negatively, but I love them all and my concern is close, honest observation. Neither the men nor the women do what I want them to do. They are more like the real people in my life, doing what they are destined to do. My claim that women do what they want is sort of a wishful claim; it’s what I want for the world: a world where women do what they want. So, I created an island where that can be true, a (fictional) space where we are a little bit freer. Now if only it was easier for us women to figure out what we want! 

Rail: Your books—from American Salvage, Q Road, Once Upon a River, and Women and Other Animals to Mothers, Tell Your Daughters have long presented the lives of fierce women. The Waters is probably your most feminist novel to date, and I so admired how fully you embody this world. The book also seems to be deeply autobiographical. You have two donkeys and live outside of Kalamazoo. You studied math at the University of Chicago and Dorothy—“Donkey”—wants to be a mathematician. Her mother, Rose Thorn, has breast cancer. You are also a breast cancer survivor. How did the personal influence this fiction? 

Campbell: This book is either my most autobiographical or my least autobiographical. I can’t decide, I mean. Though nothing I’ve done is like anything my characters have done, it’s absolutely constructed of elements from my life: the swampy Michigan landscape of The Waters is an adaptation of a real swamp near my home; the cottage on an island is an adaptation of my grandparents’ cottage on a river island; I studied mathematics at one point, I love donkeys, and I had breast cancer. But those elements are not the most critical stuff of the story—those elements are familiar to me so I have used them as houses inside which the human story of the relationships between fictional characters can unfold. Those are the containers in which character is poured. Those are bottles, which hold the liquor of the story. 

To have cancer is to experience the world cracking open, but what each person experiences when their world cracks open is entirely unique to that person. Having pet donkeys gives a character an opportunity to love and know another magnificent creature, but that love is different for each person, just as the common experience of having a mother or having a daughter is completely different each time it happens. When I hear my own sister describing the experience of being my mother’s daughter, I think she is speaking to me from a foreign country, though we slept in the same room for more than a decade. That said, it has been great fun exploring elements that are profoundly meaningful to me—as a slow writer, I know I’m going to spend a lot of time in my story, so I make a point of including elements I want to spend time with. It is just that they mean something different to my characters than they do to me. 

Rail: Knowing what you know now about the process of writing The Waters, how was the drafting process unique from your other books? 

Campbell: Writing is so hard, and every story is so hard to write that I always swear I will find a way to make it easier next time, and then I don’t. I write organically, feeling my way along, keeping what seems honest and true and tossing out what doesn’t. I revise by jumping back in and doing the same thing in every paragraph. The truth is that every book I’ve written has been harder than the last. Maybe because I’ve seen the weaknesses of the previous book and I’m asking a little more of myself. I have always known that I will have no more than about a dozen books in my life, so they have to be good ones, and that helps me be patient. Maybe the most important writing superpower I have is actually patience. I think you know I once took twenty-four years to write a short story. I just stick with a thing until I figure it out.  

Like always, in this book, I wrote long and then cut out a lot. Getting the omniscient point of view right was a major part of the writing process because of all the transitions into and out of the heads of characters and also in and out of that authorial godlike voice. Each one of those movements was a challenge and I had to spend time on the page making it seem natural, making it seem as though it was not a challenge.

The toughest thing about writing this novel was finding its shape. I did fear that I did not have a novel at all because it would not conform in any way with the normal structure of a novel as the powers-that-be tell us they should arrive. My previous novel, Once Upon a River, could be envisioned as a kind of hero’s journey, with my girl Margo conquering her own weaknesses and the enemy forces with her tools and weapons and then arriving home changed. But this story would have none of that. Rose Thorn kept going away and coming back. Herself got deeper into her own self and seemed destined to never return. Donkey was trapped in her love for her family even as her mind soared farther from them. They behaved like real women. And so, I had to fight my desire to force the story into a traditional masculine shape; I struggled to find a more fitting, more feminine shape for the novel, one that still provided a payoff for the reader.   

Rail:  Endings are such a challenge to write. I often tell my students to take the opening of their piece and place it alongside the end to see how they reflect and resonate. The ending of The Waters kept me spellbound. The final fifty pages of the book felt as right as the gymnast Mary Lou Retton nailing her landing during the 1984 Olympics. I’d love to hear about your process. It’s masterful.

Campbell: Thank you for those kind words about my ending. Endings are the hardest things. Titles are hard, too, and usually the title is the last thing I get, but the ending is the second to last. And then of course, you are right that upon finding the ending, you probably have to go back and revise the beginning. First, let me confess I did hundreds of rewrites. If not thousands. And, also, I have to say thank you to the production department at W.W. Norton for humoring my revisions right up until the last minute. There is a lot of plot in the penultimate chapter and getting all those misbehaving people engaged in a common project with all their disparate personalities and desires and fears and getting everybody to work as if in a symphony without it seeming artificial was difficult. And the very ending, the epilogue, well, I don’t know where in the heck that came from, but it is absolutely critical to my view of the community and my view of a certain character who still has a journey before him. And all this had to happen organically, had to be done by feeling my way through the story, paragraph by paragraph, respecting every word and the larger whole as I currently see it. Gradually the last fifty pages gelled and became what they had to be—some of it in line editing—respecting all the other parts of the story. 

Makes me tired just thinking about it!