Campbell, Bonnie Jo 1962–

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Campbell, Bonnie Jo 1962–

PERSONAL:

Born September 14, 1962, in Kalamazoo, MI; daughter of Frederick Loesser and Susanna Campbell; married Christopher John Magson. Education: University of Chicago, B.A. (philosophy), 1984; Western Michigan University, B.A. (mathematics), 1992, M.A. (mathematics), 1995, M.F.A., 1998.

ADDRESSES:

Office—P.O. Box 52, Comstock, MI 49041. Agent—Amanda Urban, International Creative Management, 40 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019.

CAREER:

Goulash Tours, Inc., Kalamazoo, MI, president, 1988—. Teacher of mathematics and creative writing.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Short fiction award, Associated Writing Programs, 1998, for Women and Other Animals; Pushcart Prize, 2000, for "The Smallest Man in the World;" Reynolds Price Short Story Award, 2007, for "Boar Taint."

WRITINGS:

Women and Other Animals (short stories), University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1999.

(Coeditor, with Larry Smith) Our Working Lives: Short Stories of People and Work, Bottom Dog Press (Huron, OH), 2000.

Q Road (novel), Scribner (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor of short stories and essays to periodicals, including Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Review, and Utne Reader. Newsletter editor, Letter Parade, 1985—.

SIDELIGHTS:

Bonnie Jo Campbell trains donkeys and arranges bike tours to Russia and eastern Europe. Her short story collection Women and Other Animals was called a "bold and eloquent debut collection" by a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who said that Campbell's heroines are "determined, eccentric, painfully and beautifully human."

The stories feature women from rural Michigan who eat, smoke, and drink too much and work in dead-end jobs. Janet Kaye wrote in the New York Times Book Review that "the men they know are predators: absent, indifferent or casually brutal." Kaye called the stories "hard-hitting … [and] bitter but sweetened with humor." In "Gorilla Girl" a teen is able to vent her ferocity by playing a gorilla in a sideshow. A young man is seduced by the alcoholic mother of the young woman he worships in "The Perfect Lawn." In "Eating Aunt Victoria," an obese woman hides her food from the adult children of her dead lesbian lover. "Bringing Home the Bones" is the story of a Holocaust survivor who burns herself while canning vegetables, loses her leg, and then renews her relationship with her daughters.

Greg Tate wrote in Village Voice that Campbell "doesn't condescend to her hard-luck characters, but she confuses compassion with solemnity. There's nary a joke cracked in the whole book—little of the humor that can, at once, lay pain bare and act as its balm." Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman called Campbell "a poet of survival, lust, and freedom, and the call of her powerful stories resonates long after their pages have been turned."