Bobbie Ann Mason
Mason at her Anderson County, Kentucky home.
Bobbie Ann Mason’s ridgetop home in Anderson County, Kentucky is wooded and expansive, generous with views of distant hills. You might think that a writer would dwell in such a landscape in order to commune daily with the sublime, but Mason’s reasons for choosing this place were more practical. “I wanted to live in a place where my cats and dogs wouldn’t get killed by cars. We’re well off the road.”
Mason does not, of course, only live in the country as a form of service to her animals. Aside from a stint in New York City in the 1960s, during which she was mostly unhappy, she’s always lived in rural places. Yet she is too familiar with the historically dark side of country living to be sentimental. She was raised on her family’s dairy farm in western Kentucky, and has said that her language “derives from the language of farm life, which is very practical and not decorative.”
Her own ambivalence about farming, Mason says, probably derives from having watched her mother, Christianna Lee Mason, suffer under a tremendous burden of work. Yet she also had a vitality that came from working with the soil. She managed to write letters and letters and journals; reading them, Mason recognized her as the source of her own craft: “She’s a better writer than I am.” Mason’s 1999 memoir, Clear Springs, explores the decline of Mason’s family farm. The book is also an homage to Christianna, and is infused with the vitality of her language.
Listen to Mason talk about the value and the burden of being from the country.
A winter walk at Bobbie Ann Mason’s place.