Bobbie Ann Mason
Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail to Moments of Self-Awareness

Hear Bob Edwards' Morning Edition interview with Mason.

Listen to Mason read an excerpt of "With Jazz."

Hear an extended version of the interview with Mason.

Sept. 6, 2001 -- In one of the stories in Bobbie Ann Mason's new collection, the main character goes to find her son, a kind of hermit in the woods:

Bobbie Ann Mason Photo: Pam Spaulding

The cabin was just one room, and the daybed was neatly made, spread with one of my old quilts. I sat down on the bed. I felt strange, as though all my life I had been zigzagging down a wild trail to this particular place.

That passage in the short story "With Jazz" gives the collection its title: Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail. As Mason tells Bob Edwards on Morning Edition: "It's one of those moments that could be a crossroads or a place on the trail where you stop and ask yourself which fork you want to take. I see it as a moment of self-awareness, where you're aware of yourself in the moment as if everything in history had conspired to lead you to this particular point."

Mason sprinkles the stories in Zigzagging with recognizable elements that give them the touch of reality: a woman discussing her personal health problems with a telephone solicitor; guys in dead-end jobs; a motel with a sinister night clerk; a used car with a tattered copy of an Elmore Leonard novel in the trunk.

"All of these stories to me are about people busting out of something," Mason says. "A lot of times they're coming home, coming full circle in kind of a zig-zaggy way."

Mason, a Kentucky native, is the author of Shiloh and Other Stories, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her Feather Crowns won the Southern Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her best-selling novel In Country, about the aftermath of the Vietnam War, was made into a feature film.

It's no surprise that Mason loves "to play with words," like the people in the story "Tunica" imagining "they're going to Timbuktu on the bus," she says. "It's like ... distractions from something deeper going on with the characters."

Perhaps wordplay was on her mind when Mason recounted her mother's confusion at the news that the author's memoir, Clear Springs, was in the running for the Pulitzer Prize last year. Mason's mother thought she meant "tulip surprise, which made my day. I'd much rather think I won the tulip surprise."


Other Resources

Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail

Hear book critic Maureen Corrigan's appreciation of writer Eudora Welty, and a review of Bobbie Ann Mason's Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail on Fresh Air July 27, 2001.

Hear Bob Edwards' May 10, 1999, interview with Mason on Morning Edition.
• Read "With Jazz," an excerpt from Bobbie Ann Mason's new short-story collection, Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (Random House).

• Read "Three-Wheeler," another of the short stories from Zigzagging, in the June 2001 issue of The Atlantic magazine.

• Read a collection of reviews of Bobbie Ann Mason's books in The New York Times.

• Visit a Web site about Bobbie Ann Mason, including a biography and summaries of some of her works.

• Read Mason's 1999 article in Salon about how Louisa May Alcott's Little Women influenced her perception of writing and writers.