Deep in a rural Michigan swamp, where snakes roil and magical spells seem to rise from the mud, lives a family of powerful women. Hermine “Herself” Zook concocts herbal potions that cure the ails of those in the nearby town. Living with her are her three daughters and a granddaughter called Donkey, with a mind for math and the wild. Bonnie Jo Campbell says she didn’t quite realize that she also lives in a swamp until she began writing about it. Her latest book, The Waters (W. W. Norton, 2024), launches on January 9, 2024.
“This book—I originally intended to just write about Donkey,” Campbell says. “But I’m kind of in love with three different phases of femininity—my own version of these phases. One is the girl, coming of age, the sort of pre-sexual girl who is discovering the world. So that’s Donkey; she’s 11 years old. She’s interested in mathematics, and she loves men. Go figure. She lives without them, so of course they are the most fascinating thing to her. And then the mother, Rose Thorn, or ‘Rosie,’ is the youngest of three daughters, and she came to motherhood against her will. She has mixed feelings about being a mother. A lot of what happens in the book is her coming to terms with that. And then there’s the grandmother. She’s got a lot of power in this community. She’s a healer, and she’s an important person because she knows how to use everything that is in the swamp.”
The Waters was not Campbell’s first attempt to capture such a community on her pages. Years ago, she sold a novel to a publisher about a girl who loved math—Campbell herself earned a degree in mathematics—but she recalled it before it went to print.
“I just wasn’t happy with it,” she says. “It didn’t rise up singing.”
Campbell took her story years back into the past, writing the book that came before the earlier one, a prequel of sorts, and asked questions of her characters—why does the girl like math? Why is her mother so bedraggled?
“And that became The Waters,” she says. “It took me eight years to write it. Now, maybe, I will go to the first book I submitted and give it another look.”
The Waters has received critical acclaim prior to publication. Campbell has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novels Once Upon a River, a national bestseller later made into a feature film, and Q Road. Her short story collections include American Salvage, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Women and Other Animals; and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. Campbell’s honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Eudora Welty Prize, the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and the Mark Twain Award.
Visit Campbell’s website for book launch events at Michigan News Agency and Bookbug/this is a bookstore in Kalamazoo on January 9, 2024.
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