Bonnie Jo Campbell

Margo Crane shoots a .22 Marlin rifle, same as her hero Annie Oakley, and same as her creator, novelist Bonnie Jo Campbell. Though Campbell is known for her firsthand experiential research, demonstrated in her 2009 National Book Award–nominated story collection American Salvage, she didn’t shoot her dinner in the eye like the young heroine of her latest, Once Upon a River (Norton, $25.95).

“I had to do a lot of shooting to get into Margo’s personality,” Campbell, 48, says. Fifteen-year-old Margo Crane is a product of the Stark River—a fictional tribute to the Kalamazoo River—where she swims, hunts and lives with her father after her mother abandons them. Across the river are her restive cousins, the Murrays, whose father owns the steel mill. The feud between her uncle and her dad ends—and Margo’s river journey begins—with one man dead and one man missing his junk.

“Somebody in literature had to get just the right revenge,” Campbell says, on the phone from Oregon, where she teaches writing at Pacific University (a distant shot from her native Kalamazoo, Michigan).

As Margo pursues her missing mother, she encounters men who are horrid, like meth-addled Paul, or saintly, like Smoke, who once lived on the river, as Margo is aiming to do. She learns to skin hides for money, forages for food and sharpshoots to the point of felling a buck with her trusty .22.

“The way she grew up gave her a lot of tools for survival, but it didn’t give her tools to make her life better,” Campbell explains. This is not uncommon for the denizens where she sets much of her work, in the Rust Belt around Kalamazoo. “Half the people I grew up with were practically survivalists. They’re really good at getting by without money,” Campbell says. Her mom, for instance, would get a phone call about free meat, load up the kids and chain saw in the pickup truck, and go cut up a cow that had frozen in a pond. “I didn’t realize people thought that was odd.”

It is the specificity of this oddness, the intimacy of this place and its inhabitants, that makes Campbell’s writing so compelling. Shooting a muskrat in the eye to preserve its hide is detailed so intensely that the reader feels the physical evisceration of the water rat. You’re in two places simultaneously, experiencing it for the first time from Margo’s eyes and watching her from the outside. Margo moves like the river, stunningly beautiful and darkly troubled, and at turns surprisingly violent.

“Margo was hard to write because she’s actually a sweet girl besides this rage that burns inside her,” Campbell says. “And she doesn’t talk very much.”

This is one reason Campbell set the novel in the late ’70s, before what she calls the communication revolution. It was also before the rampant development along the St. Joe River, where she spent her childhood summers.

“This book is a piece of Americana,” Campbell says. “My book and I are still living in the past.”

Margo’s survival in Once Upon a River, however, is never assured; it’s no coincidence that Campbell cites Huck Finn as an inspiration. “A lot of bad stuff happens to Huck but he never sees himself as a victim,” Campbell says. “And there really are a lot of bad things that can happen to a girl on her own.” Even to a girl with a gun.

Campbell reads from Once Upon a River Thursday 14 at Women and Children First.