ࡱ> k ˤbjbjZ Z .08cb8cb  >>>>>RRR8R1j:M1O1O1O1O1O1O1$835fs1>s1>>1 + + +>>M1 +M1 + +,9- ~]-91101 -,T6%&T69-T6>9- +s1s1(\1T6 B : INTERVIEW WITH BARBARA KINGSOLVER By Mary Barker, Susan Thompson, and Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt Barbara Kingsolver was the 2022 One Book One West Virginia Common Read Author and the ϳԹUniversity Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence (AHWIR). She received the Appalachian Heritage Writers Award on September 29, 2022, at the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education. Over the course of the year, Kingsolver selected winners of the WV Fiction Competition, wrote critiques of the finalists stories, and served as advisor to the editors who put together the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Barbara Kingsolver Volume XV. For a variety of resources, programs, recordings, and information about Kingsolver as well as a link to the WV Center for the Book, see the AHWIR website at  HYPERLINK "/ahwirweb/kingsolver/" /ahwirweb/kingsolver/; for information about ϳԹUniversitys Appalachian Studies Programs, visit the Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities at  HYPERLINK "/appalachian/" /appalachian/. To become an Ally for Appalachia and to support these programs and the work and travel of ϳԹUniversity Appalachian Studies students, visit  HYPERLINK "/appalachian/allies-for-appalachia" /appalachian/allies-for-appalachia. BTS: You experienced such a remarkable childhood growing up in rural Kentucky and part of a unique and close-knit family. Can you talk a bit about how your rural Kentucky roots helped to shape you as a writer? BK: I was an isolated child who depended on books to broaden my horizons and shore up my heart. We lived in the country, so if I wasnt reading, my siblings and I were inventing games and spending all hours in the woods around our farm. The natural world was a happier place for me than school, which was awful. As a socially awkward, cerebral kid, I was bullied year in, year out. I learned to hide my vocabulary, aim for invisibility, and watch other people. Anything I wanted to learn, I looked for and found on my own. I taught myself to read at age four, a process I remember vividly, and from then on started poking into every book in our house, with no understanding that the encyclopedia or my Dads medical books werent written for children. I also relied on the bookmobile and the town library if I could find a way there. As I aged into adolescence, I grew increasingly resentful of a social scene where girls seemed to be valued mainly as compliant sexual partners and eventual wives. Nobody discussed college, but I charted my own path and got there. I was unprepared, academically, but thats another story. My childhood made me a close observer of all kinds of people, studying what makes them popular or sad or conflicted. It made me an autodidact, ready to educate myself on any subject. It gave me gratitude for literature as a way to fly away from myself into other people and places. It gave me trust in the natural world. That all adds up to the writer I am. BTS: How did you and your siblings fare spending a year in central Africa? How did your perspective change to reflect the writer you would become? What do you find are the benefits of that kind of global travel? BK: My father was dedicated to helping people who had poor access to medical care. Thats why he chose to practice in rural Kentucky, and sometimes take us to even more remote places like the Congo. I admire his devotion to service. But it wasnt easy for a family with young children (I was seven; my sister was a toddler) to go live in a village of mud houses with no electricity, running water, or school. We had cobras, rabies, and leprosy on our doorstep, literally. We all got sick with one thing and another, typhus or malaria. My mother had her hands full trying to keep us alive and fed. Id been a misfit back in Carlisle, but now outsider took on a whole new meaning. Congolese kids were amazing at hunting food, foraging, all these adult skills, and they hadnt known white children, so we were a bizarre, incompetent curiosity. My brother and I tried hard to learn Kituba and keep up with them. Id never really thought about being white, before Congo, where I was embarrassed by it. Then I came back to a newly integrated school in Kentucky, and felt a strong affinity for the two Black girls in my class. I think they were probably confused by me. My status as an outsider was permanently cemented. When people discuss the benefits of global travel, I doubt this is what they have in mind. But it shaped my perspective, for sure. I learned early that people have many different ways of being and living. That everything that seems right in one place can be wrong in another. BTS: We were particularly interested in the year you left home for university life in Indiana and how you began to sense how women (and men) had been molded and manipulated by patriarchal expectations, particularly by what Naomi Wolfe called several decades ago the beauty myth. Can you share your thoughts about how young women today are coerced into following certain societal expectations about their bodies and how, perhaps American society more than most, is unwilling to grant freedom and autonomy to women concerning their bodies and why this might be. BK: College was mind-blowing for me. I met and befriended women who had faith in themselves and plans for independent lives and careers. Id always hoped to avoid the wifely servitude that looked to be the only option for the girls and women I grew up around. But then I learned a word for that hope, and could frame it in more positive terms: I was a feminist. I wanted the same opportunities and freedoms that were available to men. Most young women today, even in rural Kentucky, are aware of more options than I was, because they see women doing everything imaginable on TV and social media. Some types of discrimination I faced early on, like pay inequity and sexual harassment at work, are still prevalent but illegal now. So the world has changed, but in many ways it hasnt. Female objectification and unrealistic beauty standards are worse than ever, thanks to media. Men still make most of the decisions controlling womens lives, including our reproductive lives. Our country has slowly marched forward with LGBTQ rights and racial justice, but women have made few real gains in my lifetime, legally or culturally. If you doubt it, consider this: most women still surrender their adult identities and take the dominant partners name when they marry. Presumptive inequalities between other categories of people are now named racism or homophobia, but between genders, its just called tradition. I cant tell you why. But sexism is everywhere, and grieves me deeply. BTS: We are aware that you are an accomplished musician and went off for university education as a music major. What was going through your mind as you began to drift from a music major in college to a science major, and how did both contribute to your development and evolution as a writer? BK: Playing the piano was something I threw myself into, along with reading, to survive high school. When it got me a scholarship to DePauw, I felt like Id won the lottery. I had no specific career plan at that point, just the hope of having one. In music school, I quickly realized I wasnt good enough to be a professional concert pianist. I also loved biology, which seemed more promising as a life plan, so as soon as I could transfer my scholarship, I changed majors. Id always loved reading and writing, but I had no inkling that ordinary people like me could write books. In the culture where I grew up, declaring you wanted to be an artist would sound silly and self-important, like saying you planned to be a movie star. I was incredibly lucky to get to go to college, and my goal there was to gain the skills to support myself. But I also just loved the rich environment of learning and discussing ideas: that was new to me and I absorbed it like a sponge, taking classes in everything I could, from botany to anthropology to computer science to East Asian History. I took one creative writing class, and loved it so much I felt my heart would explode. I wanted to major in everything. After college I worked for two years as a lab technician, then entered a graduate program in evolutionary biology. The whole time, I was still writing poems and stories at night, because it made me happy. I wasnt trying to be a capital-W writer; I just wrote. Then I got a job as a science writer, then a freelance journalist, and then got a contract for the novel Id written more or less in secret. You could say the capital-W writer job came and found me. Every ounce of my education has been useful to my eventual profession. Almost no fiction writers in the history of the world have been trained in biology, or any other science, so I occupy a unique niche. I have rich material to bring to my novels that nobody else is writing about, as far as Ive seen. I can help bridge the gulf in our culture between the humanities and the sciences. And all the other things I studied are useful too. As a fiction writer, you have to know all kinds of people from the inside out. You cant fake it, you have to be as smart as your characters, and know what they know. A novelist gets to major in everything. BTS: What are your thoughts about the Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and other such movements and their effects on gender relationships in general? BK: Im encouraged to see more generations coming up behind mine who are willing to engage so actively in social justice. Economic and cultural oppression cross all the lines of class, race, and gender, and Im glad to see a lot of people making those connections in their lives and their activism, and also in art and literature. Ive observed that women tend to stand up for other classes of oppressed people more readily than we stand up for ourselves. I hope to see that change in my lifetime. BTS: We think it remarkable how you selected your literary agent, Frances Goldin, and likewise how you have remained with both Harper Collins and your editor Janet Goldstein. Can you talk about the experiences you had as a young writer with publishers, editors and agents. BK: Ill share the story of how I found Frances. In the mid-80s Id been working awhile as a freelance journalist, with a series of interviews that seemed to be turning into a book project. So I went to the library, found a listing of all the literary agencies, and wrote to the one who said, I do not represent any work that is sexist, racist, homophobic, or gratuitously violent. This cuts me out of most of the market, but I can be proud of all my authors. She became not just my agent but my beloved friend and adoptive mother, until she died in 2020. Im still represented by her agency, which is now run by her protg, Sam Stoloff. My first editor, Janet Goldstein, left HarperCollins in the 90s; Terry Karten has been my editor since then. Harper has always been wonderfully supportive of my books. I was lucky to find a good publishing home and representation early in my career, but maybe it wasnt luck. I didnt prioritize money or fame, but looked for people who would support my principles and the challenging kind of writing I wanted to do. As a consequence, theyve let me keep doing it. If you compromise yourself at the start, youll probably lose your soul. BTS: You have said that the stories you write come from your life experiences but are not about specific parts of your life. Talk about the power of storytelling and how important stories are as we wend our way through life, both our own and others stories. BK: Stories shape our lives. For as long as humans have been around, weve told stories to pass on knowledge, to bind our communities, and to establish our own place within our human and natural ecosystems. Writers still do all that. Everybody does that, in fact, whether its our Instagram posts or our conversations with friends or the books we choose to read to our kids. The difference between hope and despair is how you tell the tale. Its a huge responsibility, and I take it seriously. Thats why I dont write about my personal life, which has no importance to anybody but my friends and family. I write about the things that keep me awake at night, questions that need answers, problems that need attention. I try to think and write about what might be important to you, whoever and wherever you are. BTS: So much of your work has made us aware of the precariousness of this beautiful blue planet as well as our part endangering it, yet you seem to be hopeful about the status of the environment and our ability to change our ways and salvage Earth. Can you talk about the hope you have in these crucial and complex times as the world comes to grips with our seemingly boundless materialism at odds with the limited time we have to address global warming and human trashing of planet Earth. BK: The planet is in a precarious state, theres no doubt. Im frustrated to watch people, communities, and the legislators who represent us all choosing short-term gain over the long-term survival of our planet. I suppose its human nature to think of now instead of tomorrow. Its how we end up with credit card debt and various other miseries. But I cant blame individuals when its built into our capitalist system to measure and reward good solely in terms of growth and consumption, even now that were using up more resources each year than our planet can regenerate. The poorest people in this country, and on this planet, have contributed least to the problem, and suffer the most. Big problems require big solutions, but our leaders (with popular support) keep trying the old solutions that no longer work, over and over again. I wrote a novel about that, called Unsheltered. The moral of the story is that yesterdays people cant solve tomorrows problems. Im counting on the young! And yes, I remain hopeful. Because I dont have a choice. The minute you give up hope, you quit trying to make things better, and accept a damaged future. Thats deeply unfair to the people who are going to be living in it. I would call that institutionalized child abuse. Not an option. BTS: We really enjoyed your story Animal Dreams, where you explore the importance of dreams and the past and coming to terms with our own consciousness of the past as we try to navigate toward the future. Talk about why reconciling and acknowledging the past is important, both on an individual level and national level. BK: It seems so obvious: youll keep making the same mistakes until you acknowledge and learn from the past. But its an uncomfortable thing to admit, as a person or a nation, that youve messed up horribly. This discomfort is playing out in our political landscape right now, as many people resist owning up to the sins of our forefathers, wanting for instance to shield their children from learning about the brutalities of slavery. Its complicated to sort this out: if I didnt directly participate in that brutal past, what is my debt? Our national culture is so individualistic, its hard for us to see the problem in more collective terms: that social agreements in our past handed out rights and resources unequally. And that those inequalities have been passed down. So certain debts remain. I think its also a special feature of the American psyche to want to believe weve always been the best nation on earth. Ive lived in other countries where people are happy to hash out their historical mistakes, but here, a lot of people want to think we got everything right from the start. Which is nonsense! In the original U.S. Constitution, most of us would have been out of luck: women had about the same rights as livestock, Black people had fewer. The white, land-owning men who wrote the Constitution were arrogant and self-serving by modern standards. We can still admire them for the forward-thinking aspects of their document. But those men lacked centuries of experience that have now taught us to be more humane. In another century, if humans survive that long, theyll look back amazed at our self-serving arrogance. Burning fossil fuels! Warming the planet beyond repair! How dumb was that? BTS: Did you originally plan to write a sequel to The Bean Trees? Why did you want to continue Taylor and Turtles story? BK: I didnt plan that. A great joy of my writing life is getting to do something entirely new with every book. New to me, and new to the world. I have no interest in going back to the same characters, writing the same book again. Pigs in Heaven had its own separate genesis: I was following the legal case of a Native American child, adopted by white parents, whose tribe discovered this after three years and wanted her back. It was a bitter argument between best interests of the child versus best interests of the community, two different definitions of good, both completely right. That right there is novel catnip, for me. I had to dig into that story. And as I did, I realized I had already set up exactly this situation at the end of The Bean Trees. I now felt morally ambiguous about that resolution, so I was obliged to go back and square it up. But the two novels are about entirely different things, so they dont have to be read in sequence, or together at all. Ill never write another sequel. Readers do ask for it, all the time: Please, what happened to Turtle? To Codi and Loyd? Do Deanna and Lusa ever become friends? Heres my answer, for all time: You get to decide. I gave those characters to you, now they are yours forever, to do with exactly as you please. Thats the rule of gift-giving: after the transaction, it belongs to the recipient. You dont have to take my word for it, ask Dear Abby. BTS: We like to think of the writers life as a quiet, contemplative existence, yet your own life has been filled with action and engagement. Talk about the importance of living a life that is engaged in the community and in the world and how such a life is sometimes a challenge and often at odds with ideal of being a writer. How has the tension between action and contemplation shaped your own life as a writera tension that writers like Tennyson and Wordsworth grappled with as well? BK: Oh, you couldnt imagine a more a quiet, contemplative existence than mine. I love and need solitude to do my work. When Im not writing, Im working in the garden or barn, or walking in our woods, and thinking. I love where I live. Its a family joke, counting how many days since Barbara left the farm. During the pandemic, instead of a hermit I could finally say I was being a good citizen. My mode of action and engagement is largely through my writing, and supporting other writers and organizations whose work I admire. The greatest challenge of my long career has been about setting boundaries to protect my solitude and writing time. First, I am a mother, and as every working mother knows, there arent enough hours in a day. But my kids grew up respecting my writing as work, knowing it was the only thing keeping a roof over our heads. The rest of the world did not. I dont just mean the PTA moms who said, Since you dont have a job, Barbara, you can do the bake sale I mean people in my own industry. Writers are expected to do a million things that take us from our writing: public speaking, interviews, signing books, blurbing books, reviewing, answering queries, gratifying fans. I have a wonderful assistant whose main job is politely to tell people Sorry, she cant, fifty times a week. Now that my kids are grown, I have more flexibility. So each time I finish a book, I use the six-month lull between final galleys and book release as a kind of sabbatical to schedule other things: magazine articles and op-eds, travel, professional service, One Book One West Virginia, etc. But in my early career when my girls were young, there were never lulls; I hardly had time to eat or sleep. I wanted desperately to write for my living, but knew I could only make this work if I fiercely turned away everybody (other than my children) who asked me to leave my writing desk. And I mean everybody, the list is long, from the local garden club to Katie Couric, Robert Redford, and The New York Times. Some people arent used to hearing no thanks. Some got angry, some threatened to write a bad review (and did!) if I wouldnt give them an interview. Many implied I was stuck-up. How strange, that refusing to promote yourself would be taken as arrogance. But I did what I had to do. I have my books to show for it. BTS: We really admire how you have tried to support other writers, including your establishing the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. As we have researched what youve said about what makes good writing, we wonder if there are any insights you might share at this stage in your life about becoming a writer and what makes good fiction. BK: Becoming good at writing is probably like becoming good at anything, whether its cooking or running marathons or fixing engines. Its driven by passion. If you love doing something so much you want to do it every day, with all your might and every spare minute, to the exclusion of other distractions, your skills are going to improve. For the first twenty years of my life after age seven, I wrote stories or poems or diary entries every day, with no intention of letting anyone else read them. I just needed to write. Putting experience into words made me feel whole. My first novel I wrote in a closet, at night, again with no expectation that anyone would read it, because I felt like if I didnt write The Bean Trees, I might wither up and die. Thats what I mean by passion. I would also suggest that a fiction writer needs a powerfully empathetic imagination and a certain moral authority. This is not just about words, but the wisdom behind them: youve got to have something important to say. Also, a thorough knowledge of some part of the world, even if its your back yard. And most of all, before you can be a good writer, you have to be a good reader. Its really the only way you learn. BTS: Henry James was fond of talking about the alchemy of art and the power of the creative imagination. Youve given us such a remarkable range of charactersmale, female, children, Native American, Hispanic, characters from all echelons of the social ladder. What are your thoughts now about the criticism that is sometimes rendered today about writers who portray characters from different gender, racial, or ethnic traditions and experiences? Do you think it fair to limit how the stories of some groups can be told and by whom? Does this critical trend smack of an odd sort of literary correctness that might be misplaced or is it a fair assessment? BK: The bottom line here is that for most of history, empowered people presumed to speak for the disempowered. White men made films and wrote novels purporting to represent the experiences of women and people of color. Occasionally they did it well, often they didnt, and nobody thought to complain. In every case they were usurping a voice instead of letting it speak for itself. Finally, belatedly, were seeing the problem and rectifying it. It makes sense, both morally and artistically, to favor a writer with authentic experience of reservation life or Blackness or sexual harassment, over a writer who is just guessing about those experiences. Furthermore, those authentically experienced writers deserve to be heard. The problem is, however, that if taken to extreme, the representation creed would have us writing nothing but autobiography, which would be hideously boring. Writers are capable of imagining lives beyond our own. Every story needs different kinds of people. And who is qualified to write about cultural difference, if we cant create characters from both sides? My solution to this pickle, which I figured out long ago (mostly by reading Steinbeck), is to rely on the dramatic point of view for characters I dont know from experience. I narrated The Poisonwood Bible from the POV of four girls from the American South, a mindset I know intimately. Most characters in the novel are Congolese, and I wrote them exclusively from the outside, describing what they said and did, how they looked as they did it. My knowledge of those things is also trustworthy, based on my life there and my research trips to Africa. I just never told the story from inside the eyes and brain of a Congolese character. Inside/outside simple, safe. I rarely break this rule, though in two cases Ive written male characters from the inside, investing them with challenges and traits and emotions I know well, avoiding certain manly things beyond my ken. These characters had to be male, in the contexts of their plots, and maybe I felt a little more authority because both were situated outside of the mainstream: one was gay, one had Alzheimers. I did my research, I had male friends read for veracity. It boils down to being mindful. BTS: What are your thoughts about literary critics and those who make assertions about your writing and your canon? BK: I dont read them. BTS: So many of your stories offer a clear-eyed look at contemporary American society, not always appreciated in these shallow bumper-sticker days of America First and Love us or Leave Us, though you have managed to keep a loyal readership and following of your books. How have you been able to navigate through the political minefields that seem to fracture the American intellectual and political landscape? BK: I have occasionally offended readers so direly that they sent my books back to me. (As if they all originated from my house.) Ive had death threats and dark times, and once had to go on book tour with a bodyguard. But for the most part, my readers are lovely, open-minded people. Readers of novels tend to be like that. If you think about it, deeply fundamentalist folks who take every word of the Bible literally, for example, wouldnt have much use for the symbolic, metaphorical genre of literary fiction. So its a self-selecting audience. But when Im writing, I dont spend one minute worrying, What will they think of this? Ive never at any point in my career tried to be popular or marketable. I do want my work to be relevant to readers; I value their time and intelligence. But people-pleasing is a deadly bane, especially for women. The blessing of my unhappy childhood is that I learned to be content with outsider status. I write about what feels most important, exploring challenging ideas, and figure readers will go there with me, or they wont. Thankfully, they very often do. BTS: What was your reasoning behind selecting Flight Behavior for the One Book One West Virginia Common Read? BK: I identify strongly as a rural Appalachian, despite the years Ive lived in other places. Kentucky was my starting point; Southwest Virginia is now and forever my home. Im dedicated to representing our culture honestly and respectfully in my writing, because in the rest of mainstream American culture were either invisible or maligned as ignorant hillbillies. That condescension has created a lot of justifiable anger that has exploded American politics in dangerous ways. All I can do about that is to keep writing, explaining, honoring, and hoping to bridge some of these divides between rural and urban, religious and secular, rich and poor. I realize West Virginia is not entirely Appalachian, but it is largely identified as such, and its a state where all these divides are acutely relevant. Flight Behavior is a novel about those cultural divides. That was my starting point, asking: How is it that people can look at the same set of facts, and because of our cultures and communities, walk away with very different ideas of what weve seen? The novel explores the places where we put our trust, and how we decide whats true specifically, with respect to climate change, which is the most crucial issue of our time. BTS: You have written such a variety of genrespoetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and essays. Are you able to pick a favorite among your works, or perhaps a favorite genre that you particularly enjoy and find satisfaction writing? BK: My books are sort of like my children: I could never play favorites. Some were easier, some gave me fits, a couple were nearly the death of me, but I love them equally. If I had to choose a single writerly identity, though, I am a novelist. Thats where I feel most useful to the world, and most at home. BTS: We read that for many years The Poisonwood Bible had ruminated in your mind. Can you talk about the time commitments that accompany writing? How do some stories evolve or dissolve over time? BK: The Poisonwood Bible was far more ambitious than anything Id previously written, in terms of its cultural and historical scope, the research required, and the literary demands of the device I chose for framing it. I spent more than ten years wishing I could write that book, writing other novels instead, while I collected research and notes in a file cabinet labeled Damn Africa Book. I wrote and published short stories that were pieces of this novel. I took research trips to Africa, read dozens of books about Africa, and waited for the maturity to write something so far beyond my abilities. Finally, my husband Steven said, Just start. If you hit a wall you cant get past, then youll know what youre missing and you can work on that. Good advice. I started, and kept going, and finished a draft in about three years. Since then, Ive tackled other novels of equal or greater scope (The Lacuna and Unsheltered were both harder), and have an understanding of the leap of faith required. Its okay to feel youre in over your head. You can give yourself permission to write an imperfect first draft. Nobody will see it until youve revised it a thousand times and made it shine. Ive actually come to love the risk-taking part of my job, that heart-pounding sensation of free fall, knowing Im pushing my talents as far as theyll possibly go. There is a rhythm to my process that I trust after seventeen books. Contemplation and writing are two separate stages, both essential. I start a novel with a big question, like: Why is it so hard for us to talk about climate change? or How do humans behave, and why, when they feel their world is falling apart? Once Ive settled on the big theme of a novel, I put it on the back burner of my brain and let it simmer for years while I write other things. It takes time to locate the doorway into the story, the architecture, the plot and characters. Those arrive slowly, over four or five years, sometimes more, and they cant be rushed. Once the elements are mostly assembled, I dive in and begin the outlining and writing that will move the story forward, every day, till a draft is done. That, along with the many revisions to get it all perfect, usually takes two or three years. BTS: Reading How to Drink Water When There Is Wine in How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons), we couldnt help but think how you have embraced life differently at the different stages of your own evolution. This poem exquisitely celebrates the wisdom and joy of a long life. How has being a grandmother informed or altered your writing? BK: My family life, my hopes, and my writing are all completely intertwined. I actually became a novelist and a mother on the same day: Id hastily sent off my manuscript of The Bean Trees at the end of my first pregnancy, and came home from the hospital with my baby to find a message on the answering machine, telling me the novel would be published. And with that psychic explosion began my dual careers as writer and mother. Doing both at once is really hard, as evidenced by the fact that so few women, historically, have managed it. And also, by the fact that very few children ever appear in literature as genuine characters (as opposed to setting or cute plot devices). Writers who live and work separately from all the messy, demanding glory of raising kids are privileged in a way, but theyre also missing out on a lot of material that constitutes real life for most humans on the planet. Im committed to representing that material in my work. I believe motherhood has made me a better writer. And I believe that being a writer having my own, secure career and identity has made me a better mother. Raising children also gives us a powerful, heart-rending stake in the future of the planet: its not an abstraction, its where our children are going to have to live! Now that I have young grandchildren, that stake stretches even farther into the future. It means I have to carry the same fire in my blood that I had in my teens and twenties, the same commitment and determination to heal wounds, build bridges, and make some kind of difference in the world. So yes, I have been a different person and writer at various points of my career, but the undercurrents are persistent. Last year I was asked to go into the studio to record the audiobook of Animal Dreams, a novel I hadnt looked at in 30 years. I was afraid I might find the writing immature, but fortunately, I was perfectly happy with the Barbara who wrote that book in her mid-thirties. I am still she, with just a little more scar tissue and tread on my tires. A wider perspective, lets say. Age invites you to trust more in the everyday joys of living. Which, as you said, is the point of my poem, How to Drink Water When There Is Wine. The short answer is: nope. Drink the wine. BTS: Much of your fiction explores issues around living sustainablyThe Last Remaining Buffalo, The Bean Trees (healing through communal garden, 1988), Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (whole systems, the connection of humans and nature, 2000). You have said that Wendell and Tanya Berry were mentors to you as you wrote Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and that Berry pioneered many of the ideas embraced in your non-fiction work about living sustainably. In the Afterword to Kristin Johannsens Missing Mountains, Berry speaks of the folly of the destruction of our American lands. In yout own experience is fiction the best way to engender change? BK: If my fiction is full of gardens and farms and forests, its because of the life Ive lived. I began this interview by explaining how the natural world has been my balm and salvation, from early childhood to this very day. And I dont mean Nature in grandiose, National Park terms, just the homely hayfields and woodlots and farm ponds that cradle rural peoples lives and livelihoods. These places almost never appear on TV or in the movies, because our entertainments are created entirely in cities. As an increasingly urbanized species, were forgetting there are any other species besides us, or giving them no thought even though the food we eat grew in dirt, and the oxygen we breathe was made inside a leaf. Its a dangerous kind of forgetting that allows, as you mentioned, the folly of destruction. What I can do is keep writing and representing the world where trees grow and birds sing and humans are interlocked with their habitats, to help people see and feel and remember. I can even, ever so subtly, work in some of the ecological principles and natural laws that I know from my science training, to cultivate a deeper understanding. I would never suggest fiction is the best or only way to engender change. Its just my way. BTS: We understand that you are now writing a screenplay for your novel The Poisonwood Bible, which demonstrates the intricacy of mother-daughter relationships. How do you think your feelings about The Poisonwood Bible have changed over the years? Will your screen play reflect any new understandings of the book and of family? BK: Because of personnel changes at HBO, and then the pandemic, I withdrew that project after completing the pilot and outline for a limited series. It will eventually find a good home. The Poisonwood Bible is about cultural arrogance and the historical exploitation of developing countries, themes that have remained relevant, unfortunately. Im working on a different screenwriting project now, adapting another of my novels, this time as a feature film. Im sorry to be mysterious, but in the film world you have to keep secrets until the key people have made their big announcements. Ill just say this project relates to Appalachia and cultural divides, and that the production company Im working with is dedicated to making films about climate change. Draw your own conclusions. BTS: What advice or wisdom can you offer to anyone interested in writing and/or publishing? BK: For anyone wanting to write for a living, Ill say: first, make sure youve written the best possible version of your manuscript, before thinking about publication. Then rewrite it again. Do it joyfully. If the idea of being a writer is more appealing to you than the idea of sitting at a desk for a thousand hours, youre probably on the wrong track. My shift from closet-writer to professional started after grad school when I was hired as a science writer for the University of Arizona, interviewing scientists about their research, then writing about it in accessible language. From there I jumped into freelance journalism, covering any assignment from the arts beat to a mine strike. It trained me in gumption: to get out of myself and interview, do the research, put in the long hours at the keyboard, meet the deadline, get the paycheck. I learned how to think of writing as my job. Whether the subject moved me or didnt, whether I was paid a lot or a little, I never put my byline on anything less than my absolute best work. On the side, I submitted poems and short stories to literary magazines, and saw them in print. Eventually I worked up to a book-length manuscript. I had no visions of grandeur. I just loved the work. Still do. BTS: What is on the horizon for your next novel, coming out this fall? BK: My new novel is called Demon Copperhead, narrated by a red-headed boy who goes by that name, growing up in Southwest Virginia. Its a modern retelling of David Copperfield, a novel Charles Dickens wrote as a protest against institutional poverty and its effects on children in his time. I wrote mine for the same reason. For the last decade, watching a generation of kids in our region growing up orphaned or wrecked by prescription drug abuse, Ive been wanting to shine light on that story: how the pharmaceutical companies singled us out as a target for their poison pill. And how thats just the latest in a long line of exploits that have taken the goods out of our region timber, coal, tobacco leaving various kinds of damage and limited options for the folks left behind. Rural people and our problems dont get a lot of sympathy in mainstream media. Mostly, we get laughed at for being poor or poorly educated, with no notion of who we really are or what weve overcome. I knew the story I wanted to tell, I just wasnt sure who wanted to hear it. And then I thought about Charles Dickens, who grew up poor himself, and pretty mad about the deck stacked against him. The people of his day probably didnt want to hear it, either, but he got them to listen anyway. He knew no material is too dark if the plot is tight and the characters are fierce and funny. He understood the power of point of view: to let the child tell his own story. Thats what Ive done. I drafted Demon Copperhead with Dickens at my elbow, channeling his indignation, fitting out the architecture of his plot with all new elements, the people and challenges of my own place and time. Because a good story stays true forever. 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ShurbuttNormalSylvia Shurbutt2Microsoft Office Word@@`~@`~ dYG_VT$m= /   !1.@Garamond--- =2 o!0 INTERVIEW WITH BARBARA KINGSOLVER         2 o]0   @Garamond--- b2 :0 By Mary Barker, Susan Thompson, and Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt              2 j0   @Garamond--- 2 `j0 Barbara Kingsolver was the 2022 One Book One West Virginia Common Read Author and the ϳԹUniversity          2 `0 Appalachian He  2 0 ritage Writer   2 0 - 2 0 in  2 0 - "2 0 Residence (AHWI  2 v 0 R). She re V2 20 ceived the Appalachian Heritage Writers Award on      2 `w0 September 29, 2022, at the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education. Over the course of the year,       2 `W0 Kingsolver selected winners of the WV Fiction Competition, wrote critiques of the final     G2 (0 ists stories, and served as advisor to  @Garamond--------- =2 `!0 the editors who put together the  --- 2  0 Anthology of  2 [ 0 Appalachian  2 0   72 0 Writers, Barbara Kingsolver V  2 C 0 olume XV. --- 2 z0   2 0 For a  2 0   2  0 variety of   2 ` 0 resources,  2 Z0 programs, recordings, and information about Kingsolver as well as a link to the WV Center      2 e 0 for the B 2 0 ook, see  2 0   2 0 the   %2 `0 AHWIR website at    cO2 -0 /ahwirweb/kingsolver/     2 0 ; 2 0   M2 ,0 for information about ϳԹUniversitys   @Garamond---c- @ !- --- j2 `?0 Appalachian Studies Programs, visit the Center for Appalachian   42 0 Studies and Communities at    cC2 `%0 /appalachian/   2 :0 .  2 =0    2 ?0   h2 B>0 To become an Ally for Appalachia and to support these programs    2 0   2  0 and the work c- @ ! `- --- d2 .`;0 and travel of ϳԹUniversity Appalachian Studies stude  2 .0 nts 2 .0 , visit  cL2 .+0 /appalachian/allies   c 2 .0 - c2 .0 for c 2 .0 -c- @ !/- --- c2 ;` 0 appalachia 2 ;0 .   2 ;0  c- @ !:<`- @Garamond---  2 V`0   @Garamond--- 2 u`0 BTS:  2 u0   R2 u/0 You experienced such a remarkable childhood gro   :2 u0 wing up in rural Kentucky and p    2 u0 a  2 u0 r 2 u0 t of a   "2 `0 unique and clos  2 0 e  2 0 - 2 O0 knit family. Can you talk a bit about how your rural Kentucky roots helped to       "2 `0 shape you as a  2 0 writer?   2 0   --- 2 `0 BK:   2 z0   >2 "0 I was an isolated child who depend          2 u0 ed   2 0   2  0 on books      2 0 to broaden my     2 70 horizon   "2 k0 s and shore up      2 `0 my heart  2  0 . We lived   2 0    2 0 in the country    2 J0 , so  2 b0   )2 g0 if I wasnt reading,      2 0   2 0 my sibl  2 ! 0 ings and I    2 g0   2 k0 were   2 0   2 0 invent   2 0 ing   2 0    2 ` 0 games and   2 0 spen   2 0 ding    2 0   2  0 all hours    2 ;0   2 B 0 in the woods      2 0   "2 0 around our farm   2 0 . T  (2 .0 he natural world wa        2 0 s  2 0   2 0 a   %2 `0 happier place for     2 0   2 0 me than     2 0 s 2 "0 chool  2 G0 , which    2 y0   2 ~0 was  2 0 awful   12 0 . As a socially awkward,     2 m0 cerebral   2 0   2 0 kid,    2 0 I  2 0    2 ` 0 was bullied    %2 0 year in, year out    2 0 .  2 !0   2 % 0 I learned to    2 s0   2 v0 hide my   2 0 vocab  2 0 ulary,  )2 0 aim for invisibility   2 | 0 , and watch      2 `0 other   2 0 people.   2 0 Anything     2 0    2 0 I  2 0   (2  0 wanted to learn, I     )2 0 looked for and found      2 0   2  0 on my own   2 `0 .  #2 i0 I taught myself    "2 .`0 to read at age    2 .0 four,   2 .0   82 .0 a process I remember vividly,     2 .0 and   2 .0   2 . 0 from then on     2 .#0   (2 .'0 started poking into       2 .0   2 .0 every  2 .0    2 B` 0 book in ou     2 B0 r ho  2 B0 us  "2 B0 e, with no unde     ;2 B< 0 rstanding that the encyclopedia         2 B0 or  2 B$0   .2 B'0 my Dads medical books        2 U`0 werent   2 U0 written   2 U 0 for children.     2 U!0   2 U&0 I  2 U10 also  O2 UQ-0 relied on the bookmobile and the town library            2 U0   2 U0 if  2 U0   2 U0 I could     2 i` 0 find a way    2 i0   2 i0 there.   2 i0   2 i0 As I  2 i0 aged    2 i0   )2 i0 into adolescence, I     2 i0 grew    2 i0   2 i 0 increasingly    2 i0   2 i! 0 resentful of    2 im0    2 iq0 a social scene   2 i0    2 |` 0 where girl    2 |0 s  2 |0   22 |0 seemed to be valued mainly       2 |v0   2 |{0 as  2 | 0 compliant    "2 |0 sexual partners     2 |D0   2 |I0 and   2 |h 0 eventual    2 |0 wives.   2 `0 Nobody    2 0   2  0 discussed     2 0   22 0 college, but I charted my      2 0 own   )2 0 path and got there.       2 Q0 I  2 W0   #2 \0 was unprepared,      2 ` 0 academically   2 0 ,  2 0    2 0 b  /2 0 ut thats another story.      2 h0    2 l0 M  2 {0 y  2 0   2  0 childhood     42 0 made me a close observer of    2 0   2  0 all kinds     2 `0 of  2 l0   /2 u0 people, studying what ma       2 50 kes   2 M0   2 V 0 them popular     2 0   2 0 or   2 0 sad or    2  0 conflicted.     2 _0 I 2 e 0 t made me an     2 ` 0 autodidact,     2 0 ready   2 0   O2 -0 to educate myself on any subject. It gave me       2  0 gratitude    2 X0   )2 \0 for literature as a    2 `0 way to   2 0   2 0 fly  2  0 away from my  2 0 self  2 &0   2 ,0 in  22 90 to other people and places      2 0 .   2 0 I 22 0 t gave me trust in the nat      2 0 ural   2 `0 world.    2 0 T  2 0 hat   2 0   2 0 all  2 0   2  0 adds up to    2 0   2  0 the writer    2 S0   2 W0 I am  2 w0 .  2 {0   --- 2 `0 BTS:  2 0   C2 %0 How did you and your siblings fare sp   ;2  0 ending a year in central Africa?   2 l0   2 s0 How   2  0 did your   2 "` 0 perspective  %2 "0 change to reflect  2 "0   >2 ""0 the writer you would become? What     2 "  0 do you find  )2 "[0 are the benefits of  --- ,2 6`0 that kind of global tr 2 60 avel?---  2 60    2 T`0 BK:  O2 T~-0 My father was dedicated to helping people who             2 T0   2 T0 had poor     2 T0   /2 T0 access to medical care.   2 T0 Tha  2 T0 ts   S2 g`00 why he chose to practice in rural Kentucky, and            2 g 0 sometimes  2 g0   52 g0 take us to even more remote      v2 z`G0 places like the Congo. I admire his devotion to service. But it wasnt             2 z@0 eas  2 zW0 y  2 z_0   2 zc 0 for a family  2 z0   2 z0 with    #2 `0 young children (     2  0 I was seven;     2 .0 my sister was   2  0 a toddler   2 0 )  2 0   .2 0 to go live in a village     2 h0   2 l 0 of mud houses     2 0    2 `0 with no     2 0   2  0 electricity,  2 0   "2 0 running water,     2 X 0 or school  "2 0 . We had cobras     2  0 ,  2 0   2 0 rabies   2 @0 ,  2 D0   2 J 0 and leprosy    2 0   2 0 on our     2 `0 doorstep   2  0 , literally 2  0 . We all got   2 !0   )2 %0 sick with one thing        2 0 and   2 0   &2 0 another, typhus or     2 D0   (2 H0 malaria. My mother   "SystemLDLD ҍ--  00//..T`m'' ՜.+,D՜.+,< hp  ϳԹUniversityPm  Title 8@ _PID_HLINKSAj&;https://www.shepherd.edu/appalachian/allies-for-appalachiaPX&https://www.shepherd.edu/appalachian/B .https://www.shepherd.edu/ahwirweb/kingsolver/  !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~Root Entry FZ ~1Tabled6WordDocument.0SummaryInformation(LaDocumentSummaryInformation8CompObjr  F Microsoft Word 97-2003 Document MSWordDocWord.Document.89q