Barbara Kingsolver (Great Writers)

I don't write characters from a point of view I don't inhabit. My Congo novel is seen through a bunch of white Southern girls. It's my choice, but I make it carefully.

She spent a year in the Canary Islands with her eldest daughter in — their proximity to Africa enabled frequent research trips for The Poisonwood Bible. After returning, she met and married Hopp, and for seven years they lived in Tucson and spent summers on his farm in Virginia — a "marital compromise" — before moving there permanently in With Prodigal Summer , she fulfilled a long-held wish to write a "biological novel" "I thought everybody should know this stuff". A biologist divorcee with a "hillbilly accent" scours the Appalachian hills for poachers while keeping a fond eye on the local coyotes, till her solitude is disturbed by a young sheep rancher from Wyoming.

The novel insists on the shared animality of human beings despite their efforts to subdue nature, within "immutable rules of hunger and satisfaction". That it is her most erotically charged book was partly a tactical decision: Calling for scrutiny of US foreign policy, she wrote: Fear, she says now, "can bring out the worst in people.

I saw how close to the surface that defensiveness was, about any self-evaluation on a national scale — among the loudest people, anyway. I was shocked that some people behaved as though I'd said something inflammatory. The Lacuna grew out of that period. It moves between the revolutionary muralists of Mexico in the s and the McCarthyite witchhunts of the late s and 50s to probe the relationship between art and politics in the US. Her ambition was to chart the "birth of the modern American psyche".

She was "interested in national identity, curious about why my country seems so vocally to identify patriotism with completion, perfection, as though we're a finished product, not a work in progress. Is there an equivalent to being 'unAmerican' in France? Yes, — but it's about cooking, not about being a bad person. It frightened people so badly, we've never gotten over it. It's useful to explore a psyche from outside or on the borderline: Why are we so terrified of that word, communism — the anti-Christ? It's like living in a world where grownups still believe in the bogeyman.

Some reviewers have objected to what they see as her air-brushed portrayal of Trotsky. It is not a biography, she responds, "but it is an honest portrait of him in Mexico. Everything he says in the novel he did say.

It didn't pretend to be a whole picture. He was ruthless in his teens. He overthrew a monarchy — that's never going to be pretty. The novel was written during George W Bush's two terms in office. But it wasn't a day before the Fox News howlers took up the cry that Barack Obama wasn't born in the US, and the cries of 'communism', and 'don't mess with my health care'. The book's still acutely relevant. The "howlers" in The Lacuna are monkeys "one howls and the others pass it on, marking out their territories" that provide a metaphor for a gossip-driven press and its role in the witchhunts.

But it's an indictment of lazy journalism. It's also an indictment of those who listen to the howling and believe it. Yet emerging celebrities such as Frida Kahlo take control of their own image. She has stated emphatically that her novels are not autobiographical, although there are often commonalities between her life and her work. Her characters are frequently written around struggles for social equality, such as the hardships faced by undocumented immigrants, the working poor, and single mothers.

In , Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for Fiction. Named for the bellwether , the literary prize is intended to support writers whose unpublished works support positive social change. Kingsolver has received a number of awards and honors. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. Kingsolver is the first ever recipient of the newly named award to celebrate the U. The award recognizes outstanding and long-lasting contributions to literature by a Virginian. Calling Kingsolver a master of "Calamity Writing" in The New Republic , Lee Siegel wrote that she offers "the mere appearance of goodness as a substitute for honest art".

He also characterized her as an "easy, humorous, competent, syrupy writer [who] has been elevated to the ranks of the greatest political novelists of our time". Her novels specialize in self-congratulatory gestures of empathy: Kingsolver was criticized for a Los Angeles Times opinion piece following the U. She wrote, "I feel like I'm standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming at each other, 'He started it!

Questions?

I keep looking around for somebody's mother to come on the scene saying, 'Boys! Who started it cannot possibly be the issue here. People are getting hurt. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Joseph Hoffmann — Steven Hopp —present. The New York Times. The New York Times Company.

Retrieved May 3, Archived from the original on St Charles Public Library. Archived from the original on June 15, Retrieved May 18, Women Writing in Appalachia. The University Press of Kentucky. Retrieved May 25, Barbara Kingsolver's official website. They must do exactly what I want, or the story falls to pieces. No actual person I know is that cooperative. So I invent people from scratch, starting with what they need to do, and working backwards, inventing life histories that render their actions believable.

So it surprises me when people insist I must have experienced everything I write. Why do you persist in the infantile need to deny you are writing about yourself?

Yes, but via France. Did someone leave an abandoned child in my car along the way? Does my fiction reflect my world view? Do I seem that energetic? The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention. Those things I described from experience in a real place. They are genuine, but not identified. Also, if I set my story in an actual small town in Kentucky or Arizona, or Mexico , those events would be false: Still, every soul in the named town would be scouring the pages for themselves, their friends and enemies, and finding them.

So I choose real settings but place them off the map, for two reasons: These places are large enough to absorb events and people. As long as you get the weather and the civic character right, even residents who live in those places can probably suspend disbelief and accept the illusion of truth. So yes, Virginia, there is a Pittman, Kentucky. It exists in your heart and your imagination.

Hooray for you, for knowing the difference between primary and secondary sources, in a world where many seem to think watching a nature show is the same thing as being in nature. The nature show leaves out the smells, for one thing, and the seventeen hundred hours the camera crew sat waiting for the rhinos to mate. Readers are not fooled. What does it smell like, are there bees? Is it dry or humid, how does the dust feel between your teeth?

What does candied prickly pear fruit actually taste like? The sensory palette would be limited. Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. As a literary novelist I spend my days tasting the insides of words, breathing life into sentences that swim away under their own power, stringing together cables of poetry to hold up a narrative arc.

I hope also to be a fearless writer: In most of the world, people call that literature. For some reason, people in the U. Fiction cultivates empathy for a theoretical stranger by putting you inside his head, allowing you to experience life from his point of view. It can broaden your view of gender, ethnicity, place and time, power and vulnerability, things that influence social interaction. What could be more political than that? Favorite poets incomplete list: I always thought if I had more money than I needed to support my family, I would use it to improve the world somehow.

So when I received my first really large book advance in , I considered the power of words.

• Barbara Kingsolver.
• 5 Writing Tips: Barbara Kingsolver!
• Barbara Kingsolver - Wikipedia?
• Antietam: A Guided Tour Through History (Timeline).

I decided to use that money to encourage writers, publishers, and readers to consider how fiction engages visions of social change and human justice.