Barbara Kingsolver.

• Author: Epstein, Robin
• Position: Writer - Interview

In a chapter in her new book of wide-ranging essays, High Tide in Tucson, Barbara Kingsolver describes a trip to Phoenix's Heard Museum with her daughter, Camille, who was five years old at the time. One of her hopes for the visit, she writes, is that Camille will shed the notion that Native Americans are "people that lived a long time ago," an idea she picked up from the dominant culture even though it contradicted her own experience with Tohono O'odham and Yaqui playmates. Thanks to the museum's mission of appreciation for modern Native American life as well as history, Camille gleans some understanding of Native American reality outside spaghetti westerns. Indians, she tells her mother as they leave the museum, are "people who love the Earth, and like to sing and dance and make a lot of pretty stuff to use." Then she adds, "And I think they like soda pop. Those guys selling the fry bread were drinking a lot of Cokes."

Barbara Kingsolver's work takes readers on a similar journey. It makes real the daily lives lived by people who are seldom presented with all their smarts and sorrows. Among the people we meet in Kingsolver's novels (all published by HarperCollins) are, in The Bean Trees, working-class white women from Appalachia and Central Americans fleeing death squads; in Animal Dreams, Mexican-American grandmothers fighting to save the river that nourishes their town's orchards, a garden-pest hotline worker who joins the Sandinistas' agricultural efforts in Nicaragua, and a part-Apache train engineer with a penchant for cockfighting; and in Pigs in Heaven, a Cherokee lawyer who tries to resolve a conflict over a child adopted out of the tribe.

Thanks to her gift for creating characters we care about, for giving them voices that situate them firmly in time and place, and for taking them through plots that unfold inside their hearts and minds as well as out in the world, Kingsolver has been nominated three times for the ABBY award, a booksellers' prize that goes to the author they most love to recommend to customers.

She is also the author of Homeland, a collection of short stories (HarperCollins again); Another America/Otra America, a book of poems in English and Spanish (Seal Press); and Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (ILR Press), an oral history of the women in three small towns who for eighteen months sustained a picket against the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation despite arrests, evictions, and excoriation from some union bosses and some men in their communities who thought they should stick to making tortillas.

In early December, I spent a day with Barbara Kingsolver in Sabino Canyon on the outskirts of Tucson. Though I had only been in Arizona all of two days, I thought I had figured out the weather - hot during the day and cold at night. It was daytime, so I didn't wear many layers. Well, I didn't know from canyons. I shivered as we rode the Forest Service tram that takes you in. Though she had hoped we would stay in the "v" of the mountains, near the running water that reminds her a tiny bit of the landscape of her childhood in Kentucky, Barbara agreed right away to hike a short distance up the slope to where the sun would reach us faster. We found a suitable rock just off the trail and plopped ourselves down to talk. Nourished by good conversation and Barbara's homemade raisin bread, I warmed up in no time.

Q: Some of the essays in your new book read like a kind of Feminine Mystique for a new generation. Were you especially trying to reach women with the information in those essays? I wonder whether they've prompted some heated dining table conversations between women and the men in their lives.

Kingsolver: I think so. I've heard about a few. I've heard from women who said, "I gave this to my husband with underlines." But when I'm writing I don't really think, "Who's going to read this?" I don't feel my books are mainly for women. When students ask, "Is this a chick book?" I say, "Moby Dick is a whale book, but I don't think only whales should read it."

You know, John Updike writes about penises and lusting after women, and he's really one of the most male writers that I read. His point of view is so deeply male. And when he's writing, does he think, "Oh, women aren't going to be able to relate to this?" I don't think it crosses his mind. So there's a role model for me, right?

I do think we can learn so much from reading the perspectives of people we are not. I can learn a lot from John Updike. I'm never going to have a penis in my whole life, so I can read John Updike and I can get some clue. I mean, that's sort of reductionist, but that male ego that's his focus, that's the eye of his storm, is very interesting. It's kind of heady to read it and get a glimpse of what it would be like to live in the eye of that storm instead of dancing around it all the time saying, "Are you OK? Are you OK?"

I grew up learning about women by reading men and becoming convinced at a pretty early age that they were getting a lot of it wrong. I felt usurped by Lady Chatterley's Lover. But a lot of people did it right, too. Look at Anna Karenina; look at Emma Bovary. So I will never say men have no right to represent women. That would be absurd. What I will say is I think our first responsibility, and also our first treasure as writers, is to represent ourselves. So women are always dead center in my novels. And my novels are about the things women most think about, like keeping our children fed, and how to manage on not very much income. I think it's important to do that, because it's not traditionally been the main stuff of literature. And it needs to be.

A lot of what I also do is tell people, "Look, you're noble. The things you do in your life, from day to day to day, which you have probably never thought of as the stuff of literature, are heroic. And if it's not you, it's your mother, or your neighbor, or your sister. And think about that. Think how wondrous that is." I think it really might be the main thing I do. And that's crossing a new street. It's looking at yourself and looking at heroism in a new way. Forget about Power Rangers, Power Mongers, Power Bombs, Power Suits, for just one minute of your life. All those icons we associate with power are hard to leave behind. It's hard to build a new iconography of heroism, but that's kind of my bailiwick. I owe that to the people I grew up with.

Q: Do you mean your family or your community?

Kingsolver: Both. Just to see people survive. Survival itself, in certain circumstances, is heroic. To live through mean times without becoming mean-spirited is heroic. I saw a lot of that.

Q: In the new book, you explore our anti-child policies on the political level, and imply we also have some anti-child practices on the family level.

Kingsolver: The "terrible twos" is an excellent example. I asked all my Latino friends, "How do you translate terrible twos?" "What?" they said. "There's no terrible twos." They didn't even...