Barbara Kingsolver

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can,” Barbara Kingsolver wrote in her debut novel The Bean Trees, first published in 1988. Back then she could not have known that her entire ethos as one of our finest creative writers, public intellectuals, and humanitarians would be summed up in this statement. But consciously or not, that’s what Kingsolver has tried to do time and time again in her award-winning works of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry; in her advocacy on behalf of the environment, local foods, and social justice; and in her establishment of the Bellwether Prize for writers of “unusually powerful fiction.”

A daughter of Appalachia who has lived and worked all over the world, Kingsolver has produced novels—among them The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna, and Flight Behavior—short story collections, essays, and poems that have been translated into more than two dozen languages. She has received Britain’s Orange Prize for Fiction, the James Beard Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

In a recent conversation with acclaimed writer and teacher Crystal Wilkinson, Kingsolver spoke of how her rural upbringing has “never left [her] psyche,” finding her literary voice, and writing across genres.

CRYSTAL WILKINSON:

As a child you grew up in Carlisle, Kentucky, and then lived briefly in the Congo. How did your sense of the outside world as a girl develop? How did it frame your identity as a woman and as a writer?

BARBARA KINGSOLVER:

You’ve put your finger on the formative moment in my lifelong sense of place, belonging, and point-of-view. As a rural child in Kentucky, I claimed as my own universe the fields and woods surrounding our farm, and the few dozen children with whom I attended first grade. The next year my parents abruptly moved our family to the Republic of Congo, where my father provided health care to people who badly needed it. Instead of going to school I spent many months prowling with my brother around a village of thatched mud houses, no electricity or plumbing, no school, no stores, no roads or automobiles. We tried to befriend children who spoke no English and viewed our whiteness as a bizarre curiosity. The girls my age were all busy carrying younger siblings around as they fetched water, worked in manioc fields and gathered firewood from the jungle. Little boys climbed trees in search of things to eat, such as palm nuts or baby birds. I envied these kids’ adult-like competence, and tried to keep up, but mostly failed. I accepted my status as an utter outsider.

Surprisingly, that stamp never left my psyche. When we returned to Kentucky I entered third grade and found that important things had happened in my absence. My peers had learned to fit their writing on one line of the ruled paper instead of two. Our segregated school had been integrated. Classmates sorted themselves wordlessly into groups based not just on skin color but also clothing, possessions, whether they lived in town or rode the bus—subtle supremacies that baffled me. The kids who were considered poor in our county were affluent compared with those I’d recently known, who literally had nothing but the shirt on their backs. I resisted the easy order, and fell into a gap that continued to widen. In small towns like these, all human interactions tend to begin with the unspoken question: Are you one of Us, or one of Them? I accidentally became Neither. I felt as if I’d taken an apple from the tree of knowledge, and gotten myself thrown out of the garden.

I did what lonely kids do everywhere (or did, before the internet): buried my nose in books about everyplace and everything, and made friends with other people who didn’t quite fit in. Something in me was always watching life from the outside, permanently obsessed with the notion of belonging vs. not-belonging. It did not make for...