THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Epstein, Robin
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Barbara Kingsolver 'People who have panned my work as being political are people who are not on my side, so I feel kind of proud of that.' by robin epstein In a chapter...
...Just that I knew that they came from a different world, and I knew that they were outnumbered...
...It seems like I did, but I didn't...
...Understanding and appreciating art is something you learn from other people who do it, and historically it's been part of oral tradition...
...I think the average African in Africa, let's say the average citizen of Cameroon, understands more about the art of Cameroon than the average Tucsonian understands about the art of Tucson...
...ber thinking, "They must be so scared," and wanting to ask, but being afraid...
...Kingsolver: It's being done to us...
...Q: And the critics may say, "Oh, this is too political," but people are reading the books...
...We haven't been around 'ery long, and we're probably not going to persist...
...I was a little bit scared, not because my par-ents said, "Stay away," nothing like that...
...Survival itself, in certain circumstances, is heroic...
...And that's crossing a new street...
...Nobody in my class was going to college...
...I shivered as we rode the Forest Service tram that takes you in...
...I owe that to the people I grew up with...
...this is what's real...
...1 don't think it crosses his mind...
...Now I'm pretty confident of being taken seriously...
...Ongsolver: I think urban life is a big part of the problem...
...And some things lappened that were deeply reinforcing on the human level...
...There was merchant and farmer...
...Q: Including details about your life made the book more accessible...
...We were activists and organizers and we went there in solidarity with the strikers...
...I thought I had figured out the weather—hot during the day and cold at night...
...that can throw you for a loop...
...It used to be people thought they knew all about me because they thought I was my characters...
...It was an enormous adventure that let mc know at the age of seven that there's a great big old world out there that I don't know anything about, that I'm going to see, and that I'm going to know if I can...
...We wrote the article together and they published it and it was an enormous thrill when it arrived...
...Q: Do you think the people who criticize your work are people who already know about the issues and have decided they're on the other side...
...And that had to do with being really skinny and really tall, and physically not blending in, which is so important in pre-adolescence and adolescence—it's sort of the main thing...
...Prove it...
...Well, if we write and paint and film things that people understand to be vital to their lives, we'll get public support...
...Q: What can we do about it...
...My mom would explain to me, "They're not trying to hurt you...
...There it was, with the photograph we'd taken of the women on the picket line...
...In High Tide in Tucson, I wrote about that anecdote at the mall, where the managers decided that the people passing out yellow ribbons and We Kick Butt bumper stickers were not political, and the people who were passing out anti-war propaganda were political...
...She is also the author of Homeland, a collection of short stories (HarperCollins again...
...High Tide in Tucson...
...For whatever reason, it's with us now and we haven't recovered from that time...
...What I learned is how to formu-Ue or identity a new question that hasn't been asked before, nd then to set about solving it...
...Seeing it in print was even more important than the check...
...It really doesn't...
...Barbara Kingsolver describes a trip to Phoenix's Heard Museum with her daughter, Camille...
...I didn't really write about mv divorce...
...there wasn't an enormous amount of public or federal support for artists to begin with, and it's dwindling...
...It's very hard to criticize this country, our domestic or our foreign policy, or our attitude, or our Americanism...
...And think about that...
...Look at Anna Karenina...
...And I don't mean to demean these crises...
...Not just between man md woman but also North and South...
...in The Bean Trees, working-class white women from Ap-palachia and Central Americans fleeing death squads...
...Were vou especially trying to reach women with the information in those essays...
...I hear from activists who say, "We've been trying and trying to tell people about Nicaragua and finally what a relief to pick up a book that does it, a real book that people are reading...
...But when I'm writing I don't really think, "Who's going to read this...
...They didn't even know what I was talking about...
...I loved The Progressive...
...Robin Epstein is a freelance witter in New York City who worked us a reporter and an organizer in Kentucky for several years...
...Or are they people who have so much of their personal and professional identities invested in the idea that they don't take stands that they feel threatened by the fact that your characters do...
...And I have to do it right I have to say the important stuff, not just smile and nod and say, "Oh, yes, I have written another book...
...Then he'd say...
...Kentucky is such a laboratory of class consciousness because you have really oppressed workers shoulder to shoulder with big capital, which is not something you see necessarily in other parts of the country...
...Kingsolver: Yes...
...Sometimes I think, "Are they just reading the love story and didn't notice the part about Guatemala...
...When I went to first grade, it was an all-white school...
...Times have been tougb there for as long as I've known about, and I think they're tougher still now that tobacco doesn't have the economic bifieit did...
...into hotel rooms out of whose windows I would look and ee the same skyline...
...Q: So you were an outsider...
...I saw a lot of that...
...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...
...One letter in 100, or even less, will say, "I don't think you should be writing about this stuff...
...Arizona...
...Forget about Power Rangers, Power Mongers, Power Bombs, Power Suits, for just one minute of your life...
...But also my family was different...
...The NEA...
...and in Pig.-) in Heaven, a Cherokee lawyer who tries to resolve a conflict over a child adopted out of the tribe...
...Where does this idea come from...
...they said...
...who was five years old at the time...
...In early December, 1 spent a day with Barbara Kingsolver in Sabino Canyon on the outskirts of Tucson...
...I remem...
...Kingsolver: That was sort of part of the public record already, anyway...
...You ouldn't go anywhere...
...I told him I'd been to Zion...
...Kingsolver: I think so...
...J: In your new book, High Tide in Tucson, in the essay, "The ipaces Between," you write, "I'm drawn like a kid to mud into he sticky terrain of cultural difference...
...Do you think patriotism means turning your back on evidence that your country has done immoral acts...
...or me...
...Because if you go back before the 1950s you find great political writers like Steinbeck, Walt Whitman...
...Usually when people say, "You're too political," what they mean is, "I don't agree with you...
...People think it's sort of funny thatl went to graduate school as a biologist and then became a novel;l...
...That would be absurd...
...Kingsolver: I have to think so...
...Nobody else I knew had that sort of expectation...
...It's looking at yourself and looking at heroism in a new way...
...When students ask...
...Is this a chick book...
...But in his age of glorifying the individual and self-esteem...
...For he first day you're still trying to get to work, or get to your ap->ointments, and then slowly you give it up...
...And if it's not you, it's your mother, or your neighbor, or your sister...
...I can't get over that I get to do this...
...I feel like I say stuff that people really don't want to hear...
...But your new book is nonfiction...
...Their poets do not starve...
...The popular kids—the ones with new clothes every year—were the merchants' kids, the ones whose parents owned the dime store or the men's clothing store, or were the county attorney...
...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...
...spiritual and carnal...
...Kingsolver: Very much...
...So there's a role model for me...
...Obviously many, many mothers have no choice but to bundle their kids off to daycare, so I'm not blaming them...
...There's this troupe of kids coming in and out, and always adults to take care of them...
...I think that you can say difficult things, but do it artfully, and you'll be heard...
...so people think they know all about my house, but they don't...
...Beginning a book is really hard, 'm trying to begin one now and I just keep throwing stuff away nd thinking, "Can I do this'.' I don't think I'm smart enough...
...Let's face it...
...Now I go to them...
...My parents just expected me to do things like read books—big, good books—and one day go to college...
...It's like heresy...
...ommunal and individual...
...The people who have panned my work as being political are people who are not on my side, so I feel kind of proud of that...
...I don't feel my books are mainly for women...
...and "by God I want to believe that, and so don't mess with me...
...Marilyn and Karen were the two African-American kids in my class...
...I don't think it's necessarily things people would define as political, although sometimes it is, explicitly...
...Kingsolver: I went to school with African Americans and whites...
...Like humans are nore important than any other species...
...You create characters and you have a plot...
...In our county we didn't have a swimming pool, not in the whole countv...
...and Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of {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...
...but I didn't at first have an assignment...
...Why doesn't the public support us...
...I think I might be a lot more process-oriented nan a lot of writers are...
...I wonder whether they've prompted some heated dining table conversations between women and the men in their lives...
...I asked all my Latino friends...
...And it needs to be...
...And that's what I do\vhen 1 write a book, t's very similar...
...Seven or eight years ago I couldn't...
...Kingsolver: Both...
...Maybe the rust belt, maybe the auto belt, though I still don'l know if it's as clear as mining bosses and the way they sort of own their workers wholesale...
...I never read Marx until I was about eighteen, but the first time I read Gnindrisse and Capital I said, "I know this stuff...
...But a lot of people did it right, too...
...I think the reason that my friend Carmen was baffled when I said "terrible twos" is that the children in her household don't have to punch a clock...
...I don't know whether it was because of McCarthyism, or whether there was some evil humus in this country from which sprang Joe McCarthy and people who supported him and this idea that art and politics should separate themselves...
...Her last interview for The Progressive was with Billy Bragg in August IW2...
...Kingsolver has been nominated three times for the ABBY award, a booksellers" prize that goes to the author thev most love to recommend to customers...
...There was something in my training that was telling me, "You're going to go away...
...If you're reverent towards something, vou feel . . . CingSOlver: Lowly...
...I think he would say...
...My personal theory is it has a lot to do with McCarthyism...
...The reason that I do it at all is that I can still remember how recently it was that I was cranking out leaflets about the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Plant, or whatever was the crisis of the week in Tucson...
...for days and days...
...Q: It's waning, but it has the potential to come back...
...THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Barbara Kingsolver 'People who have panned my work as being political are people who are not on my side, so I feel kind of proud of that.' by robin epstein In a chapter in her new book of wide-ranging essays...
...Barbara Kingsolver's work takes readers on a similar journev...
...Robin Epstein is a freelance writer in New York City who worked us a reporter and an organizer in Kentucky for several years...
...They put my name on the list to draw a different crowd...
...Barbara agreed right away to hike a short distance up the slope to where the sun would reach us faster...
...so when mui run up against somebody who sa\s, "Of course the Kariland's warbler is just as important as I am...
...Q: You couldn't0 Kingsolver: I thought it, but I couldn't admit it because I was afraid of not being taken seriously...
...I guess some liberal people would say they know that, but they don't really believe it at a gut level...
...Kingsolver: I think if artists can speak of things that matter, then they will be supported...
...to do original research to find he way to an answer...
...It's hard to build a new iconography of heroism, but that's kind of my bailiwick...
...Think how wondrous that is...
...Their poets have their finger on the pulse of the human-rights situation, the core of economic oppression, where it's going and where it's coming from...
...Kingsolver: I speculate that if I asked him...
...There's this idea that political art is bad...
...1 sav...
...In some families, a lot And in almost all families, my generation is not as well off as our parents, even though we worked just as hard, and more of us got more of an education than they did...
...So I will never say men have no right to represent women...
...Kingsolver: I've been writing essays all along, but to write a book of them that all added up to something was really wonderful...
...You can look at the same event fifty different ways, so the story I chose to tell from a particular event was the creative part...
...I remember driving by that every time and smashing our faces against the glass of the window and hating those horses for being so rich...
...Ongsolver: The reason I'm attracted so much to those places md those moments is you can learn so much...
...Popular culture reflects a population that still identifies with the ruling class...
...Q: You've said a novel can move people in a way a newspaper article can't, because it gets in their heart and because they can't switch to the sports pages...
...things just sort of ground to a halt in the 1950s...
...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...
...Though I had only been in Arizona all of two days...
...and you realize that his whole schedule—all these things in our date book—are just ittle scratches on the surface of this old Earth, and she doesn't nuch care...
...Well...
...That's come to be a significant definition of the word political in this country, and it's something I don't agree with...
...Yet turn on the television and you still see rich people idolized...
...Q: Do you mean your family or your community...
...And I do have my limits...
...We rely on so many things on faith, without having to have any evidence...
...You know...
...They're with her or there's other people in the household...
...But I don't think we're really talking about censorship here...
...I included a lot of details about where I live and so forth, only as kind of a springboard to issues or ideas...
...Most people with your background and mine go through their whole lives without questioning that...
...You have to put clothes on them and make them walk around...
...So women are always dead center in my novels...
...Kingsolver: No, and it wouldn't be a good use of my time...
...It's like absolute heresy for an artist to say that...
...Nicholas County is not mining, it's agricultural...
...And he said...
...I don't know whether it's cause or effect...
...This is what's real...
...Kingsolver: Both...
...And so, given the chance to do that, given this strange moment that I have, little old socialist me, to go talk to David Gergen and be in everybody's living room, I have to do it...
...but the process is so similar...
...I wanted to introduce mv readers to this completely different unit of good and have them believe in it by the end, have them accept in their hearts that that could be just as true as the other...
...You can't just put the ideas there...
...It was so unfair...
...I warmed up in no time...
...look at Emma Bovary...
...Thev write about power relations and the common good...
...It works for me...
...It just happens that I used real people or real events or incidents in my life as the starting points...
...They'd get married and they'd have kids and they'd stay right there...
...Even if only to be awakened to the possibility that the government is doing something not right in Central America and maybe they'll be more open to reading stuff that's more explicitly about that subject...
...I'm never going to have a penis in my whole life, so I can read John Updike and I can get some clue...
...Now I just figure it's as ood as any way...
...Kingsolver: I'm not sure...
...I had really long hair that I could sit on, and people didn't think it was hair, because hair doesn't look like that, and they'd try to pull it off...
...I've heard from women who said, 'i gave this to my husband with underlines...
...I think certainly in Kentucky people understand class and power relations...
...Another America/Otra America, a book of poems in English and Spanish (Seal Press...
...This is a really scary thing to say, but it has worried me at times that my work is so popular...
...Think about if you had to crawl around and play with blocks all day...
...It makes real the daily lives lived by people who are seldom presented with all their smarts and sorrows...
...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...
...Q: You see the wealth of Lexington'.' Kingsolver: It's just one county away...
...But I somehow lived through that and learned to appreciate it...
...They didn't value spending lots of money on superficial things, which of course really irritated me when I was fourteen...
...Well, for how many generations now has that been untrue...
...So, there are all these divisions...
...Kingsolver: I didn't title the book, Barbara the Marxist Tabs on Life, but that's what it is...
...the other is that the good is whatever is in the best interest of the tribe, the group, the community...
...I grew up with this stuff...
...Just to see people survive...
...And that's why Kentucky—and Arizona, too— has a history of radical class action, and radical labor organizing...
...What I'm saying is our culture doesn't make allowances for kids...
...It's enough to make you religious...
...I find that I can be an effective activist in very different ways, but I feel like I still believe exactly the same things I did when I was twenty...
...It was roaring water...
...Q: Some people criticize your work as being too political...
...Well, I have a clue about that...
...it doesn't give parental leave...
...And so I feel I ha\e an obligation to tell truths like that...
...You feel daunted and unworthy...
...Everybody kind of had the plan...
...Kingsolver: There's this whole realm of natural history metaphors and symbols you can use if you know about them that gives a kind of freshness to your writing, because most writers haven't studied science...
...I felt that I did at this point in my life have a chance to be more direct...
...you'd be a terrible what-ever-you-are...
...Well, get this: I'm a pinko and I want to change the world...
...I lon't mean just their city, like, "Oh, this is Pittsburgh...
...A lot of what I also do is tell people, "Look, you're noble...
...I've never talked with another writer bout process who does it exactly the same way I do it...
...popularity...
...1 mean, that's sort of reductionist, hut that male ego that's his focus, that's the eye of his storm, is very interesting...
...And there's a hue and cry, and artists are looking around and saying...
...I think we're talking about a responsiveness of artists to their public that's sort of waning...
...Q: Do you think the popularity of your fiction speaks to people's hunger for the acknowledgement of the political in their lives, in addition to the fact that they're drawn in by the great stories and great characters...
...My first national publication was in The Progressive and it was about the strike...
...And it's funny that I still shock people when thev say, "Why do vou write...
...It was daytime, so I didn't wear many layers...
...Why am I looking for this9" So few of us examine our motives and our mythology, the hings that we believe in without question...
...Also, we moved right before the book came out...
...Her last interview for The Progressive was with Billy Bragg in August 1W2...
...about the small towns of Morenci, Ajo, and Clifton...
...That's the power of being able to get the word out...
...I wanted to be friends with them and I didn't know how...
...Those nountains don't inspire religion...
...That's what I do...
...I steered clear of the M word, because people are so ignorant...
...so I wrote a query...
...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...
...You appreciate dance because you participate...
...You'd be cranky...
...Q: Where did you get the desire to learn about different cultures...
...I can learn a lot from John Updike...
...Q: That it happened, yes...
...So it's very clear whose side everyone's on...
...But people who look around at the city and say...
...Like this belief about how anyone can make it in America if you're smart and you work hard...
...gives out each year less money than the money for military band uniforms...
...It was so much like writing fiction...
...Q: You weave your scientific training into your writing, which is pretty unusual...
...Q: But it's suspect to be a writer whose purpose in part is to change the world...
...Q: I don't imagine you have time to crank the mimeographs anymore...
...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...
...Thev write about all of this stuff that in the United States manv artists avert their faces from as being too political...
...His point of view is so deeply male...
...It's a tobacco town, so it's deeply depressed...
...Kingsolver: The gatekeepers of art are the ones who are saying this is too political...
...Even though we're a secular state, we're deeply religious about the religion of America...
...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...
...In Pig\ in Heaven 1 wanted to choose a high-profile e\ent in which a Native American has been adopted out of the tribe and in which that adoption is questioned and challenged...
...And add to that, Nicholas County is right in between, it's sandwiched...
...Or sort of an attitude about the environment, or an attitude about women that comes through...
...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...
...I got a real extreme look at what it's like to be a minority...
...And that's not the fault of the parents...
...Kingsolver: Yes, even though I didn't grow up in a mining county...
...I think people do, on some level, understand the politics of my fiction...
...All those icons we associate with power are hard to leave behind...
...All of the essays really are little stories that mean something, and what they end up being about is not the events but some larger ideas...
...Now, I'm not saying it's not difficult to have a two-year-old, but it's a cultural difficulty...
...That can be at the starting point of a lot of different stories...
...And then that stopped...
...Everything in High Tide in Tucson I think I've said before behind the mask of fiction, but this time I stepped out from behind the mask and said, "I, Barbara Kingsolver, believe this...
...Children are an aberration in late capitalism...
...That's why I say it...
...I would much rather stay home and bake bread and write another book...
...And then all the other kids were farm kids, and they didn't get to wash their hair every night because they didn't necessarily have hot water...
...They don't have to get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, and get strapped into the car seat by 7 o'clock, which is a schedule that would make any two-year-old cranky...
...Kingsolver: That's really wrong...
...And there was a horse farm where— I swear this was true—the horses had a swimming pool...
...It was a segregated town...
...Kingsolver: That's the idea...
...There was black and white...
...and I saw "Well, to change the world...
...We expect our two-year-olds to fit smoothly into adult schedules...
...How was your recent book tour...
...Cockiness loesn't lend itself to good writing...
...Their poets are talking about important stuff...
...To live through mean times without becoming mean-spirited is heroic...
...What I will say is I think our first responsibility, and also our first treasure as writers, is to represent ourselves...
...Q: Your fiction, you've made clear, is not autobiographical, but the essays . . . Kingsolver: Are...
...d Abbey, who was my neighbor, said something that continues o impress me in new ways...
...I write about child abuse, and about sexism and racism and illegal immigration laws, and I think, "Nobody's going to read about this," and yet, they do...
...What can you make of someone telling you...
...It was really a turning point for me...
...So we ended up living in St...
...I don't hear that from many people...
...You know you get handed in your life this chance to go all over the country and talk and talk and talk, and answer and answer and answer questions, and go on McNeillLehrer and national shows...
...I think we also have in this country a rare phenomenon in which people are very uneducated about art...
...It impressed me, because I was also an outcast...
...Q: Some of the essays in your new book read like a kind of Feminine Mystique for a new generation...
...J: In the essays you let on that there have been days when you lidn't think you could keep going, when vou questioned vour bilities as a writer...
...We found a suitable rock just off the trail and plopped ourselves down to talk...
...They try to erect a huge wall between art and politics...
...I do think we can learn so much from reading the perspeetives of people we are not...
...white and not-white...
...As she said this, she gestured em-jhatically to the saguaro-studded canyon rising all around us.] Ve're just a blink in the eye of this...
...John Updike writes about penises and lusting after women, and he's really one of the most male writers that I read...
...I think one of the great pluses is that I grew up as a social outsider...
...I keep coming back to the term creative nonfiction to describe this book, because it really was more creative writing than journalism...
...I've heard about a few...
...right...
...Henry Thoreau...
...Kingsolver: The "terrible twos" is an excellent example...
...They had to walk through mud to get to the school bus, so they had mud on their shoes...
...Q: So you're probably reaching people who haven't heard about these issues from your perspective before...
...You go through he world on some kind of search, and you take so much for ;ranted...
...Q: In that same essay you came back and said that that guy could think critically...
...Did you want to speak in your own voice instead of through your characters...
...Not only is it not in their language, it's not in their thinking...
...For example...
...I figured I'd write about it...
...I heard Christopher Reeve say when he was in town years ago...
...I think it's important to do that, because it's not traditionally been the main stuff of literature...
...I'll do it for a few monthi after a book comes out, and try to make the most of that time...
...Because it brings into conflict two completek different ways of defining good, of defining value...
...and I aid...
...Nourished bv good conversation and Barbara's homemade raisin bread...
...They're also a liability, because they're not productive...
...You grow up seeing other people moved to tears by the events, and you learn what that's about...
...It used to be I was the one who would organize the events...
...I wrote about divorce...
...You say, "I want to :now...
...I would much rather not do that...
...That's a huge underestimation...
...Q: One thing that comes through so much in vour writing is that people, like those you grew up with in Nicholas County, can understand power...
...We've had wo hundred-year floods here in the last ten years, and both imes the citv was completely cut off...
...If leople could just get out and look...
...Among the people we meet in Kingsolver's novels (all published by HarperCollins) are...
...You can hear on the left sometimes an elitism of ub...
...And it sold more in the first four months than all six of my other books combined in their first four months...
...Kingsolver: Yes, my dad was a physician, and he wanted to go where he could be extremely useful...
...they are all very real...
...Carl Sandburg...
...don't confuse me with the facts...
...Kingsolver: And...
...I suppose before that, deciding what it means...
...I got some sense of the possibilities and of the power of this kind of writing...
...The one is that the good is whate\er is in the best interest of the child...
...How do you translate terrible twos...
...And that's of course what drew me to the strike...
...ingsolver: This book tour just took me from city to city to ity...
...I think "my country right or wrong" is not such a common slogan as "my country always right...
...iut it has to be hard...
...I think here's something healthy about being daunted...
...That was a very clear distinction in my school...
...Lucia for a while in a convent hospital, and we lived in Central Africa...
...Any artistic commission that has Jesse Helms on it is scary...
...and to write, about the places where disparate points of iew rub together—the spaces between...
...You like what 1 write...
...Mohv Dick is a whale book, but I don't think only whales should read it...
...I was in that group, not because we were farmers but because we lived in the country, and my parents didn't believe in new clothes...
...And to just sit still and be...
...Are you saying that I sold out, or what...
...Shocking but true...
...Q: The choosing how to tell it...
...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...
...They are religion...
...Second grade, the kids who had gone to school in the CME church came down to our school...
...yeah...
...Or I'll go and read a poem...
...Love it or leave it, bitch...
...I don't know how many times I've heard people say "Well, I write, but my work will never be popular because it's so political," and I think, "Well, am I chopped liver...
...And it's sort )f laughable that we take all of our stuff so seriously...
...It also comes with a certain responsibility...
...They elect their poets to public office...
...What...
...I started going down there with a friend of mine, Jill Fein...
...Don't e\en think about it...
...Camille gleans some understanding of Native American reality outside spaghetti westerns...
...Now they do...
...Look to some of the poorest countries in Latin America...
...They just think you're wearing something weird on your head and they're trying to get you to quit showing off...
...They revere their poets...
...The people in our village had not seen white kids...
...It's staggering tome to read statistics of how many people in this country live in poverty: 20 percent of kids, right...
...You use the same techniques...
...ingsolver: I still have them...
...Are you OK...
...and that a divider between the two can actually exist...
...After bonegrinding years as an activist, a door opened...
...So that's why capitalism treats them like toxic waste...
...One of the things that was psychologically ind emotionally tiring was that it was all city, and I was sur-ounded continually by people who took their city so seriously...
...There's no terrible twos...
...Thai's what I love...
...It was for therapy or something...
...And I think reverence implies a certain lack of self-steem, doesn't it...
...Q: It seems to me that as disparate as they are, all the essays in the new book fit together...
...Thanks to the museum's mission of appreciation for modern Native American life as well as history...
...Those guys selling the fry bread were drinking a lot of Cokes...
...Censorship of any kind is scary...
...Q: And then you lived for a while in Africa as a kid...
...And when you run up against somebody else who's noving right beside you but looking for completely different tuff, it can stop you in your tracks, and you can start thinking...
...I felt usurped by Lady Chatterley's Lover...
...I think it really might be the main thing I do...
...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 we would go to Lexington once in a while, and pass through these horse farms...
...Nicholas Count} holds a really interesting geographic position between the wealth of Lexington and the poverty of Appalachia, and people define themselves depending on which way they're facing...
...Q: Was your connection to small-town life one of the things thai led you to write Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizonc Mine Strike of 1983...
...But I'm still involved locally...
...I didn't really reveal anything that intimate in that book...
...You appreciate stories because you sit around in groups where people tell them...
...What's the unifying theme...
...So in high school I learned about class, and I didn't even know the words...
...You have to have a reverence for the un-lertaking...
...2: How do we build more awareness of that...
...Then she adds, "And I think they like soda pop...
...Kingsolver: Oh...
...I remember just standing by the mailbox holding it in my hand and thinking, 'All over the country people are reading about this...
...women aren't going to be able to relate to this...
...Artists are losing the minuscule amount of support that we had...
...I am more important than a kirllanJ's Warbler...
...I didn't know from canyons...
...It used o make me certain I was doing it wrong...
...And when he's writing, does he think...
...To define individuation from the parent as terrible is an anti-child mindset...
...What 1 really wanted to do in that book was not necessarily write about Indians...
Vol. 60 • February 1996 • No. 2
