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BARBARA KINGSOLVER
By the time she was 8 years old, novelist, short story writer,
and essayist Barbara Kingsolver had already started keeping journals. She filled
“drawers and drawers” with them, and yet she never thought she’d be a
writer.
Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland in 1955, but was raised in Carlisle,
Kentucky, a small Southern town of 1,600 people. Actually, the Kingsolvers
didn’t even live in Carlisle proper, but “out in the country, in the middle
of an alfalfa field.” Given that out-of-the-way setting, it’s not very
surprising to learn that Kingsolver’s childhood was a rather solitary one,
which she now recalls as a lonely time in her life. But she also recalls it with
affection and notes that the time she spent by herself helped to stimulate an
“elaborate life of the mind”—a quality that would prove useful later on.
After high school, she left Carlisle for Depauw University in Greencastle,
Indiana. She attended on a music scholarship and studied classical piano; but
eventually, she says, “it kind of dawned on me that classical pianists compete
for six job openings a year, and the rest of us get to play ‘Blue Moon’ in a
hotel lobby.” In an attempt to be more practical, she changed her major to
biology. After graduating from Depauw, and hoping again to expand her range of
experiences and options, Kingsolver left for Europe. With very little money, she
traveled the continent and took whatever work she could find. Mostly she worked
on archaeological digs, but she did some translating, too. Her work visa
eventually became more and more difficult to renew, and she knew she was going
to have to figure out some new course. More or less on a whim, she decided to
move to Arizona. Kingsolver worked as a laboratory assistant and later enrolled
as a graduate student in biology at the University of Arizona. For a time she
studied the social life of termites. She finished an M.S. degree but then,
disillusioned with academia, left the Ph.D. program and took a job as a science
writer for the university. The science writing led to some freelance feature
writing, and, after a time, the feature writing allowed her to quit her job as a
science writer.
Although she had written fiction and poetry for years, she showed her work to no
one. With more time on her hands, she began writing in earnest, taking a
creative writing course and struggling to find her voice. Her creative writing
teacher gave her a copy of Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories,
which helped. Finally she screwed up enough courage to enter a short story
contest—and she won. “1983. That was the year that I wrote in block letters
in my journal, I AM A WRITER. And I felt this great relief, you know, that I’d
found an identity that felt true and honest.”
Her first published story, Rose-Johnny, appeared in the Virginia
Quarterly in 1987 (and was later collected in Homeland). Her first
novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988. She wrote it during a
period of chronic insomnia that accompanied her first pregnancy. And not
coincidentally, it is about a young woman making the move from Kentucky to
Arizona, trying to find her place in the world. “It’s taken me a long while
to understand, really, what I am and who I am,” Kingsolver says. “I had to
realize that I’m very much formed by living in a small town, and that the
things I value most have to do with community, and the ways that people know
each other in a rural place, and the way they depend on each other.”
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