Barbara Kingsolver

Hi book lovers, this is Ellen Hildebrand, best-selling author of 30 books, including Swan Song and the Perfect Couple. We're back. That's right. And this is Tim Ehrenberg, creator of Tim Talks Book. And you're listening to season two of Books Speech and Beyond, presented by N Magazine. We're so excited to be back in the studio for another great season talking about the wonderful world of books. from best-selling authors to publishing industry insiders to book influencers and so on.

Because there's nothing Ellen and I love more than chatting about books. And our favorite question to ask each other is, what are you reading? But we'll go even further here on this show, exploring the craft of writing, Publishing and that wonderful connection a reader has with your favorite book. But before we head into our episode, we want to take this opportunity to thank our incredible

Sponsors. Nantucket Book Partners, the Nantucket Hotel, Book of the Month Club, Cartolina, and Triple Eight Distillery. Without their generous support, we wouldn't be able to bring you these fast with some of the most dynamic leaders from the book world. So thank you and Under the show.

Hi, Ellen. Hi, Tim. Okay, we always love to talk favorites, and but one thing we've never talked favorites on this podcast yet is our favorite literary quote. So while you think I'm gonna tell you, I don't think I've ever shared this. One of my favorite books In the whole world, even though I primarily read fiction, is the nonfiction book Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon. Do you know it? No. It is about

Parents that have kids that are far from the tree. So there are chapters of dwarfism, of death, children through crime, transgender, and every page in that book is like a literary quote that I like to read. I think it should be a required reading for all of of mankind. It's such a such a beautiful book. Okay, I'm gonna buy it. And then my other quote is from A Little Life, which is you know it's one of my favorite novels.

And it is what I think I would like written on my tombstone, what he knew he knew from books. Yep. That is so great. What about you? So I chose a quote from which is basically the the bedrock of every single novel I've ever written. And it comes from my very favorite novel, which is Family Happiness by Laurie Colwyn.

And the main character, Polly Demarest, says, Once she had divided the world into the sort of women who had love affairs and the sort of women who did not, but now she, a woman who did not, did, and with considerable expertise. And the reason I love that quote so much is because and the reason I associate it with all of my novels is because my novels are all about

essentially good people making terrible choices and doing awful things. That's beautiful. Right. And so I chose that quote. I also want to let everyone know that in my novel The Academy, which I have written with my daughter, which will come out next September. One of the teachers at the boarding school papers her door and invites the students to write quotes on the door. And one of the quotes over the course of the year that is written is a quote that says

I think most people would agree the hardest part of high school is the people. Oh my gosh. And that is a quote. From Demon Copperhead, written by our guest, Barbara Kingsolver. Barbara King Salver is the author of ten best selling works of fiction, including the novels Demon Copperhead, Unsheltered, The Bean Trees, and The Poison Wood Bible, as well as books of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction.

And Coyote's Wild Home, a children's book co-authored with Lily Kingsalmer. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the art.

She will also receive the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. She lives with her husband on a farm in southern Appalachia. Welcome, Barbara. Welcome Barbara. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here with both of you. And also I feel Immediately at home because of what you've just said. I I love Lori Colwyn. Her work has a special place in my heart. I'm just sad there isn't any more of it for me to read. And I loved the book.

Far from the Tree. Yes. By Andrew Solomon. That is one of my favorite uh nonfiction books I've read in decades. And yeah, it gave me a new way of thinking about what he called vertical versus horizontal family and community, sort of the families that come down through The community that comes down to us through our line and the ones that we find kind of sideways around us. Yeah.

It's a good way of explaining something that I've always thought about in my own writing, kind of the families that we inherit versus the ones that we build. Yeah. It's the ultimate our differences unite us and that we are so much more alike than we are different.

But we started this podcast about literary quotes because it's inspired about one of my favorite characters in Demon Comprehead, Uncle Dick, and how he would write all the literary quotes on the kites and then fly them up to thank the authors. So with that in mind, Barbara, what what are some literary quotes that you would write on a kite?

There's several that are right here on my bulletin board. Hope is an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. That's from Vaclav Havel. I would say that That's kind of a touchstone for me when people say that's impractical or that's impossible or that preposterous or that isn't done.

I don't think any of those is a good reason to do it. And I would say that it's been kind of a a d a motivator, kind of a driving force in my whole career. It's such a beautiful one.

So Ellen and I love to start these podcasts with talking about origin stories. And what we've really loved this year is talking about origin stories as readers. So what are those books that made you fall in love with storytelling and then put you in this path of a literary life?

Oh that's a really good question too. I can remember different books at different kind of junctures of my life that that kind of hit me over the head and told me, wow, this is a whole new way of looking at Not life per se, but at how a book can position itself and a reader and a person in the world. I would say the first of those was this won't be a big surprise.

Little Women by Louisa Mayalcott, when I was probably ten or something, nine or ten. That's the first that the first novel that just took me completely out of my life into the world of of the book. I guess that's another way of saying that's the first kind of adult reading experience that I I had.

And it was really handy because the world it took me out of was the back of a station wagon. My family was driving to the Grand Canyon, which from Kentucky is a really, really long way. And I remember kind of like snapping out of it at one point and seeing my brother and my sister in utter misery and I was like, I don't even care if it's a million more miles to the Grand Canyon.

I am in here with Joe and and Beth and Amy and Meg. And I just, yeah, I was there. So that's a book that told me a book can create a world and bring a reader inside of it. A book that I read in my late teens, I guess, a series of books, Doris Lessing, the Martha Quest novels.

Those novels are about a young woman coming of age first in in what was Rhodesia at that time, the British African colony of Rhodesia. And she wrote about what she called the color bar and the gender bar, we would call those now sexism and racism. And she wrote about them so poignantly as this young woman was understanding kind of the barriers between herself and the life she wanted to live.

And because I was, you know, still pretty young, I hadn't read a lot of books that really revealed that and and explored that. And I remember thinking, Wow, a novel can do this. A novel can invite us to look at really hard things about the world, you know, the way it's organized. Power. And again, it was just, it was so emotional for me. I remember reading this passage. of Martha and her mother. Her mother is showing her the right way to fold sheets. And Martha, young Martha who was

you know, about the age I was when I was reading it, feeling very oppressed by my mother's notion of what I should be doing in the household. I just remember sobbing, feeling like, yes, it's like all over the world, young women feel this this sort of this lead

heaviness on our shoulders because of what we're not allowed to do. And I guess I thought, hmm a writer can do really interesting, powerful things in the world. A novelist can another I mean, I could go on and on, obviously, but another book that

rocked my world'cause I think that's the question you're asking, right? The world rockers. I grew up in Kentucky in a rural town. I was and I was not aware until I left that place to go to college that the whole world looked down on hillbillies and I was one and therefore the whole world looked down on me. And people laughed at my accent. Professors corrected my pronunciation, which was not Wrong. It was just my language.

And I code switch now. What you're hearing right now is not the way I spoke as a child. Uh it comes right back when I'm, you know, when I'm talking to my neighbors or when I'm talking to my family. But I learned to code switch and I learned to sort of life switch. I sort of I created because

Because what young person wants to be laughed at? You know, nobody would say nobody would hear what I was saying because they were too busy mocking my words or just presuming things about me because of the way I spoke. So I tried to change my whole aspect and I tried to be this worldly person that was from nowhere. And I was starting to r well, I wasn't starting. I was always writing.

since I was a little girl. I always wrote poems and stories and, you know, kept a journal and all that. But it was it was very private. But at this time in college, even though I was a science major, I was writing stories and poems more seriously. And I was writing from this fake persona that I was trying to invent. And oh my God, it w it was horrible. It was just so ridiculous what I wrote about, I don't know, people in Italy and sports cars. I don't know what. Stuff I didn't really know about.

And I spent years kind of sort of idling my engines or revving, I guess more like revving my engines in the mud or something, going nowhere. Because I was writing from this inauthentic place. And when I maybe about four or five years. After that I was living in Arizona and someone gave me a book by Bobby Ann Mason who is from Kentucky. The book uh was a collection of short stories called Shiloh and Other Stories. And that book

just it blew me away because all of these characters were Kentuckians. They were people who worked at the Walmart or the it was the Kmart at that time. They were cashiers. They, you know, they were the people that I knew. They were people I'd grown up with. And here they were in this book that was considered that was a very well received book. That book was, you know, much sort of the critics said this is great literature.

It wasn't just that recognition that, you know, that sort of stamp of approval that I was was taking in. It was the fact that this writing was really, really good and it spoke to me and I just understood for the first time. that if I wanted to write anything good, it would have to come from a real place. The place that I really I really inhabit in the universe, which involves where I came from. And it was also a revelation, I'm sure, to be like, okay

The way I grew up, because I gr my I personally, Ellen Hilderbrand grew up in sort of nowhere's Pennsylvania, and it's very suburban and it's like the least literary place you could possibly imagine, like the shopping mall and everything. But that you grew up in a place and then saw it in literature for the first time with Bobby Ann Mason and thought, Oh my goodness, like my life is actually something that I can write about.

It validated a whole sort of lifetime of experience that I had been trying to swallow and hide. Yeah. It's just amazing. But I want to ask, I want to go back to the Doris Lessing. Who put the Doris Lessing in your hand? I was the omnivorous little reader. I just was I was just hungry. I was a early reader. I started reading when I was three. I remember it really well. Well, because my dad was a reader. He was one of those compulsive readers. Like

If the cereal box is on the table, he's reading the cereal box. And I watched him and any free time he had, he had his nose in a book. And so he never had to tell me reading is important. He showed me. And I think that's an important thing for parents to think about. Your kids are watching you for cues of what's what's cool and wonderful. I mean, I know you think that they don't think you're cool, but they are watching you for cues of what is the really most valuable thing to be doing.

And if your nose is in the phone all the time, then you know, don't tell tell them to get their nose out of the phone. So my dad was a reader and I just grew up just really I remember being sort of jealous or envious or really curious and hungry to know what he's getting from these words. So I taught myself to read. And then I just read everything that was in the house.

We have the encyclopedia Britannica. Mm-hmm. And so my brother and I divided it up. He started at A, I started at Z, and we worked towards the middle. Reading it all because we this this was our theory. When we get to when we meet in the middle, somewhere around the M's.

We'll know everything between us. Between the two of you. You will know everything. Yeah. Between the two of us, we'll stick together and we'll conquer the world. So that was I mean, that's the kind of nerdy little reader I was. And we found my dad's he was a a country doctor and we found his medical

Textbooks and read them and which was probably really a bad idea for me as a child because I have these images, you know, like a knife sticking into a head and stuff that I'll never get and burnt into my my retinas. But I just ate up any library that I could get into. We had it was a really, really little town.

The library was upstairs over the utility office, the where at Kentucky Utilities where you went to pay your electric bills. So when my mom would go to pay to town to pay bills, I'd go upstairs and furtively read in the stack. because the librarian had this theory that children shouldn't put their hands on books. So no. So I had to sneak around, which probably also added to the allure. We had so we didn't live in town, so it wasn't easy for me to get to libraries, but our School.

You know, I had a l a little library and I read everything. In high school, the teacher who was in charge of libraries saw what a book nerd I was. So she uh kind of tapped me as her assistant. So she taught me the Dewey Decimal system and I cataloged every book in our high school library. fun. I g I went back there recently and I saw the little tabs.

on all the books, they're still there. I mean, after all these years in my handwriting. That is amazing. You know, while I was doing that, I was reading. So I just read everything I could get my hands on and I believe I found Doris Lessing in E I think probably in the school library and how it got there. How it got there, we have no idea. That seems very amazing for rural Kentucky. Yes, exactly. I know.

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Barbara, I wanna I wanna shift gears and ask about how you first got published, what your right, your sort of publishing origin story is. Did you have an agent or how how did you get your first book published? I had started on what I I already told you I was in the closet. I w I always wrote, but I didn't admit it to anybody because I was sort of embarrassed.

As sort of and which also goes kind of with my rural kind of Appalachian upbringing, which is uh the the the who do you think you are school of of you know of humanity, especially for girls. It was like Saying you wanted to be an artist or a writer when you grew up would be kind of bragging, like, I'm gonna be a movie star, you know, I'm gonna fly it just like

No. So I didn't ever talk about it, but I wrote a lot and I submitted, I don't know, a few things to the college, what do you call it? Literary magazine. Right. The liter that's it. The literary magazine. There was kind of a book that they published. the literary annals and everything that I submitted was published and I just thought, Oh, well they're they're not

They they have pretty low standards, I guess. But I just kept going and in my twenties I just bravely started submitting short stories. Again to, you know, this was when I was an adult, I could go to bigger libraries and I would read the literary magazines. And I found these places like Virginia Quarterly Review. Yep. And so I thought, okay, that's I'll try this. And everything that I submitted got published.

And and I just kept thinking, well, they must have really low standards. Cause what because what do I know? And then I actually after I finished grad school in science. I my first job was a science writer. And so that was all, you know, just science. But on the side, I was doing some freelance journalism. I had heard you need an agent. So I looked in the the list.

There was like a literary marketplace at the library. You can pull it off the shelf. And in the back there was a list of list of all people. Yep. Yeah. Pretty much all the literary agents there were. And there was one called Frances Golden. And here's what she her listing said. I do not represent any work that is racist, sexist, ageist, homophobic, gratuitously violent. I realize this cuts me out of everything that's or out of 90% of what's written, but I am proud of all my authors.

And I thought, oh, well that If there's an agent for me, she's the one. So I was working on this novel and I was pregnant and I was but I had insomnia. And as you do often when you're carrying another human in you and they don't let you sleep. The my doctor said, Well, just do something boring like scrub the tile on your you know, the grout on your tile and maybe that'll put you to sleep and I

Screw that. I'm gonna write I'm gonna write a novel. I mean, when does life give you extra hours to write your first book? Never. That's the answer. Never. So I felt like life was giving me extra hours. So I wedged my desk into a closet so I could go in there and tur close the door and turn the light on. So I wrote this whole book. in the closet at night and that book was the Bean Trees and

I was had a hard deadline'cause I was gonna have a baby in March and my daughter was very, very obliging. She was three weeks late. Three weeks. She must have been huge. That's a ten month pregnancy. Yeah. But I was not complaining because I was trying to finish this book and I finished it just at the nick of time. And I thought, well, I'll send it to this agent because I have to get it out of, you know, I have to clean up here and get the stuff out of this closet.

So I just put it in the mail with absolutely no expectations. I included a letter of apology. I said, You probably don't want to read this. It's probably not any good. She saved that letter. And I went to the hospital, had my daughter Camille, came home and my answering machine was blinking and that The message said your book is going to be published by you got a choice, Harper Collins or or

St. Martin's, I think, was the other one. Amazing. And so so yeah. So it just happened like I became a mother and a novelist on the same

Day. That is crazy town. I love that story. I love that. That is absolute crazy town. So I'm I'm so excited. And then okay, so you are living in Arizona, then you must did you write Animal Dreams next? Well, okay. I got this, I got an advance for this novel, which sounded like an incredible sum to me. I will tell you what it was$25,000. Yeah. That sounded amazing to me. I could quit my job. I could live on that for a year. Right. And I could write another book.

So I thought, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna just I'm gonna I'm gonna make this work. So I had been working on short stories for a while, as I mentioned, sending them off here and there. And I thought I can pull together a collection of short stories. I didn't know, of course, anything. I hadn't been through, you know, an MFA program where you learn things like

Uh publishers don't want short stories. I think that's one reason. Correct. They do not. Even though you're writing them, there's not a huge market. I didn't know any of that, so that didn't stop me. I pulled together a collection of short stories, wrote some new ones, kind of, you know, organized them into a collection. That was my second book and it was pretty, pretty quick'cause a lot of the work was done.

And that was published and it actually I don't think it sold, you know, I don't think it burnt any barns with sales, but that but it was well reviewed. And so then, you know, booksellers and people were starting to take notice. And my third book then, again, I thought, uh, royalties, I'll just, you know, I'm gonna just keep making this work as long as I can without going back to a day job. Right. If I could live from the book. And so I wrote Animal Dreams Next.

Right. And then and then it just kept going. I haven't I haven't had to apply for a job for quite a few years. No, you really haven't. I'm glad you haven't. I have a fun tidbit for the the listener, which is that when I first came to Neantucket, my first summer on Neantucket, which was nineteen ninety three.

And I've lived here 31 years, Barbara. And the bookstore on Nantucket Mitchell's book corner on Main Street, the very first time I walked into that bookstore in the summer of nineteen ninety-three, I bought a book and that book was Animal Dreams. By Barbara King Silver. The very first book I bought on this island in thirty one years was your book. I loved it so, so much. And that is when I became Did you go in looking for that particular book? No.

With my roommate Margie. Margie, if you're listening, you'll remember this. And we didn't really know each other. We just met You know, a day or two before and we were in town walking around and of course we went to the bookstore and she she picked it out and she said, You have to read this.

Oh, I love that. Thanks, Margie. Thank you, Margie. My first Barbara Kingsover was the Poison Wood Bible. And it was the first time that I feel like I felt that a setting could be a character in a book because it is about the missionary family that goes to the Belgian Congo in nineteen fifty nine.

Can you talk to me, Barbara, about the importance of setting in all your books and how you did your research for the Congo? Well, first of all, setting to me is a really important part of anything I write, I can say this unequivocally. I would never set a book in a place where I've never been. Which is why I can't write science fiction because I've never been on you know the moon or whatever, a rocket ship.

And, you know, it's it's not something that I would really have known about myself, except that it has been so consistently pointed out to me by others, that sense of place. Is always really, really important in my books. You know where you are. And that's important to me, I think, because of the way I grew up.

I grew up kind of I was sort of raised by wolves. And I mean, you know, my father was a reader and wolves don't read. So I guess it's not entirely true, but really minimal adult supervision. I played outside all the time when I wasn't reading or ideally was reading a book under a tree, but just playing outside and exploring the in the field. We lived out in the country, so playing in the woods.

and discovering things and being in the, you know, in the fields and the the farm ponds and stuff was so so formative to me. I always Just love you know, these these other beings that I lived among, these trees, these crickets and frogs and snakes and everything, I grew up with the sense of community that involved species other than humans. And a lot of my world growing up was not human constructed. So that's just, you know, it's just you just learn.

fr from what you imprint on as a child, I always pay attention wherever I am, to the trees, to the birds, what's blooming, what does this place smell like? You know, all that stuff that's not Built by humans, which can be exactly alike in many, many places, the natural part of a place. Is its own. It belongs to itself. And so when I set a book in a place, I have to go there because I can't just read about it. I can't read other people's

interpretations of the place or even watch movies because I wouldn't know what it smells like. Right. You know, I wouldn't know like the quality of the air and, you know, that grit that gets in your teeth, you know, in a dusty place. Those Those details for me make a piece of fiction feel place.

And so you asked about the poison with Bible. And that's a long story which I'll try to make short. I lived in I grew up mostly in rural Kentucky, but my dad had this really, he was a first-generation college student. Nobody in his family had ever been, I don't think, finished high school, but he was just this. really unusual driven person. He wanted to be a doctor to help people and he got himself through all the schooling that you need to become a doctor. And then with some

support from an organization that said afterwards you will do service and that was fine with him. So he every few years would say, Well, kid We're going to the Congo or going somewhere. We lived we spent some time in it was often jumbles. We spent some time living in a

In a convent in the jungle in St. the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean. Wow. Uh we spent and one of the most probably sort of striking and informative places For me is that we we spent about a year in in the Congo, in rural Congo, a village that's Probably hard for you to imagine because there are There were no there was no running water, electricity, no car. You could not reach it by by automobile. There was no commerce that like connected this village with the outside world.

or whatever, you know, what you want to call it with the rest of the world. And my dad, there was no school. So that was great. This is like what I got to do instead of second grade, which was wonderful. And so my dad was there treating leprosy. Oh my goodness. Smogpox. And I mean, when I think now about

Mostly my mother taking us to this place. But I mean, my sister was two. I would never ever have taken my two year old to a place like that. But, you know, that was my dad. I was like, well, you know, this is sweet, we need to do this. And so we did. So I did live in the Congo as a child. So I know the quality of the air, you know, I know what's blooming. I know, you know, I have very strong memories. I have memories of

olfactory memories from the Congo. And of course, the world that I knew there as a kid was a kids' world, playing with Congolese kids, trying to learn Kituba'cause They didn't s you know, that's what they spoke and they thought we were really weird because our skin was, you know, lacked color. Their version of it was that we didn't have skin. They said, Why don't you have skin? So, you know, I learned a whole lot of things.

from that piece of my childhood about point of view and what we assume to be good or right or or righteous in one place. can be completely wrong in another. So you know, a skin color that is an asset in one place can be a real problem in another. Just for example. So that stuck with me and you know, the the I paid attention to the Congo, you know, for the for the remainder of my you know, up until now, still I've always paid attention to what's going on there because I have a connection to it.

As a child I wasn't paying attention to the political story of the Congo, which is really a really dramatic one and the Congo is kind of a perfect example of colonial arrogance and kind of the worst things that one country will do to another. And when I grew up and learned that story. I wanted to tell that story. And so that is the motivation for the the Poison Wood Bible. And yeah, I did have to do research. A lot of

you know, just reading about political history, but then I also had to go back to Africa. I wasn't able to go to the Congo because of It was still under the dictatorship of Mugutu, which the US installed, which was not because of my position, my political position, I would not be allowed into the Congo. So I just went as close to the Congo as I could. And I I stayed in other villages and I met people and I went to the market with them to see like what's it like for an adult.

you know, to live in this place. What do you buy at the market? How do you cook it? Whatever. So I made a a number of trips to Africa and I just read lots and lots of books. I love that story. Thank you for sharing that. Because th listener, if you have not read Poison Wood Bible, it's one of my favorite books of my younger years. So thank you for writing it. Now let's get into

Demon Copperhead. Demon Copperhead You and I actually have met Barbara. We met at the Oprah's Book Club book discussion. It was on Zoom, but we met through the screen and we got to prepare all these questions for you. And I think I came to the table with like four pages of questions. And then I think I got to ask one. So thank you for being here. My first one is in the preface to David Copperfield, Charles Dickens eloquently writes, he says, it would concern the reader little, perhaps.

How sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two years imaginative task, or how an author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him forever. Is that how you feel when you finish a book? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I miss Demon especially. I have a very strong attachment to that kid. I feel like he's, you know, he's my my kid.

And he required as much of me as any human child would have in terms of just, you know, the heartache of of bringing him into the world. Intensity. It was it was hard work to go to some of the dark places I needed to in my both in my research and in my imagination to rank that novel because he has some really hard passages in his life. And then afterward, oh my God. I mean, he just took me all around the country and all over the world. The demon promotion just it this the fact that this book

surprisingly became a global phenomenon. Yeah. Meant that I was talking about this kid day after day for really almost three years. Yeah,'cause it just came out in paperback right now.

Which is unheard of it. It just came out on paper. That's right. Because it was yeah, it was doing so it was still selling so well in heart. I didn't know that this was even possible. I thought that, you know, there's just that's like you know, the order of the universe after ten months a book comes out in paperback and and my publisher s said, oh no, that it's actually the

The booksellers. The booksellers are saying, no, no, keep it in hardcover because we're still doing well with this. So it just came out in paperback just last week, I guess. And but finally I've just had to say, all right. Enough. I'm not traveling around with demon anymore. He's on his own. He's got it. I didn't do a I did not do a paperback tour. The kid has just got a I kicked him out of the house. He has to he has to speak for himself now.

But I do feel such an attachment to him and oh it is it there's always a a sadness. I mean, y you know this, right? Yeah. When you just Oh yeah. When you finish, you've lived with these people in your head. Intimately. for, you know, a period of years and then when to be finished and say Okay, I don't get to play with you anymore. You tell me we we it's over. If it feels sad. And I always feel like it's after after it's not on publication because of course you turn in the the manuscript.

al almost a year before publication. So it happens in this quiet period. And I always think of it as a kind of postpartum depression. It's kind of baby blues. There's this just Sad emptiness when you send them out of the house. And then it's a period of months, even af you know, after you're done with the galleys and everything, there's this quiet period for about six months where nothing's happening except you're just waiting for those first reviews. And so you're trying not to think about it.

So I always I'm actually really deliberate about that. I There are always requests. always, always, every almost every day coming in invitations for me to write an article about you know, knitting and my sheep or, you know, or some investigative piece or an overview of Appalachian literature or, you know, these different kinds of things that are fun to do would be tempting to do, but when I'm writing a novel I don't want to do.

So I always say wait and I will do that when I finish. And so I I'm really intentional about filling the the the postpartum quiet. With a lot of fun assignments sometimes, you know, that take me interesting places and I try to organize it that way.

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coupon code and buying from ninety plus sellers. Exactly. Thank you, 90 plus sellers. Thank you.

So you've talked a little bit about your process on your website and I found this absolutely fascinating. So you say that pounding out a novel is like hoeing a row of corn. You keep your head down and keep going until the end. I also feel that way.

Revision is where the fine art begins. It's it's thrilling to take an ending and pull it backwards like a shiny thread through the whole fabric of the manuscript, letting little glints shine through here and there, which I also experience, although I would never have had the eloquent language to say it that way. Oh you would have. It would have taken me my entire life. I just I just wanna I just wanna clarify that you you said writing a novel is like how

It's writing a first draft. Writing a first draft. That's sequencing. Correct. Writing a yeah. Writing a first draft draft is like owing a row of corn. You just you just Have to get it done. But so I'm sure people ask you this, people ask me this all the time like how how do you write a novel or how what is the most important thing? And that is the thing. The thing is, is you have to finish it. You have to keep going, right? You have to start at the beginning and move.

to the end and l I now I'm gonna think about it like Howing a row of corn. Yeah. Although I'm I'm a little more random than that. I don't because I do a whole lot of outlining. I d I really, really work on the architecture of a piece a lot. So I know where I'm going and I actually even set up my novel usually in open different files for different chapters. And so once I've started and found the voice.

Cause that there's that, you know, couple of hundred pages that you write and throw away before you really find the voice. Right. And it's not really you're not usually even writing the beginning of the novel. You write something and then you say, No, this is not, it needs to start earlier than this, or it actually needs to start later than this. But once I get my voice,

And I have my architecture, I will actually go into the middle, or, you know, I'll think of a scene and say, ah, this is chapter 31. And always, always, well before I've gotten to the end of the first draft. I've written the last scene. It will come to me usually somewhere midway through the writing, I'll just have a vision of the last scene and I will write it. And of course, you know, it will get rewritten several times, but having that ending

already already nailed at the, you know, in my computer as I'm going towards it is so helpful even on the first draft because it's like you're gonna stick the landing. You know, it gives you this confidence.

Right. But I interrupted you. You were gonna ask something about that process. Well, I was gonna ask uh the uh there are other things that you mentioned, but I wanna talk about the relationship of pa first of all, patience and second of all faith. And I don't mean faith in a spiritual sense, I mean faith in yourself. When you're writing a novel, right? The patience to know that you don't know at the beginning.

necessarily who these characters are, right? You just said you write a few h hundred pages and throw them away. Can you imagine telling someone that you have to write a few hundred pages and then throw them away? Because it is a process of discovery. But it's so daunting, I think, for beginning writers to think about that. But can you talk a little bit about the patience and then the faith in yourself otherwise or your the confidence that's required? That I would use the word trust.

Trusting the process, just trusting that you don't know. everything yet that that you will find it. And that business of writing those hundred pages that you throw away used to really make me sad or frustrated in the early days when I would think I would sit down and say to myself I'm gonna write all day and at the end I'll throw it away. And that seems so pointless. Especially especially if you're uh a very uh sort of you know goal-oriented person. However I eventually figured out that

This is the way to think of it. You're writing pages Minus. hundred to zero of your novel. You have to write them. They are part of the novel. You just have to write'em and get'em out of the way. It's like digging for gold or something. You wouldn't expect to just start picking up gold. You know you have to dig. You there's dirt. You have to get out of the way. Removing dirt. That is a great analogy.

Corn, dirt. This sounds like the toughest job in the world. No, but it's also fun. But here's the thing about trusting the process. Every time I I've how many books have I written? I think 18 now. And I'm starting number 19 now. I'm actually maybe like 60 pages in. That's after minus minus a hundred. Yeah. Like a hundred and sixty pages in. And I feel like I'm Steven says, How's it going? And I and I say, It's stupid. I'm just writing a stupid novel. It's just

Stupid. Nobody would want to read this. I always feel that way. I never feel in the beginning like, yeah, I've got this. But That's part of the process too. And it I think when people talk about writers block, they're talking about writers fear. I'm afraid to write because whatever I write is going to be stupid. So

Here's how I deal with that. And this I learned books and books ago. And I do it every time. I just reach that point early on where I just I'm struggling with how stupid this whole thing is. And I just look out the window. Usually I stand up. It's sort of a ritual. I take a deep breath and I give myself permission to write a stupid novel. Right. Because Nobody's gonna see it.

I it's that's the beautiful thing, you know, like if you're an athlete or you know, like and you mess up everybody's watching. We're doing all of our stuff in private here. It's not this is where I write, by the way. This is my this is I have my hands on my my keyboard here. This is where I work.

That door's closed. Nobody will see what I make here until it's been rewritten and rewritten and rewritten and I feel like it's not stupid anymore. Right. So and you know, and I and made Maybe you will never get unstupid, but Odds are, I mean, improbably will. It just takes time. It just you just have to trust the process. I love that mantra. Give yourself permission to write a stupid novel. To write a stupid novel.

Because you that's where you start. I read on your website that every book that you write always starts off with a very big question. So if you look at all eighteen of your books. Could you pinpoint what's the main question Barbara's always answering in all of those books? Oh it's it's not always one qu no it's it's a Hopefully it's a different question every time with some specificity. If there's an underlying theme though to all of them. But if there was, if there was a theme, yeah, I think

Because yeah, they say that every writer is writing the same book over and over again. If that's the case, I think It's about this continual struggle between be defining ourselves as individuals, defining ourselves, our voices, our accomplishments as individuals. and belonging to our community. And I think that I think of that as a particularly American question because I think in this country more than any other I've ever known about or been in.

This country worships the solo hero, you know, the the solo flyer, the lone ranger, the one, the one guy who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. And I grew up in a place where, you know, you could Appalachians are made out of community. We are really aware that nobody is doing anything alone. I mean, we would like to do something alone sometimes and we can't because the whole family is going to come along and everybody knows your business.

And in a family, you know, you know who your people are. It's just a really important part of of sort of Appalachian culture and mindset. It goes along with what I said earlier about. it's not polite to say I'm gonna be, you know, you know, famous when I grow up because That's like putting your yourself above other people. You don't go parading yourself around, you know, you just you belong. And so I grew up with that. And at the same time, I grew up with this.

American mythology that we are all kind of on our own to make our w seek our fortune, you know, and make our way. And so that sort of the continual conflict, I think that all of us feel as people, as communities, as political beings. that conflict is always there and I think it's really interesting to sort out. And I think that's why I so often end up writing about women or people who are are not Privileged because

These are people who don't really have access to the myth. You know, you don't you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don't have shoes. That's something that I have heard people say. And I think people who are really under aware of how they they have to rely on other people are very interesting to me and those are the kinds of heroes that interest me. Yeah. Well truly congratulations on all of your books, but Demon Copperhead, I loved it so much. I read it twice.

The blitzer, all of the awards for it. So well deserved. Thank you. We always like to wrap up these conversations with a little bit of a speed round. So are you ready? I hope so. Okay, now I know you strike me as a writer that is never going to be able to pick a favorite. So the question is, which book of your own had the greatest impact on you during writing? Demon Powerhead.

Okay. That's good. I that I think that's a good answer. Who who are your favorite writers? Let's pick can we pick three? Let's pick three. Oh man, do you see these books behind me? That's it's so hard. It's so hard. Just three among your favorites. Three among three among your favorites. Marilyn Robinson. Love her. She was my professor at Iowa. No way. Yes. What to you? As soon as this is over, I will yeah. It's so it I feel guilt I feel disloyal picking favorites.

No, I can't. I can't. Okay, just Marilyn. That's fine. She'll be happy. She'll be happy to see. Okay, if you could invite three of your characters from your books to dinner, who would they be? Okay, that's easier. I want Rachel Price from the Poison of the Bible and Eddie Bondo. 'Cause I think the two of them could have something to say to each other. And Aunt June.

From Demon Copperhead because she would keep them from getting out of hand. That's an amazing dinner party, right? Yeah, absolutely. Barbara, do you have any pop culture guilty pleasures? I love country music. Excellent. And that might be unexpected, but I do. I love country music because So often it tells stories. It does. It's narrative. It's a narrative form and it's a it tends to be about people's lives. Do you have a favorite country music artist? Well, I love the chick.

I l again, I'm gonna feel disloyal if I get it. The final question, and you said that you're about sixty pages in, and I know sometimes a writer gets a little superstitious to share, but can you share anything with what you're working on next? Besides that it's stupid, is it stupid? Besides that it's stupid. Actually it's substantially set less stupid this week than it was last week. So I feel like I feel like we're making progress. Yeah, the protagonist is a musician.

Ooh. Yeah. And I it's I'm having a lot of fun because I was a musician at one point in my life. I actually got to college on a music scholarship. I played piano and I was trained as a classical pianist and I was in in conservatory for a couple of years before I jumped ship. because I was really it became clear to me I was not going to be able to make a living as a pianist.

You were part of the Rock Bottom Remainders too, which we had at the Nantucket Book Festival, uh w a collection of them, and I saw that in your bio too that you were part of that group. I loved that group. Yeah, and additionally classical piano, I've played in jazz ensembles. I've played in actually real music groups besides the rock bottom remainers who are fake.

Yeah, but yeah, music is a huge part of my life and I have never written about it. This is very exciting. Oh my gosh. Well we can't wait to whenever it is less stupid. And Barbara, thank you so much for today. This was such a delight.

Really and an honor. Thank you. And thank you both for everything you do. We love it. Thank you. Thank you, listeners. Hi book lovers, Ellen Hildebrand and Tim Ehrenberg. Here again. Just a few closing notes before you leave. We want to thank our wonderful premier sponsors, Nantucket Book Partners, the Nantucket Hotel, Book of the Month Club.

Cartolina and Triple Eight Distillery for their generous support in the making of this show. And we also want to thank our team behind the scenes, beginning with N Magazine. We want to thank our producer Emmy Duncan. Technical director Kit Noble and our editor Brian Murphy. We hope you'll keep tuning in for more conversations with our stellar lineup of special guests all season long. And if you're just finding us now, don't forget to go to the video.

And listen to the fabulous episodes from season one. Yes, and please subscribe on Apple Play. Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And feel free to leave us your feedback there or on Instagram at Books Beach and Beyond. See you next time and happy reading.