Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at.
— Barbara Kingsolver
I don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.
Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it's a lot of effort!
Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It's practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.
It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control.
I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.
I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.
I was trained in classical piano, but 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 the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career - my anti-job - that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.
You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.
As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.
Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just do it.
My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.
At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.
I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.
Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.
It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.
I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.
To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!
It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.
Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
Most of my books have been about the complex ways an individual depends on community.
I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.
When people are frightened about going hungry and paying their mortgages, a scarcity model begins to prevail; they fear someone else will get their piece of the pie.
The first sentence of a book is a promise.
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
For me, writing time has always been precious, something I wait for and am eager for and make the best use of. That's probably why I get up so early and have writing time in the quiet dawn hours, when no one needs me.
Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I never get over being thankful for that - for the courage of my readers.
I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.
I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
