An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver on Community and Hope

Excerpt from a conversation with Stephen L. Fisher and Barbara Kingsolver.
(Recorded at Emory & Henry College Literary Festival, September 30, 2011. Published in the Iron Mountain Review, Volume XXVIII, Spring 2012.)

Stephen L. Fisher: Critic Priscilla Leder argues that two basic themes run throughout your impressive array of genres and settings: an appreciation, first, of the natural world, and second, of human diversity. I’m interested in your reaction to this observation and, if it is at least partially on the mark, in your commenting briefly on why that is the case.

Barbara Kingsolver: Certainly an appreciation for nature is an important feature of my work, and it arose in part because I grew up running wild in the woods with little adult supervision, studied biology as a college student, and then went to graduate school in biology. I am one of thousands of species that live in this place, and I don’t ever forget the other ones are there. Species diversity is a biological fact. I think a lot about the world out there beyond the artifice that human beings have created. As for human diversity, I’m very interested in the fact that everybody in this room has something different in mind right now. I’m not accusing you of not paying attention, but you’re each seeing the world in a different way and all of you are right. Well, a couple of you are not [laughter]. But seriously, as a novelist, one gets to create all kinds of minds and then put them together and look at their intersections, their interactions. Cultural differences are really exciting territory, not just for literature but for learning in general, because sparks fly when there’s friction among different viewpoints. People invest themselves differently in the same set of truths. Because of my training as a scientist, I’m always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves. So, yes, I’m very interested in human diversity.

Fisher: I’d like to focus now on what I consider to be two crucial themes in your work: community and hope. First, community. You’ve said that you always write about individualism vs. community, and that you see independence as stupidity and instead celebrate dependency. As you once put it, "the most remarkable feature of human culture is its capacity to reach beyond the self and encompass the collective good; yet, here in the United States we are blazing a bold downhill path from the high ground of 'human collective' toward the tight little den of 'self.'"  Would you elaborate on the importance of seeing ourselves as part of something larger and on the role of writing in helping people understand and move toward that vision?

Kingsolver: Well, I do apologize for the "bold downhill path" part. That didn’t sound very good, did it? We do have some strong traditions of community in the United States, but it’s interesting to me that our traditionally patriotic imagery in this country celebrates the individual, the solo flier, independence. We celebrate Independence Day; we don’t celebrate We Desperately Rely On Others Day. Oh, I guess that’s Mother’s Day [laughter]. It does strike me that our great American mythology tends to celebrate separate achievement and separateness, when in fact nobody does anything alone. Nobody in the auditorium is wearing clothing that you made yourself from sheep that you sheared and wool that you spun. It’s ridiculous to imagine that we don’t depend on others for the most ordinary parts of our existence, let alone the more traumatic parts when we need a surgeon or someone to put out the fire in our house. In everyday ways we are a part of a network. I guess it’s a biological way of seeing the world. And I don’t understand the suggestion that interdependence is a weakness. Animals don’t pretend to be independent from others of their kind—I mean no other animal but us. It seems like something we should get over [laughter].

Fisher: A key component of building community and leading a meaningful life is hope. Environmentalist John Nolt observes that "everyone needs a place of refuge, but hope withers if we do not carry it out from that place." You echo that notion in the quotation from Animal Dreams that you feature on your webpage—the passage in which Hallie writes to Codi: “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.” Hope, in my mind, is at the core of your political vision and runs throughout your writing. But to be hopeful is not an easy task in these mean-spirited times. In an interview with Elisabeth Beattie in the mid-1990s, you described yourself as, along with your dad, one of the most ridiculously optimistic people on the face of the earth. I’m wondering how your optimism is faring these days, and how you today live out Hallie’s charge: What is it your hope for, and what are the ways you live inside that hope?

Kingsolver: I would like to revise my earlier words: I think that my dad is still the most optimistic person I know. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between being optimistic and being hopeful. I would say that I’m a hopeful person, although not necessarily optimistic. Here’s how I would describe it. The pessimist would say, “It’s going to be a terrible winter; we’re all going to die.” The optimist would say, “Oh, it’ll be all right; I don’t think it’ll be that bad.” The hopeful person would say, “Maybe someone will still be alive in February, so I’m going to put some potatoes in the root cellar just in case.” And that’s where I lodge myself on this spectrum. Hope is a mode of survival. I think hope is a mode of resistance. Hope is how parents get through the most difficult parts of their kids’ teenaged years. Hope is how a cancer patient endures painful treatments. Hope is how people on a picket line keep showing up. If you look at hope that way, it’s not a state of mind but something we actually do with our hearts and our hands, to navigate ourselves through the difficult passages. I think that as a fiction writer—or any kind of writer—hope is a gift I can try to cultivate.