Pulitzer on the Road Podcast: Episode 6: Meeting Barbara Kingsolver in Appalachia: Transcript

Recorded in Virginia.

Barbara Kingsolver: One of the things that I really love about social media is BookTok. I love seeing on Instagram these book accounts where young people are posting their books that they've read. They're just like celebrating books. And I also love what people say. And it's amusing to hear very young readers say they love Demon Copperhead, but this Barbara Kingsolver, have you seen her, she's old!  Like, how does she know what it's like to be a teenager? Well, I was one. And I remember it so well. And the great advantage of being an older writer is that with every decade, you have been more people, not just that you've known more people, you've been more different kinds of people with different levels of worldliness, or fear or security, or all of those things. So you just have a deeper well to draw on.

Nicole Carroll: This is Barbara Kingsolver, one of the country's most celebrated and read authors talking about reaction to her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Demon Copperhead. The story is told from the perspective of a boy born to a single mom in a single-wide trailer in Appalachia. The work calls on Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, and that author's own story of growing up in institutional poverty. In Copperhead, Demon lays out the journey before him on page two: "If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they're slapping the kid she shunted out, telling him to look alive, likely the bastard is doomed."  Barbara grew up in Appalachia in rural east-central Kentucky. She still calls the region home. We're meeting the author on her southern Virginia farm, 250 acres of tree-packed hills and grassy hollows. She's being interviewed by Pulitzer board member Emily Ramshaw, CEO of the nonprofit news site The 19th. We're standing with Barbara outside her early 1900s farmhouse, her border collie, Hugo, trotting back and forth between us cautiously accepting pets and ear scratches.

Emily Ramshaw: So I have a bunch of questions we want to get through, but we also just want to hear from you and about this place, and maybe we could just sort of tromp around a bit if that's okay with you. We'll just follow you. Can you tell us your story?

Barbara Kingsolver: How long of a walk do you want to take?

Nicole Carroll: Welcome to Pulitzer on the Road, bringing you closer to Pulitzer-winning work through discussions between Pulitzer judges and winners. I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll, a Pulitzer board member and Professor of Practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Each spring the board meets in Pulitzer Hall at Columbia University in New York to choose the winners. The discussion is rich and insightful. This podcast is designed to bring a similarly thought-provoking experience to you. We'll join Emily and Barbara on their hike up a tree-lined gravel road, turn back down a mossy path that leads to Barbara's garden, and eventually, gratefully, end up on her covered front porch. Hugo stays with Barbara, occasionally darting into the trees before emerging, tail wagging, a few yards ahead.

Emily Ramshaw: You started thinking you wanted to be a biologist, right?

Barbara Kingsolver: I don't know if I started thinking I wanted to be anything. I wasn't around people who necessarily encouraged me to have big dreams. In high school, I realized I wanted to go to college. That was my big dream. Because almost nobody I knew did that. They weren't preparing us for the future. I got to college. It was remarkable. To get out of the small town where I had been and meet other people who liked to read. I love to read but I had to sort of hide it in school. It was embarrassing to be smart. I hate to start with that because there's so many things I love about Appalachia and so many good reasons to be here. But the culture of education traditionally here has been suppressed, which is common enough for a population that's been controlled by, you know, outside industry that really wants to keep a good labor pool. You know, I mean, the coal companies did that to us. Yeah. But I didn't know at the time, I just knew it was embarrassing to love books. You didn't put yourself ahead of other people, or suggest that you could rise,  sort of rise above your community.

Emily Ramshaw: So when did it change? When did you even have the sort of idea that you could break out as a novelist as a writer?

Barbara Kingsolver: After I had written and sold my first novel, that's way down the line. I mean, definitely, I didn't grow up saying I want to be a writer. I read all the time. I love just going into a novel and being in another world and escaping and seeing through all these windows. It didn't dawn on me that I could do that. But I did love to write. I got one of those little five-year diaries for my eighth birthday. And I filled it up in a year. I wrote in it every day and never stopped after that, the habit of writing every day.

Emily Ramshaw: Do you remember what you were writing about?

Barbara Kingsolver: Oh the most boring things. I mean, I still have that little diary. I sort of branched out from every day sort of writing down  my experiences to writing poetry and writing short stories, which were terrible. I just did it. Because writing was the way I processed my experience. But I just did this all in private, I never told anybody was doing it. When I was in high school, the Soil and Water Conservation District always had an essay contest where we wrote about what soil conservation means to me. I would write like 25 pages every time and I always won. My poor teachers, any assignment they would give, you know, like write a five-page paper, I would give them 15.

Emily Ramshaw: I feel for your editor, too.

Barbara Kingsolver: I never, ever imagined I could be a writer. You know, capital W profession. I just didn't know anybody who did that. But those people were, you know, old dead guys from somewhere else. So yeah, I got to college and thought I need to be something, I need to study something that will be practical and allow me to make a living. And I loved biology. But honestly, I loved everything. Everytime I took a class, I was like, wow, anthropology is amazing. Psychology is amazing. East Asian civilization is amazing. I wanted to major in everything.

Emily Ramshaw: In a way you have with all the books.

Barbara Kingsolver: That's exactly right. I eventually found a way to major in everything.

Emily Ramshaw: When was the moment you thought, I could try to make a go at this as a professional writer.

Barbara Kingsolver: I’d finished undergrad and graduate degrees in biology. And I had actually got a job as a science writer for the University of Arizona. I was still writing poetry and stories. I made friends with people who were writing poetry and who were doing these public readings. And they invited me to participate. And I did and the response was really positive. So I secretly entered a short story contest. And I won. I sent a short story to the Virginia Quarterly Review and they published it. It was like writing was happening to me, not against my will, maybe against my confidence.

Barbara Kingsolver: I moved from science writing into journalism. I was a stringer for a couple of national publications. And I was covering this mine strike that was happening in the 80s. The men had to go elsewhere to find some kind of work. And so the women were holding the picket lines and the National Guard would come out. They had all these black helmets and flak jackets and automatic weapons and they threw tear gas at us. And it was so shocking to me that this was not getting covered, you know, in the mainstream media. So I just kept coming back week after week, tear gas notwithstanding, thinking somebody has to cover the story. And then these women started referring to as me as, "that gal that's writing a book about us."  So I thought, oh crap, I have to do that now. So I wrote a book about them. 

And someone told me you have to have an agent. So I went to the library and pulled down this big, thick book called Writer's Marketplace. And it listed all the literary agents that there were in the US, and I found this one who said, "I don't represent any work that is sexist, racist, ageist, homophobic, or gratuitously violent. I realize this cuts me out of most of what's written, but I am proud of all my authors." I thought, well, if there's a literary agent for me, this is the one. So I sent her my proposal and she spent a year trying to place it and didn't. Everyone said, "Well, the writing is really good, but we just don't see a market for this."  So after a year, she told me, you know, "I'm sorry, I really tried." And I wrote her a thank-you note, which she thought was amazing. She framed it. She said, "No client ever wrote me a thank-you note for not placing her book." And I said, "But you worked really hard on that. And that's how I was raised. You thank people."

Emily Ramshaw: Mama taught you right.

Barbara Kingsolver: Yeah. And I said, "Oh, by the way, you probably don't want to hear this. But I have this other book that I've been writing, this novel. And I know you don't want to see it, and I'm sorry. And it's okay." She said, "Yeah, I want to see it." I had written it while I was pregnant with my first daughter, Camille. I couldn't sleep at night and it was extra time. Nobody gives you time to write your first novel. But those were my extra hours. I finished it up and just you know, in that fit of cleaning you have right before you have your baby, sent it off.  And when I came home from the hospital the next day, she had sold it already.

Emily Ramshaw: Oh my gosh, just like that.

Barbara Kingsolver: That's when I knew I was a writer.

Nicole Carroll: We're back on Barbara's wood-planked porch. Stone pillars hold up its roof. Stone arches frame views of the chickens and sheep with rows of pansies lining each base. Barbara's farmhouse started as a Sears kit home, from back in the day when you could order the plans and most of the materials you needed for a house from a catalog. The original family's 11 children added on the porch. Their dad would come home each week with a trunk full of river rock and put the kids to work. Barbara says you can pick out the parts built by a five-year-old versus those of a competent teenager. She and Emily settle into wood rocking chairs. Fresh coffee is poured. They launch into Demon's journey, a story of the opioid crisis, foster care and child labor, but also humor, passion and love.

Emily Ramshaw: How much in a book like Demon comes from your personal experience and trove of memories, versus having to be out you know, physically experiencing something?

Barbara Kingsolver: Well, it's always a combination. I can't write a book set in a place that I don't know intimately. I have to know what it smells like, what birds are singing, what it's like through all seasons, what the air tastes like. So I tend to set books in places that I live or have lived.

Emily Ramshaw: The scenes are so vivid, they're so visceral. I mean, I think about like for Devil's Bathtub, did you literally have to tromp up the hill to get there?

Barbara Kingsolver: Oh, yeah. I had to go there. I had to see it.

Emily Ramshaw: What about like the pill mills or being in the, you know, strip mall parking lot?  How did you learn all this?

Barbara Kingsolver: I spent hours sitting with people in active addiction who are in recovery, mostly in recovery. I have a good friend who is a physician. He was like the original whistleblower on Oxycontin. He did me the kindness of sending an email to all of his patients, explaining that there was someone who wanted to know their experience, was not going to write about them personally, but just wanted to understand their experience to write about it. And people came forward and I was surprised by how deeply some people wanted and needed to tell their stories, even the most humiliating, desperate, awful things they wanted to talk about because I think not too many people wanted to hear it, or had listened.

Emily Ramshaw: To me it's even more powerful than journalism in some ways, because I can tell you've done the work and done the research. And we're so invested in these characters. I think about a scene of like, you know, Demon basically like wrapped in bedsheets and soaked in sweat and worse. I mean, it's so powerful.

Barbara Kingsolver: Yeah, well, thank you. Well, that's what I do, what I do instead of what you do, to be honest. I mean because I did that, I did journalism for a little while. And it's very valuable. And it was good for me. I'm an acutely introverted person and when you're journalist you just have to get up and make those cold calls. And it's so important that we read the stories we see and hear the stories from all over the world. But the human animal is designed to accept information emotionally, not cerebrally. We really believe something when we receive it directly from another human, not just any human, but another human that we trust. And while, you know, the right radio stations, or the right newspaper is an acceptable substitute, but it is a substitute, it is not direct learning. And so fiction goes a step further, you're not just learning from this imaginary person who has been constructed, you actually become that person. That's just magical.

Emily Ramshaw: I’m so curious how you found Demon's voice. How do you know him so well? Is that a real voice?

Barbara Kingsolver: Well, yeah, he's real, I mean, in my brain, I never base characters on real people. Because my job is harder than that. The characters in my novels have to serve my plot, for example. And you know, so I have to construct a very specific life history and psyche in order to do the all the things that they have to do. But that voice came more naturally to me than most people imagine. His diction is completely familiar to me. I mean, that's the way people talk here. Just the little, you know, the idiomatic turns of phrase, where you would use "when," like, "when" I went to the store this morning, people here say, "whenever" I went. It was important to me in this book to give readers the sound of our talk, of Appalachian speech, without condescending, which so often happens. I can't stand that, because the way we talk isn't wrong. It's our language and it needs to be respected.

Nicole Carroll: Bees nest in the holes of the stone pillars. They've come out because of new scents, or curiosity, and are buzzing around Emily and Barbara. The microphones are picking up the sound. So we move the chairs to the other side of the porch, refresh the coffee and talk turns back to Demon. Barbara describes him as Melungeon, writing, "One of mom's bad choices, which she learned to call them in rehab, and trust me there were many, was a guy called copperhead. Supposedly, he had the dark skin and light green eyes of a Melungeon and red hair that made you look twice. I doubt anyone was surprised to see me grow up with these eyes, this hair."

Emily Ramshaw: I confess I had never heard of Melungeon before. Am I even pronouncing it right?

Barbara Kingsolver: Yeah, that's no big confession. Nobody's heard of Melungeons outside of this area. Lee County, Virginia, is actually the epicenter of Melungeons.

Emily Ramshaw: So why did you make the choice you did?

Emily Ramshaw: You hear so much dialogue these days about sort of who gets to tell whose stories? And do you have to be a Black woman to tell the stories of Black women or an Indigenous person to tell the stories of Indigenous people? Where do you land on this as a storyteller?

Barbara Kingsolver: For Demon to be a Melungeon? It just occurred to me that way, the moment I realized that I was going to write my version of David Copperfield. This kid came into my head and he had red hair. He would be named Copperhead, or nicknamed Copperhead, because of his penny-colored hair. And I just saw him as a Melungeon. There's not really exactly one way to be a Melungeon, but it comes from a time really, close to 200 years ago, when people in these mountains were Cherokee, African American, probably Scots-Irish, and Portuguese. And so the way Demon puts it is everybody was poor, and so they didn't look down on each other. They just all got together and had a good time and had their mixed-up babies. So I've never read this, but I feel sure that the word "Melungeon" comes from "melagne," French for mixed.  And I am sure that initially it was applied as a pejorative for these mixed-race kids. And they just owned it. They said, okay, well, we're Melungeon. Because when we go down to the courthouse to register our property, if we said we were Black, we would not be able to own property or vote. I like the idea of centering this character in that racial identity. One of many things people might learn about Appalachia is that we are not all white, that we are not a monoculture.

Obviously I understand the importance of authentic representation. That's really, really important to me. And as a person who grew up reading men's versions of women, I understand how important it is for people to represent their own experience and not be subordinated or dominated by an outsider's view. And also, you know, the practical concerns of if men are getting all the chances to tell stories, authentic women's stories won't be told. So it's important to give everybody room to tell their story. However, if you take that to its end, we're all writing autobiography. And that would be so boring. I love writing about the friction in the places where cultures mix, where different points of view collide. So who is, who is ethnically allowed to tell those stories? It would be very limiting if you could only ever represent a single ethnicity, your point of view or cultural experience. I think that, you know, significant research can get you a long way. 

However, the line I've drawn for myself, and it's just for me, every writer does this differently, for me, I will only represent from the inside the character that I know by heart. So, for example, when I wrote The Poisonwood Bible, a story about profound cultural difference, and the problems when one culture marches in to try to educate a completely different one, with inappropriate technology and inappropriate religion and everything else, you know that the whole point of that book is cultural difference, the difference between this white family from Georgia and these African villagers. Well, I could write about African villagers from the outside, because I've lived in Africa. And I went back and did a lot of research. So I can describe with reliable detail the way Congolese villagers look and act and what they cook for dinner, where they get their food, what they love, what they argue about. I can tell you all those things because I've recorded it with the, you know, the video camera of my mind, I can represent those characters from the outside. But I had to tell that story from the point of view of the white southern family, because I could never completely trust myself to represent an African villager's life from the inside. 

Did I have the right to tell the story from the inside of a boy's head? Well, I guess maybe that's the advantage of being in my 60s. I didn't worry about that. And I also know by now that teenage girls and teenage boys are more alike than different. All of those ways that boys are driven, girls are too.

Nicole Carroll: Emily and Barbara continue to compare notes on the advantages of being an older woman. Emily says every year after 40 is a marked upgrade. Barbara agrees saying you leave behind the people pleasing because you understand it's not going to work no matter how hard you try. Even as a girl, Barbara planned to be a strong woman.

Emily Ramshaw: I wanted to go full circle on the financial independence piece. And you talked about that and early in your career that being a big priority for you, particularly as a woman coming out of this community.

Barbara Kingsolver: Earlier when I said I didn't have big dreams growing up, I had one and that was to be financially independent. From a really early age, almost all the women I knew were unhappy. And they almost all were financially dependent on men. And those things were not disconnected. They didn't have power in their relationships or in the world. And it seems so weird to say that now, but when I was a kid, I couldn't really imagine what a woman could do. She could be a stewardess. It was men who flew the planes and women who served the drinks. I remember thinking about it when I was eight or nine and thinking, well, I didn't, you know, I didn't have body dysmorphia or anything, but I sure as heck wished I would grow up to be a man. It just seemed like a much better deal. So my big dream was to live the way men lived, which was to have control over my life and financial independence. I didn't think I ever wanted to be married, because I thought that it just looked like such a bad deal. I didn't have any other models.

Emily Ramshaw: Seems like it's worked out okay for you.

Barbara Kingsolver: It has, I'm very happy. For the record, I'm very happy to be married. But I was financially independent first. And I never had to submit to someone else's rules because they owned the house. I didn't change my name when I married. I didn't want to become Mrs. Somebody. And I think it's because I grew up seeing so many unhappy Mrs. Somebodies. In the summer between my junior and senior high school years, I worked at the little newspaper, the Carlyle Mercury. I was writing articles. I was editing articles. And I noticed anytime we wrote about a woman, she was Mrs. John Smith, she didn't even get her first name. And even if the entire article was about her, and she did something I don't know, like, moderately amazing, however moderately amazing you could do things as a woman in Carlisle, Kentucky, your first name never appeared. You were Mrs. John Smith. And I was, what, 16 at the time? And I thought, well, that's ridiculous. This is Mary Smith who did this. John wasn't even on the scene. So I started changing that. And nobody noticed.

Emily Ramshaw: Little acts of rebellion.

Barbara Kingsolver: If you think about it, it was sort of a major act of rebellion. I thought, well, one of two things is happening here. Either the world can be changed more successfully and more easily than I ever imagined, or you can change the world and nobody's gonna notice. Maybe a little of both.

Emily Ramshaw: Do both. Where did Demon Copperhead come from? I mean, how long have you been waiting to write it. To me, this is like the great Appalachian novel.

Barbara Kingsolver: Thank you. I've been waiting a long time to write a novel about Appalachia. In a way maybe my whole life I've been wanting to do that. Because I didn't know when I was growing up in Kentucky that it was a reviled place or a place that was disrespected by the rest of the world. I didn't know that till I went away to college. I was shocked that my accent, my Kentucky accent, my just Kentucky origins,  just knowing that I was from Kentucky, made people laugh, and think that it was okay to laugh. Professors corrected my pronunciation, not my grammar, which was perfect, my pronunciation of words that I had grown up pronouncing. "Har," we'd say, "Over thar." Just this constant correction. I spent the early years of my adulthood covering, changing. I mean, I have a good ear, just listening to vowels and copying other people's speech kind of aiming for this, this neutral effect where nobody would know where I was from. And it was just a bunch of crap. It was terrible. I swallowed my own voice.

Somebody put into my hands Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason. That was a book that changed my life. She's Kentuckian and all of the people in her book are from Kentucky, specifically from Kentucky, living the lives I knew. They were, you know, cashiers at Kmart and they were housewives. They were long-haul truckers. They weren't from some other place and this was literature. It was respected. The scales fell from my eyes that someone like me, from the place where I was from, could be respected.

So it took me this many decades to get ready for Demon. Even after I decided that, I spent two years blocked because this voice in my head said, but nobody wants to read that. It's still every day. Like, I just did this European book tour. And the very first interview I did was live radio. And the first question the guy asked was, "Why did you decide to write about degenerate people?" And it's live radio and people like this host, so I couldn't just say, "Well, you're an impossible bigot, aren't you?" 

So yeah, I spent two years looking for my way in. And found it in the most surprising way in Charles Dickens' house. I had a weekend to kill after a UK book tour, and saw online that you could spend the night, it was an inn, it was Bleak House where Charles Dickens had lived. What I found in that house, specifically in the little study at the end of the hall, which was still full of Dickens' stuff, was just the spirit, this profound, angry spirit of Charles Dickens. I was also really tired. I just sat in that room thinking about this man who made a whole career out of his outrage at the way these children, these, these products of institutional poverty, were thrown away by his society. And I just felt like he was talking to me. He said, "You think you can't write about orphans and poverty?" He said, "Let the child tell the story." I just had that experience of him giving me permission, and taking it and deciding to, to just really kind of translate David Copperfield into my own place and time.

When I made the decision, I didn't know at all if it would work, it had been more than 10 years since I read David Copperfield. So I downloaded David Copperfield on my tablet, and read it on the flight home. And, as I read it, chapter by chapter, I thought, holy cow, this is gonna work. So when I got home, I, I opened a spreadsheet with 66 cells for the chapters in David Copperfield. And in each cell, I wrote a really short sketch of what happened in that chapter. And then I started filling in the cells underneath with what would happen in my version, and figuring out so it was like solving 66 puzzles. What is the modern Appalachian version of a bootblack factory? Well, that would be the sorting garbage behind the Circle K, which is also a meth lab. You're just like, bit by bit, what would be this school, this boarding school for boys, whose parents have little means?  Well, that would be Creaky farm, that would be a foster-care home run by this man who's really just using these boys for free labor on this farm. And I didn't do it all in order. Sometimes I would, you know, have an idea of what would happen in chapter 50 or chapter 14. But I filled in the outlines of the plot and saw I could do this, but I needed that propulsive voice of Demon to carry you through. For three years, I wrote with David Copperfield open at my elbow, really studying the tricks of this great, great writer. He was the limited series writer of his day, he wrote in these little chapters, where a lot of things happen, and you, you think you know what's gonna happen, and then it turns, and it surprises you. And it was really fun to take that novel apart and see, you know, the puppeteer behind all of these puppets.

Emily Ramshaw: What is writing and rewriting like for you? I mean, were there like major substantive changes you had to make along the way?

Barbara Kingsolver: I never get anything right the first time. That's one of many great things about being a novelist rather than an athlete is nobody sees your mistakes. I write so much bad stuff, but I have the sense to throw it away. A lot of things about Demon did happen, right or, or rightish, the first time. That voice, I just kind of had that when I had 19 or 20 pages. Steven, my husband, is always my first reader. And we were sitting right there, in actually in these rocking chairs on the porch, as we do at the end of most days to debrief, and I said, "Here's what I wrote. What do you think?"  And he read it. And he said, "I love this kid." He's never said that before. So I thought, okay, good. I had something and I kept going with it. It's a safe rule to say, you should start every scene as close to the end as you can. And you should start a novel as close to the end as you can. Because it tightens the story. It gives it more tension. But in this case, I couldn't do that. My plot was given to me, in essence, Dickens wrote my first draft.

Emily Ramshaw: For me, even, I had to put this book down a lot. Some of the scenes particularly around drug use, or around the, you know, domestic violence, are so tough. What is it like for you?

Barbara Kingsolver: Yeah, I had to put it down too, but never for long. Because once I'm in it. Many a day I ended feeling so sad because this is all real. I mean, I know it's fiction, of course. But it's made out of truths. Everything that happens to Demon has happened to somebody that I know. Or somebody who knows somebody I know. At the end of a lot of days, I felt desperately sad. And I would come downstairs to the kitchen, and Steven would see my face and say we need to go for a walk. And he would take my hand and we'd walk up that road that you and I just walked up and into the woods, where everything is going on as it does and as it should. And he would say, "You know what, our kids are okay. We're okay. And you're doing this for a reason." Every time I start a new book, I set out to do something that I've never done before. I always have a particular challenge in mind. That seems really scary. That terror keeps me coming back to my desk because that's how I know I'm working at the edge of my powers.

Emily Ramshaw: Can you tell us anything about your next book?

Barbara Kingsolver: It's a mess. It's an absolute disaster. It's probably not a book. I don't know. I don't know what it is. It's a mess. But it's about music. It's about a musician. And that's really exciting to me, because that was a huge part of my life for years and years, and I haven't ever gone back there.

Nicole Carroll: Barbara is one of America's best-known writers, but points out on several occasions that she and Steven are farmers. Most of what they eat comes from the land, tomatoes, beans, corn, squash, blueberries, apples and pears. She says they're a little behind on their potatoes, pointing to one little sprout. The chickens provide eggs. The sheep are shorn for wool, which Barbara knits into sweaters for the family. Some sheep are used for meat, sent to what Steven called freezer camp. The teenager who won the soil and water conservation essay contest, the woman with two biology degrees, knows how to coax what she needs from the land. When they have a bounty of produce, they'll share with the neighbors, who do the same in return. People take care of each other.

Emily Ramshaw: How has your background of community played out in your storytelling?

Barbara Kingsolver: That's the main thing I could tell you about Appalachia, is that we are people made of community. We know, we depend on each other. For better and for worse, everybody knows your business. You feel really attached to your family and your people. I mean, it explains a lot of the good things and harder things about Appalachia. Like why is it so hard to go away to college? Because your family knows you might not come back. And that's legitimate. You know, that's a legit concern, even though Americans are not supposed to think that way. We still do. So that's a lot of what I wanted to write about in Demon Copperhead. And you look at, you know... Like the notion that this is a story of degenerate people is overlooking those powerful ecosystems that hold people together.

Emily Ramshaw: Barbara, what's the history of this farm?

Barbara Kingsolver: The history of this farm is that in 1902 a man named Sanford Webb bought this hollow, bought this property, ran his cattle on it, ran like a half a dozen cattle for a year, watched where they bedded down at night, and built his house there. Because he figured the cattle knew the most sheltered place. And they were a really innovative family Sanford, wired this house for electricity when there was no electricity in this part of the world.

Emily Ramshaw: And why, so why did you make the choice to live out here? I mean, especially given the demands on your time and the people who need you to be in cities at book talks and traveling around the world.

Barbara Kingsolver: That's why I'm here. 

Emily Ramshaw: To recover?

Barbara Kingsolver: Well, I mean, no. This is real life for me. When a book comes out, I give, you know, a few weeks of my life, or, you know, at most, a few months of my life to travel, but then it's done and I get to be here. So I grew up on a farm, I grew up thinking, this is my everything. And that's never changed.

Nicole Carroll: Barbara's husband, Steven, first bought this property in the 1980s. He joins us as we walk down a slight slope from the house toward the animals. Brown, black and white chickens come forward as we near, watching from their fenced-in pen.

Barbara Kingsolver: It's your turn to talk.

Steven Hopp: Let's walk up here and see the Icelandic sheep.

Emily Ramshaw: They're Icelandic. Wow.

Steven Hopp: And part of the reason we like them is because unlike most other breeds, they were not bred for uniformity, they bred for variability. So there's different patterns, different colors and the genetics of those two are separate. So they combine you know. We try and keep a nice mix in a group and it's about, we have about 20 animals.

Emily Ramshaw: I see a donkey back there.

Steven Hopp: Sally is the donkey. She's the protector. Oh, horses evolved in open country. So if there's trouble, horses get away from it, they run. Donkeys evolved in rocky country. And so if there's trouble, they face it off.

Emily Ramshaw: It feels like an extraordinary amount of work.

Barbara Kingsolver: As a writer whose work takes place entirely inside the folds of my brain, I really welcome this other part of my life that gets me outside using my muscles. Rather than going to the gym or going to a yoga class, I spend a lot of time in forward fold pulling weeds, or lifting or carrying or delivering lambs. When that time comes, that's up to me. If there's a breach or tangled up twins or something, I have to handle that.

Emily Ramshaw: I wish we were here to witness that.

Barbara Kingsolver: You do or else you don't, like those moments when I say, "Oh man, I hope I see my wedding ring again."

Nicole Carroll: We're back on the porch. Hugo sleepily surveys the farm from the top of the porch stairs, mud on his paws and belly, sticks in his tail. Barbara and Emily sit in the porch swing, our visit is winding down.

Emily Ramshaw: This story feels so sort of this time. And I wonder how you think about the ways this book does or doesn't play into the politics of this moment?

Barbara Kingsolver: It is my best hope that this book can help move a conversation between these two really different Americans that aren't talking to each other. It's really scary to me that these divides, the divide between urban and rural, has become even more of a gulf in recent years. Because each side's behavior, each side's voting behavior, has kind of validated the presumptions of the other side. So I understand why my neighbors vote for Trump. I don't. But I absolutely understand why so many rural people who are tired of the condescension, tired of the dismissal, tired of being ignored, tired of a life where everything that the government is supposed to provide for us seems to be crumbling. Our hospitals are closing, our post offices are closing. We don't have enough doctors. We don't have schools or libraries that we need. People feel so overlooked, and worse than overlooked, feel the condescension and have felt it for so long, that they're very vulnerable to the first person to come along, who doesn't talk down to them. And it's very discouraging to me that the politicians that I get to vote for at the national level remain pretty tone deaf to rural concerns. So if this book I've written can help people understand what's wrong with the big middle that they've been calling flyover country, that is populated with real people with real concerns who have legitimate anger at the way this country is being run, if I can help explain that, and help create a conversation that begins from a place of respect, rather than from a place of contempt, I will have done something useful.

Emily Ramshaw: So tell me about when you found out you'd won the Pulitzer Prize. Do you remember where you were and what you were doing?

Barbara Kingsolver: Yeah, I do. Well, first of all, I wasn't expecting it. And I've never expected it. A person like me, a rural person, a woman, a person concerned with rural people and women and kind of ordinary lives is not not prize-magnet material. I've never cared about that. And I've also always, this is a very odd thing to be telling the Pulitzer committee...

Emily Ramshaw: It's alright, we can take it.

Barbara Kingsolver: I’ve always mildly felt disturbed by the notion that great novels can be ranked. Because it's just false. Every novel is, is a different, it's a different work of art for a different reader. And so I've just been writing away all these years without thinking about prizes. And I've been so lucky that my books have found an audience. It's big enough to be a working writer for a living. And I understand that prizes can really help people with that if they're not there, and that I really value. So in May, I was chopping onions. And every phone in the house blew up. It was dinnertime, I guess my cell phone was on the table, we have a landline, because there's no cell signal here. Stephen has a cell phone. But I went over to my phone. And there were like, a stack of like, I don't know, 16 messages that all came in at once. And the one on top said, "I'm crying my eyes out." And I said, "Oh God, Steven, somebody's dead." And then I picked up the landline, and it was my agent. And he said, "Barbara, I can't believe it." And I said, "What can't you believe?" I was still expecting really bad news. And he told me. I don't remember this. He says I swore like a sailor. I was just so surprised. It's just not, not on my agenda for that day. And then I found out pretty soon after that, that it was shared with another writer, with Trust. And I thought, well, that's perfect. If I was ever going to win this prize, given my beliefs that there is no one best book of the year, this is the right way to do it. And I was so happy. So then after that, I thought, well, okay, that happened. But I don't live in a literary world as you can see. I live among people who... sometimes I think that my neighbors probably don't know what I do for a living. They probably think I don't have a job because they don't see me going in and out to work. So I thought, well, that's okay, but nobody really knows. Well, guess what? Everybody knows. I mean, my mail carrier the next day says, "Yay!" Every single person I ran into in town at the grocery store, at the at the farmer's market, every single person knew about this prize. And you know what? It was like fireworks going up and down these mountains. No Appalachian novel has won this prize. And what people were saying about it is,  "We did it."

Nicole Carroll: So what makes a work worthy of a Pulitzer Prize? The jury called Kingsolver's novel, "A masterful recasting of David Copperfield, one that succeeds courageously."  In Kingsolver's tale of poverty, addiction, institutional failures and moral collapse, the judges said, "the one dependable constant is Demon's beguiling narration, which sketches his adventures with a rueful and unruly clarity."

Thank you for joining Pulitzer on the Road. To see this work and the work of all of our 2023 winners, please go to pulitzer.org. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends to listen in. Episodes have been edited for length and clarity. Pulitzer on the Road is a production of the Pulitzer Prize board at Columbia University in collaboration with the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. It is supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation. It is produced by Central Sound at Arizona PBS. Our producers are Anna Williams and Alex Kosiorek from Arizona PBS, and me. Our audio engineers are Robert Disner, Alex Kosiorek and Joe Miller. Editing, promotion and other support by Edward Kliment, Pamela Casey and Sean Murphy. Marjorie Miller is our executive producer. I've been your guide, Nicole Carroll.

To learn more, and to hear more episodes of the Pulitzer on the Road Podcast, visit the season homepage.