Barbara Kingsolver: ‘The first time I set foot in Ireland I felt so at home. Something about the language, the culture’

It feels appropriate to speak on a video call with Barbara and her daughter Lily Kingsolver about their new book. They spent much of their time plotting and writing Coyote’s Wild Home, an illustrated children’s book, over countless phone, and video calls. Lily lives in Florida, where she works as an environmental educator, while her mother is still in the family home in Appalachia. They made light of the distance and anyway, Lily retains a cartographer’s memory of the places she roamed as a child. On the day the illustrator arrived, Lily sent precise co-ordinates so they could capture the locations she had in mind for the images to go with the story.

This is Lily Kingsolver’s first book while her mother has long been considered American literary royalty. It’s clear that they are delighted by the collaboration, not just because it gave them a chance to explore twin passions of environment and literature but because it depicts what is sacred terrain to both: the untameable hinterland near the family home in Appalachia.

“I have so many memories of spending whole summers and I don’t remember where my parents were,” Lily says. “I presume they were around! But I don’t remember where. And I’d pretend to be an orphan, out in the woods. And I would bring back wild onions. And to my mum’s credit, she would say, okay let’s make wild onions for dinner.

“There’s a huge issue with interest in the outdoors and also with access. It is a privilege to be able to walk outside your door and into wild land. So, a lot of what we wanted to do with this book is to try and improve that access.”

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The premise of the book is simple: a grandpa showing his city-dwelling granddaughter around the local wilderness. The coyote in the story sees the pair as they explore, but they never see him. The idea was first suggested to Barbara Kingsolver by a publisher.

“I probably say yes to about one per cent of the things I am invited to do,” she laughs. “So, the fact that Gryphon Press invited me to do a book on coyotes for children is not the reason ... it appealed because it was about predators. I have written, actually, a whole novel before about ecological loss [Flight Behavior, 2012] that I was interested in explaining for a broader public. But the importance of predators in the system matters to me as a biologist and a person. So, if I was going to do a book for children, it would be about predators.”

[ Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver: An ode to Dickens, but with a contemporary edge ]

When Lily got wind of the suggestion, she encouraged her mother to commit to it.

“In my job, I can talk to 10, 20 kids at a time whereas a book allows you to talk to the world. I didn’t expect to be involved! But she invited me, and it was so much fun to make what we hope will be a good addition to the world, you know, as a biologically correct, accurate children’s book.”

The project has led to Lily’s upcoming visit to Ireland, where she will read at the Listowel Writers’ Week Festival and take part in a public conversation at the Seamus Heaney Homeplace in Ballaghy, Co Derry. The family are no strangers to Ireland: Barbara tried to include a visit after any tour of England where, she laughs, she gets to reclaim her ‘r’s.

“The first time I set foot in Ireland I felt so at home. Something about the language, the culture. I mean, we are Scots-Irish in Appalachia. Our whole culture has such strong connections in our music, our language. I go there after I am in England, where the ‘r’s disappear ... and we lean hard on our ‘r’s.”

The theme of their book is familiar to the Irish experience. It’s a story that grapples with the vital shift in the relationship between Americans and the wilderness. When Barbara Kingsolver recalls her own childhood, it was defined by a freedom to explore the outdoors with zero adult supervision. There has been a sweeping societal move across western society to ensure that all childhood recreation is scheduled and supervised.

“I feel like my best education as a kid was the stuff I discovered myself; that the creatures I caught and observed were like a guidebook. That process of self-discovery is something I feel parents have really taken from their children with the best of intentions ... but not with the best results.”

A realistic views of predators is so much of what I am trying to communicate to children. They don’t want to hurt you. Nothing wants to hurt you

—  Lily Kingsolver

One of the reasons both women wanted to highlight a predator in the story was to reposition all predatory animals from threat to a vital part of the ecosystem. We talk for a while about the aspect of fear associated with the North American wilderness, from the preponderance of killer-bear films to the occasional man-eaten-by-lion stories that tend to have a viral impact on the global news and gossip cycles.

“I have so many thoughts about this,” Lily says. “For every one story about a man eaten by a mountain lion, there are thousands of mountain lion encounters you never hear about and thousands more where people pass by and don’t know they are there. Because they are not messing with people unless they are really desperate or unless they don’t have a choice. If they are cornered in their ecosystem or if they don’t have food, of course they are going to become desperate, just like a person would.

“I’ve encountered bears and they do exactly what I do: they go, who, whoops! And they back up and I back up and we go, okay, see you later. We don’t want to mess with each other. And really the best way to be prepared for the wilderness is to be informed about these animals, and to know you should not walk towards a coyote if you see one. You should keep a distance. A realistic views of predators is so much of what I am trying to communicate to children. They don’t want to hurt you. Nothing wants to hurt you. They are just animals like we are, and they are meeting their names.

“I saw an alligator yesterday. I live in Florida. Every once in a while there’s a story about a person eaten by an alligator. And almost all the time – there are exceptions to this – but often it was because people made choices that put them in danger.”

Barbara confesses that she has several stories of frightening encounters with predators. “But I’m not going to share them,” she laughs, explaining that she doesn’t want to contribute to the fearmongering. Instead, she returns to an extraordinary hour spent with Lily in Denali National Park in Alaska, where they camped and hiked for a week. They were with a park ranger who noticed a grizzly and her cubs were trailing them. They switched track but still, the bear followed.

I think with good intentions, parents try to shield their kids from so much and are causing a kind of deficiency of understanding of how the world works

—  Barbara Kingsolver

“And she said, let’s just go up this trail to a kind of cliff. Let’s just sit here. And ... don’t open those tuna fish sandwiches. And the bear stopped below on a stream with mossy banks. And this was the day she was teaching her cubs how to roll up the moss like a rug and find these big fat beetles underneath. And when they paid attention, she was nice and when they would wander off, she would bat them with her paw. And because I think I was there with my cub, it was a moment where I had this understanding as a mother that mothers everywhere, of all species, are doing the same things. We are in this together.”

Part of her ambition for Coyote’s Wild Home lies in the hope that the generation of readers “learn how to be unsentimental about nature”. “Everything eats something,” she laughs.

In the southwestern Virginia home where the Kingsolvers raised their family, hunting and fishing are an inherent element of the local culture. What began as a necessity over a century ago hasn’t changed: neighbours will call with cuts of venison every autumn. Many environmentalists in the locality hunt and fish. Although Barbara Kingsolver has hiked and trekked in many regions and parks in the United States, she has never seen a wolf.

[ Barbara Kingsolver: ‘Every single family I know has been affected by the opioid crisis’ ]

“And again, I think with good intentions, parents try to shield their kids from so much and are causing a kind of deficiency of understanding of how the world works.”

Her most recent novel, Demon Copperhead, has been generally acclaimed as a masterpiece and won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. More so than any of her previous works, it is Kingsolver’s Appalachian novel: a wonderfully inventive retelling of David Copperfield transposed to 1990s Appalachia. The inspiration arrived at the conclusion of a book tour in England for Unsheltered when she saw an advertisement for Bleak House bed and breakfast in Kent and, on a whim, booked herself in there. And so, she found herself sitting, in the depths of November, at the very desk where Dickens had written David Copperfield in 1850.

“I just felt the presence of his outrage,” she said in a Guardian interview last year. “I felt him saying, ‘What do you mean, nobody wants to hear this?’ He said: ’Let the child tell the story.’ I thought, ‘well, I will. Thank you, Mr. Dickens,” explaining how she downloaded the classic to read on the flight home and upon returning immediately began making notes for a localised creation of Damon Fields, who is cast into a 1990s Virginia of meth labs, Marvel superheroes, terrible tobacco farms and slimy sports coaches and the ruinous opioid epidemic which has swept through the community.

Both Kingsolver women are fierce advocates for Appalachia, the vast mountainous region which runs from Pennsylvania through to Alabama, and Barbara is quick to agree that people who live in Appalachia have come to feel voiceless in how they are represented in the national conversation.

“Absolutely. We don’t see ourselves or our concerns or problems anywhere on television or in magazines. We only show up as a joke. And that really makes people mad. You know, we have television! We are seeing what they are saying about us – that we are backwards and stupid and bigoted and marry our cousins and all that. It is more prevalent than people realise. And it is important to us as writers to represent Appalachia and our authentic culture.”

The problem, she points out, can be sourced to the steady elimination of local, engaged, knowledgeable sources of media information.

“All of our local radio and television stations have pretty much folded, almost all of our local newspapers have folded. So, all of our entertainment, our information, our news is coming from cities made by city people. It is not their fault, but it is what they know and what they consider important.

“This has been happening continually since the 1970s in the US and because it is a big country and because the population is divided half in half, it has left half of us disenfranchised. And people don’t understand how invisible we feel. So, we welcomed writing this book because this was going to be a country grandpa showing his granddaughter from the city this place that means so much to him. It is going to be a blending of worlds here.”

When Lily moved to Florida, she felt that she was living in an urbanised area – the Kennedy Space Centre was nearby; there are restaurants and shops, traffic. Palm Bay was, she read, one of the most moved-to places in the US last year. Nonetheless, where she lives is considered rural.

I feel most optimistic when I am talking with people of Lily’s age about these problems because we need new thinking

—  Barbara Kingsolver

“But I guess it speaks to the fact that it is such a spectrum, and that true rural people are really disenfranchised and disconnected from places like LA and New York that are making the decisions. Florida is a very divided place with a lot of strong feelings on different sides and it [has] kind of helped me hone in on what I care about and what I can do to change things.”

There won’t be any quick fix, but Barbara Kingsolver is buoyed by the fact that her own children are quietly working to better the opportunities for coming generations. Camille, her other daughter, works nearby as a clinical health therapist for children.

“And I feel most optimistic when I am talking with people of Lily’s age about these problems because we need new thinking,” she says firmly. “We need tomorrow’s people to solve tomorrow’s problems and I feel so lucky to have millennial daughters who are doing valuable work in the world.

“I have to be optimistic because giving up hope is not an option. It is irresponsible.”

Coyote’s Wild Home is published by The Gryphon Press

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