The Bean Trees
by Barbara Kingsolver

List Price: $13.00
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060915544
Publisher: HarperCollins

Q: I've read that you begin every book you write with a clear idea of what you want to say.

BK: I do, you're right. The trick is finding a voice that will tell exactly the story I want to tell. When I begin a novel, I have a theme, I construct a plot, I work out a chapter outline, and then I begin to write. That's when the trouble starts. I have to write pages and pages and pages before I find the voice. I have to crash through the woods blindly until I find it, and it's very frustrating. When I'm beginning to do the actual writing of the novel I may write 200 pages that I throw away daily, by tens and twelves, at the end of every long, hard writing day. That process used to be stultifying and completely disheartening. At the beginning of each new book I'd think, well now I've lost it -- I'm never going to be able to write anything ever again. And then one day it starts to come, the voice is there, it's talking and it's working. Finally I begin to believe I will be able to do this again.
Q: Are some voices more difficult to find than others?

BK: Some come easily, and some I have to really reach for. Voice and points of view are tied closely together in my mind, which is why I'm probably most comfortable in the first person. That's what comes naturally to me. When stories are flowing in my mind, they occur to me as if someone were telling them. I think that has to do with where I grew up, hearing the imagery and power of rural speech; allowing the value of that to flower on the page is important to me. But critics say the first person is immature, so of course I'm always struggling to grow up and be mature. I was determined to do it in Animal Dreams, and so I wrote a whole draft of Animal Dreams in the "mature" third person. But it wasn't compelling -- it was cold. So I went back and started over. I kept the third person for the chapters told by Doctor Homer, because he's a little bit removed from himself anyway. But I put the Codi chapters back into the first person where they belonged. "Okay, well, heck," I told the invisible critics that are always lurking around my desk. "I'm still not mature, but that's how the story has to be." With Pigs in Heaven I knew, because of that question I had set up, I had to do it in the third person. There was no way around it. So I felt a little proud of myself, because I managed to do it as best I could.


Q: So that was one of the things you did in Pigs in Heaven that you felt you hadn't done before -- that made you feel you were moving beyond what you'd already done.

BK: Yes, that's right. And not just the third person, but from the omniscient point of view, which is very seldom done in contemporary fiction. I ransacked my bookshelves looking for role models among living authors, but they just aren't there. You pretty much have to go back to Tolstoy.
Q: It seems that Annawake Fourkiller's perspective might be difficult to make appealing to most people. Was there a moment when you discovered a way to make her claims sympathetic? You know, you start with Taylor, and everybody's on her side, and they already know her from The Bean Trees.

BK: Even if they don't already know her, they're going to be on her side. I should state for the record that I didn't write the novel as a sequel, and don't think of it that way. I used those characters because once I got into this question of individualism and communal identity -- which is not just a thematic question, but also a very real and delicate political one--I realized I had already set up a situation in an earlier novel and hadn't even touched on the political ramifications of taking a Cherokee baby away from her tribe. So I felt an obligation to pick up those characters and address that part of the story.

But I wrote Pigs in Heaven as an entirely new book. I felt from the beginning that Annawake was just as important as Taylor, and just as right. But I knew that 98.5 percent of my readers would feel a strong and instantaneous sympathy with Taylor, because that's our culture. My task was to somehow bring my readers around to an equal sympathy with Annawake, or not with Annawake, with the values she represented. That was very, very hard to do. I revised the character of Annawake about seventeen times. Most of the changes that happened through the many different drafts happened to Annawake.
Q: It seems you used Cash also, to create sympathy for that view.

BK: Yes. He was a later invention...he didn't even appear in the first several drafts. He actually arrived out of a conversation I had with a woman in Alaska, an attorney, whose entire practice revolves around the Indian Child Welfare act. She pointed out to me a pretty serious flaw in the story I had concocted, which was that no child would simply vanish from a tribe without leaving a hole. There would be someone who needed her back. And I realized with a shock that there was this huge element I'd overlooked, so I invented the character of Cash. I was mad at myself, really annoyed, because this deadline was looming and I was forced to trash about half the book, right then and there. But I was so relieved that I'd found this vital piece of information, because it eventually made everything fall together in that magical way that lets you know, whatever it was, it was right.
Q: It seems that the character of Cash is about integrating the needs of the individual and the collective.

BK: Yes. This is a cultural issue for people in the U.S., maybe more than anywhere else in the world. The way we construct ideas about self and family are very much at odds with the rest of the world. We're a nation of immigrants who kept on emigrating, leaving family and home. The ideals and mythologies that hold us together as a nation are mainly about glorifying the individual, glorifying independence to such an extreme that it seems we actually assign positive value to leaving behind our family and geographic context. And the way we define family is very narrow...you have this tiny little nuclear family which you think is complete. If you look anyplace else in the world that's simply not the case. It's an aberration, but we think of it as the norm.
Q: This is related to the theme of memory that appears throughout your work. You have a great line in one of your stories,"Extinctions," in which a husband says to his wife, "it's never too late to get mad." But first she has to recover memories of what's happened to her.

BK: One of the things I wanted to explore in Animal Dreams, in particular, was memory and amnesia. That's what allows us to separate ourselves from other people's pain. We read today's awful news, and then instantly let ourselves forget it. I wanted to dedicate that novel to Ben Linder, a kid from Portland, Oregon, who lived as a political and humanitarian activist, and died at the hands of the Contra army, in Nicaragua, from a bullet supplied by your tax dollars and mine. It makes me incredibly sad--more than sad--angry, that Ben's own nation has mostly forgotten him. I want people to remember him. I wanted to explore that theme of forgetfulness at a personal level and at the level of a nation.
Q: Do you think it's particularly difficult these days to write the kinds of politically engaged novels that you do?

BK: Well, maybe in the United States, because we have this particular fear of mixing politics with arts in this country. But look at what people are doing in the rest of the world: the great writers everywhere consider issues of social justice to be absolutely the most fundamental domain of art.
Q: Not only do we separate politics from art, we also separate science from art.

BK: That's for sure.
Q: And you certainly don't.

BK: Well, I can't. The natural world provides me with my philosophy and religion. My training is in evolutionary biology, and that's ultimately how I understand the workings of the world. My interest and passion in life science comes from having grown up among farmers, and also from parents who were deeply interested in natural history. They always told me the names of wildflowers and birds. I grew up in the milieu of creating education, entertainment, and pets out of snakes and turtles and every kind of thing we could find.

Sometimes I think I have a slight advantage over many other writers, because my background is so different from the average writer's. While they were reading Shakespeare, I was dissecting planaria, or learning plant taxonomy, or unraveling plant-insect co-evolution -- all these wonderful mysteries. I have at my disposal all these images that might seem stunning and fresh, like something new in literature, but actually they're just the everyday mysteries of life on earth. I bring that world into my writing, because that's who I am.
Q: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

BK: I don't know if I'm in a position to give advice to writers. I'm only just trying to figure out how to do it myself. As I said, I didn't go to school to learn to write...I feel I learned, or am learning, from literature. I read a lot of great fiction, both to satisfy myself and to learn. I go explicitly to certain books on my shelf to help find my way through difficult problems of writing. When I'm in a scene and stuck and can't get out of it I'll remember, oh there's something like this in Mrs. Dalloway, and I'll go see how Virginia Woolf did it.

In terms of formal education, my only advice would be to learn as much as you can. Learn about other trades besides writing, other information about the world besides crafting words, because when you write a novel it's full of people who will be, almost without exception, not writers. They will all have jobs, and they will all know things. And you, the author, will have to know everything they know and more. So major in biology by all means, or history, or anything.
Q: And what would you tell readers?

BK: There's a particular kind of quesition I'm often asked by students. They want to know, what does this symbol mean? What does water stand for? Was the railroad a metaphor of Codi's journey? What was the point of the bird in the kitchen? And I always ask, well, what do you think? And they squirm in their seats and say, well, I sort of thought it meant...this, or that. They have something clearly in mind. And I tell them, you'r exactly right. And then they think I'm being evasive because that question was going to be on the test. But the truth is they are right, as far as I'm concerned. I have things in mind when I create symbols and metaphors. But my hope is that every reader will bring his or her own life of experience to this novel, and will take away whatever it is that works, that seems personal and valuable. That's going to be different for every reader. I can't bear the idea that every symbol I've created could be only one thing. That would be static and impersonal. I want it to mean whatever it means to you.


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© Copyright 2009 by Barbara Kingsolver. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.

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