Critically acclaimed author Barbara Kingsolver came to Duke last week to accept the Nicholas School of the Environment’s award for Lifetime Environmental Achievement in the Fine Arts. Kingsolver studied evolutionary biology and ecology at the collegiate and graduate level before pursuing a career in writing. After her acceptance speech, Kingsolver sat down with The Chronicle’s Julian Spector to talk about her approach to writing, the intersection of science and art and how farming contributes to her writer’s lifestyle.
The Chronicle: Do you see yourself more as a scientist who became writer or as writer who studied science on the way to literature?
Barbara Kingsolver: I think I’m a scientist who loves to write.... But, I think that I’ve always seen the world as a scientist. I’m very interested in natural order and cause and effect and figuring things out. And I write novels in a fairly scientific way I would say, because I work out structure; I work out the sort of bone structure of a story. I think about characters the way a psychologist would. In fact, sometimes I think of myself as an anti-therapist, because I invest characters with these motives and these things they have to do and then I work backwards to give them the right kind of damage so that they’ll behave the way they need to behave.
TC: When did you make the switch from focusing on biology to writing?
BK: I make my living as a novelist as a literary writer, and I have for 20 years. I really can’t say I ever made a switch because I’ve always written since I could hold a pencil. I’ve kept diaries kind of obsessively... going back to when I was eight years old. So I always thought writing was a very good way to capture and organize experience and then later I found that it was a very good way to communicate experience.... So I always wrote fiction and it was just a wonderful discovery along the way that I could actually let other people read it and make a living at it.
TC: In your speech you discussed five ecological principles that you deal with in your novel “Prodigal Summer.” So would you say you were writing with a moral?
BK: It’s not a moral. Science, as a matter of fact, is completely amoral if you think about it. I just wanted to write about these things that are. Natural selection isn’t a moral choice; it’s a fact, it’s an organizing principle and same with those other principles I talked about. And it just amazes me that so few people understand them. So I wanted to use them as setting and material the way other novelists might want to write about Hungary during World War II or something like that... that’s what I do with scientific material.
TC: The environment plays a fairly central role in many of your stories and in the development of your characters. Do you look at the environment as a character in its own right?
BK: I guess I would say I look at environment as a setting. Which it is [laughing]. It’s funny, it doesn’t seem difficult to me to use the environment as a setting. I simply don’t ignore it the way many writers do.
TC: How do you think art most effectively communicates scientific ideas?
BK: By being extremely readable.... When I studied these things in graduate school, my professor spoke mostly in mathematics.... So I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try to express these ideas that are always discussed in mathematics, to translate into the English language.... In order to translate from one language to another, you have to understand both languages extremely well. So that’s the challenge, and that’s the work and that’s the fun.
TC: And your new book deals with climate change, but trying to understand the human feelings behind that?
BK: It’s about why people presented with the same evidence believe many different things.
TC: And do you hope that this book will offer some new evidence that might change people’s minds?
BK: Oh, no, it’s really a book about why people make the decisions they do. And it’s still not half-finished, so there’s a lot about this book I don’t know.
TC: You and your family live on a farm, how does your farming lifestyle influence your writing process?
BK: It keeps me healthy. At the end of the day of being a desk potato, I get outside and I pull weeds and move sheep in the pasture. Instead of going to the gym, I get a workout right there at home.
TC: Many of your characters are farmers as well.
BK: They often are. I think it’s good material that’s often overlooked. Our fiction is increasingly urban, but a lot of people don’t live in cities. You know, Thomas Hardy wrote about farmers. It’s time someone else did.
TC: Do you have any advice for young artists who want to take on scientific themes?
BK: Well I try to avoid giving advice, because no one ever will follow it, [laughing] but I do think there is an enormous need for writers who understand science well: journalists, artists, poets, fiction writers. I think if a person wanted to do that, it would make sense to study science while reading a lot of poetry and fiction of the type that you wish you had written yourself.
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