Folkways Reporter Zack Harold recently made a trip to the small town of New Vrindaban, in West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle. It’s a Hare Krishna community started in the late 60s. These days, the town is home to a few hundred permanent residents, but thousands of pilgrims visit each year. They come to worship in the temple — and to visit the opulent Palace of Gold. But those main attractions were a pretty small part of Zack’s trip. He ended up spending much of his time in the kitchen.
Kingsolver has won numerous awards and accolades over her career, including the National Humanities Medal, the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in Britain, and her 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible won the National Book Prize of South Africa, held a spot on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and was an Oprah Book Club selection.
While Kingsolver’s fiction takes readers all over the world, she says her Appalachian roots inspire key themes and ideas in her stories. Last fall, Kingsolver was recognized by Shepherd University as the 2022 Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence. Liz McCormick sat down with her at that time to learn more.
Listen to the extended conversation below:
EXTENDED: Author Barbara Kingsolver Reflects On Appalachian Writing, Climate Change And Upcoming Novel
The transcript below is from the original broadcast that aired in West Virginia Morning on Oct. 7, 2022. It has been lightly edited for clarity.
Liz McCormick: What does it mean to be an Appalachian in your own experiences, in your own words?
Barbara Kingsolver: To me, it means home. It means recognizing and celebrating my own people. I grew up in the eastern part of Kentucky. I left my little rural town, as young people do. I lived all over the place on several continents, doing low paying jobs. And as I traveled the world, and this country, I encountered a lot of shocking stereotypes, a lot of condescension that made me mad, it still makes me mad.
After trying out a lot of different places, I came back home to Appalachia, and I now live on the other side of the mountains in southwest Virginia. But it’s the same culture. It’s the same language. It’s the same emphasis on community, and resourcefulness, and kindness that I grew up knowing and loving.
So as a writer, I see it as sort of my mission to represent us in a way that is seldom seen and seldom understood outside of Appalachia.
McCormick: Barbara, you’ve written a lot of diverse stories, ranging from novels, short stories, poetry; some of these stories take us all over the world. What sort of impact do your Appalachian roots play in your writing? Like with The Poisonwood Bible, it took place in the Congo, how does your background and roots here in Appalachia impact your writing?
Kingsolver: You know, they say that every writer is really writing the same story over and over again. And if that’s true, my story is about community. If I really examine all my works, even though I work hard to make each one entirely new, not just a new place and set of characters, but I ask a whole new question.
I’ve written about climate change and why that’s so hard for us to talk about. I’ve written, as you said, a book set in the Congo, which is about cultural arrogance, and how what one nation will do to another. So these are big, big questions, sort of urgent, modern themes. But if you sort of dig down into the heart of every one of these stories, it’s about community, what is our duty to our community? How do we belong to it? How does it belong to us? And how does that play against the really powerful American iconography of the individual, the solo flyer, the lone hero that’s supposed to be the American story.
But as a woman, and as an Appalachian woman, I always see the other people behind the solo flyer. The people who gassed up his airplane, the women who packed his lunch. I mean, there is no such thing as a lone hero. I’m interested in the heroism of people who think they’re ordinary, and people who are helping each other, creating families for each other or safety networks for each other, who are aware of their indebtedness to their neighbors and their people.
McCormick: I understand you have a book that is soon to be hitting bookshelves on Oct. 18. And that is Demon Copperhead. I want to ask you to talk with us about this book, and what can readers expect when they read this?
Kingsolver: Readers can expect a page turner. I live in deep, deep southwest Virginia, which is the epicenter of the opioid epidemic. So we are living with this, and I wanted for several years to write about it, and I couldn’t think of a good way in that would make this story interesting and appealing to people, to readers, because it’s a hard subject. It’s dark, it’s difficult. Kids coming up in this environment.
And then I sort of had a conversation with Charles Dickens, and I realized the way to tell the story is the way he told David Copperfield. Let the child tell the story. That’s what I realized I needed to do. So this kid who’s called Copperhead, because he has red hair. He has Melungeon heritage, if people know what that is, and he’s the child of a teenage, drug-using mother. He’s born on the floor of her single wide trailer home. And he comes into the world with this fierce — if a newborn can have an attitude, demon has it — he tells you his story from his point of view, mostly taking place in his teens and early 20s, as oxycontin is released into Lee County, where he lives.
But he tells this story in a way that’s in his own voice. In a way that will just give the reader a reason to turn every page because you need to know how he’s going to come through this. How he’s going to survive because he is a survivor. He’s funny, he’s fierce, and he’s passionate.
Folkways Reporter Zack Harold recently made a trip to the small town of New Vrindaban, in West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle. It’s a Hare Krishna community started in the late 60s. These days, the town is home to a few hundred permanent residents, but thousands of pilgrims visit each year. They come to worship in the temple — and to visit the opulent Palace of Gold. But those main attractions were a pretty small part of Zack’s trip. He ended up spending much of his time in the kitchen.
This week on Inside Appalachia, a Hare Krishna community in West Virginia serves vegetarian food made in three sacred kitchens. Also, an Asheville musician’s latest guitar album is a call to arms. And, we talk soul food with Xavier Oglesby, who is passing on generations of kitchen wisdom to his niece.
Affrilachian poet and playwright Norman Jordan is one of the most published poets in the region. Born in 1938, his works have been anthologized in over 40 books of poetry. He was also a prominent voice in the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 70s. He died in 2015, put part of his legacy is the Norman Jordan African American Arts and Heritage Academy in West Virginia. Folkways Reporter Traci Phillips has the story.
The 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline from West Virginia to Virginia took 10 years to complete. Author Denali Sai Nalamalapu was part of the protests to stop the pipeline. They have a new book, called HOLLER: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance. It’s written and drawn in comics form and profiles six activists who fought the pipeline. Mason Adams spoke with Nalamalapu.