Western Writers

An Interview with Kim Barnes, Part Two

By Jenny Shank, 10-14-08

	Kim Barnes, photo by Scott M. Barrie.

In the second half of my interview with Idaho novelist and memoirist Kim Barnes (click here for the first half), we discuss the character of Elise, the 17-year-old girl whose difficulties are at the heart of the second half of Barnes’ new book, A Country Called Home, how Barnes thinks that the term “regionalist” can diminish Western writers ("This isn’t about cattle, people!"), and her current project, a novel set in Saudi Arabia.  Barnes will discuss her book on October 15 at the Tattered Cover (Colfax, 7:30 p.m.) at the Montana Festival of the Book on October 25 (Wilma Theater, 7:30 p.m.), and at the University of Idaho on October 29 (7:30 p.m., Law School Courtroom).

NW:  In your essay ”Why I Wrote In The Wilderness,” you write, “I hope to make the connection between being in the literal wilderness and the wilderness that was something other than physical: the wilderness brought on by physical isolation; the wilderness that is the sexuality of a girl coming of age in such an isolated environment; and the wilderness of our souls.” Although this is about your memoir, it seems equally applicable to A Country Called Home.  The wilderness of sexuality seems to apply to Elise.

KB: Yes, it does.  When I start telling the story of Elise coming into her young womanhood, I cast back into my own sense of what that was like as a young woman coming into puberty, and how dangerous I became to the people around me.  Like Elise, I was involved in the Pentecostal Church of God, where there was simply nothing more dangerous and disruptive than women’s sexuality in the mind of the congregation.  As she starts going through the changes in her body and changes in her awareness of what she wants—for so long she had been happy with just her horse.  And this is what we always do with young women, especially in the West.  You want to keep them out of the backseat of a boy’s car?  Get them a horse.  And it works for a while. 

When I was 13 or 14 years old, even younger than Elise is in the book, I was accused of being demon possessed.  I have come to understand how much of that has to do with the fear of a tight, insular community casting out the woman who is coming into her sexuality because she becomes a threat to some of the other women inside the community.  So Elise, just as she thinks she’s finding a family, the brothers and sisters inside the church, they turn against her, which happened to me as well.

NW: There’s no one to guide Elise, so she turns to religion and then to sex, then to anorexia and to more sex.

KB: [Laughs.] Well, you know, she’s coming into her womanhood.  Elise is a synasthete.  I had always been interested in synesthesia.  I’m fascinated by the workings of the brain, and what we don’t know about the brain.  So I had thought she might be synasthetic.  Then as I continued to write the story and I saw this possibility of the fundamentalist church becoming involved, what I recognized immediately is that if a member of our church had suggested that she saw colors, that she had visions—which was what they would have called it—when she heard music, it would have been immediately assumed that she was demon possessed and we would have gone about an exorcism, which is what happens to Elise, and she starts fasting.  I think it’s less anorexia than it is a kind of way that she believes she can control what she doesn’t understand and what she fears.  But of course maybe that is one of the basic definitions of anorexia.

NW: In regards to what you were saying about Jung, this novel seems to relate to your life in the way that a dream would, because it has many elements of your life, but yet it’s not you.

KB: That’s a great observation.  When I wrote this book, I understood I was exploring a certain part of my family mythology, about my father whom I’ve often seen as a tragic figure who had this noble but very flawed vision that both scarred me and shaped me.  But at the same time these characters were wholly new to me, and the situation was wholly new to me.  You know, a doctor from Connecticut?  His privileged young wife?  I don’t know where these characters came from.  And so it both felt familiar to me and at the same time completely unfamiliar.  I love that combination—it felt like there was a kind of a parallel universe out there for me in my life.  There’s one way I see what happens to Elise as a kind of exaggerated extension of how my own life may have played out differently.

NW: You’ve said that you’d rather not be considered a “regionalist” or regional writer, perhaps because that term would suggest a diminishment of your work.  But it does seem like there is a supportive community of writers in this region.  For example, I always see Mark Spragg and William Kittredge supplying blurbs for other writers’ books, just as they do for yours.  It seems like there are benefits to being a writer from this region.

KB: Yes.  I think absolutely.  As someone who lives in Moscow, Idaho who is sitting there working away, that community is essential to me.  If things are going badly with the work or I need an idea or I’ve gotten a bad review, I call Claire Davis or I call Mark Spragg and they understand and we support each other.  And I think you can have that community whether you live in Iowa City or Manhattan.  That’s wonderfully supportive and important to me at the personal level.  I am absolutely blessed by a community of literary writers who happen to live in the West and whose writing is informed by a strong sense of place.

My sense of resistance to labeling has more to do with what comes from the outside, less from the inside.  I don’t mean to denigrate it in any way.  The Western writing community as we know is alive and well.  It’s more a sense of what comes in from the outside, that Western literature comes with its own kind of baggage.  You know, what’s it going to be about?

NW: Trees.

KB: Trees and rivers and mountains!  And Mark Spragg has been attacked in reviews for paying too much attention to the light.  I think part of is that the West is almost an anachronism now to people who live outside of it.  It becomes something that they see as almost overly precious, overly dramatic.  The lives of the people are not ones that they necessarily recognize, and their concerns are not ones that they necessarily recognize.  So it’s easy for the people outside to denigrate.  This is an old story, the Norman McLean story, which I think you’re referring to.  But it’s different than someone saying, “she’s a Southern writer.” If you’re a Southern writer, that comes with a badge of approval, whereas a Western writer somehow doesn’t.

NW: Maybe because there’s a genre named “Western,” and there aren’t genres named after other regions.

KB: No—Southern writing is taken seriously, and it’s complex and dark and has this undercurrent of the Civil War still informing it, and you’ve got your Southern gothic and your Southern grotesque and you have this long lineage of writers out of the South, but when people hear “Western literature,” they often think of genre writing, without the complexity at the level of archetypal struggles and Jungian concerns and Aristotelian tragedy.  The idea of a tragic figure in the West at a Faulknerian level?  People just don’t think that way. 

One of my goals as a writer is to bring those kind of large dramas that are large at the level of the human condition.  This isn’t about cattle, people!  It’s not just about how “purdy” the landscape is.  This is about the human condition.  It’s about the quest for meaning.  It doesn’t matter if you’re in Weippe, Idaho or Massachusetts.  It’s still the same quest for meaning and acceptance.

Like other literary writers who happen to live in the West (such as Claire Davis, Mark Spragg, and William Kittredge) my goal is to create characters who are individual and particular, but at the same time paint their lives on a larger canvas that is more than landscape, more than Big Sky, Big Country.  At the same time, I realize that the land and its people are often inseparable and that the story of one is often the story of the other.

NW: Have your goals as a writer changed now that you’ve written several books compared to what they were at the outset?

KB: I don’t think so.  My goals, no matter whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, whether they are set in the West, or as my next novel seems to be, in Saudi Arabia, my goals are first and foremost to serve the art.  To write whatever I’m writing well.  And after that it’s all gravy.

NW: After four books set in Idaho, what prompted you to leave Idaho behind for the next book, and how is the writing different because of the setting?

KB: What brought me to thinking about the possibility of this story is the experience of my aunt and uncle.  My aunt is my father’s eldest sibling, and she like my father was raised in literally a dirt floor shack.  They were sharecroppers.  So was the man she married, my uncle.  He went to work as a roughneck in the oilfields in Oklahoma and Texas for Halliburton.  When the oil fields were discovered and started to be developed in Arabia, he was offered this job in Saudi Arabia as a derrick foreman if he’d sign on for two years and live in an American compound in Saudi Arabia.  And they did. 

They recently moved to Clarkston, Washington, which is right next to Lewiston, Idaho, so I’ve had time to spend with them.  I’ve started hearing these incredible stories about this place.  What I’m fascinated by are really the same interests that have driven me in my other books, which is that quest for a better life.  Whether that takes you to Idaho or to the Aramco compounds in Saudi Arabia, it’s still a story that is rife with desire and inevitable complication.  And I’m fascinated by the landscape of Arabia. 

My family is all out of Oklahoma—my grandparents were Dustbowl people.  They remember the Dustbowl so vividly—they talk about the dust coming up and covering the houses in dunes.  As I started thinking about Arabia and the landscape I thought, “This seems so familiar to me—how can that be?” I was raised in the wilderness, you know, the woods, which is not the biblical wilderness.  In the Bible, the biblical wilderness is in fact the desert.  In the new versions of the bible, the NIV, the word “wilderness” is no longer used.  It’s completely replaced by the word “desert.” I came to realize the reason the landscape seemed so familiar to me was because it was.  That description of the sand and the dunes was almost exactly the description that I heard my grandmother talk about, about the Dustbowl.  The sense of isolation, that quest for a better life, the sense of possibility.  I mean the American dream was just right there for them.  Just like it was for my father.  My mother at 16, she thought they were going to come out to Idaho and log cedar and then they were going to be rich.  All they had to do was live in these little shacks for a few years and then they’d have it made.  That was the exact same thing that drove my aunt and uncle to Saudi Arabia.

NW:  Are you going to visit Saudi Arabia?

KB: I need to, but it’s not easy.  My understanding is if you’re sponsored and you have a host and abide by the laws of the land, it can be an interesting, engaging experience.  I have friends who have traveled there by going to Syria first.  That’s one possibility.  Another possibility is to see if I can get sponsored, perhaps by Aramco itself, to see if I can go over and study the compounds I’m writing about.  I would love to go.  My husband’s not keen.  He said, “If you go, I’m going to have to go with you, and I don’t want to go.” I think actually he’s more threatened than I am because if he went with me as my husband, he would be charged with my care.  That is not an easy situation to be in.  But my hope is to visit.

Barnes will discuss her book on October 15 at the Tattered Cover (Colfax, 7:30 p.m.) at the Montana Festival of the Book on October 25 (Wilma Theater, 7:30 p.m.), and at the University of Idaho on October 29 (7:30 p.m., Law School Courtroom).

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