Conversation with Kingsolver [View all]

[Kali]

https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/conversation-with-kingsolver/Content?oid=21585071

Author Barbara Kingsolver talks to us about the thorny issues in her new novel Unsheltered
By Margaret Regan

*snip*

In this book you deal with plenty of distressing current events. Iano, the main character's husband, loses his tenured professorship when his college closes down. Willa herself loses her job as a journalist when her magazine fails. And their house is falling down.

In Southwest Virginia we're surrounded by colleges that are on their last legs or have already folded. Two colleges within a stone's throw of where I live have closed. I know people who have lost everything. Magazines fold too. Many are gone. I cannot tell you how many interviews I've done for this book (and the interviewer says) "I'm kind of living Willa's life." What this novel is about is that all of these institutions that we've spent our lives trusting in as permanent are just evaporating. So many kinds of shelter, whether it's your life insurance policy, pension or the ice on the North Pole, aren't going to be there.

President Trump is never named in the book but he's a background character.

I started the novel in 2013, 2014... I was writing in real time as he and his bullying form of leadership showed up on the horizon and were taken seriously. I was finishing the last draft last December [2017]. It gave me a lot to think about, about polarization, about the different ways that we refuse to talk to each other:

When people's worldview is threatened, how tightly we all cling to what we believe and how we resist dialogue and how we resist conversation.

For the earlier story, set during the scientific uproar over Darwin, you were looking for a real-life scientist to use as a character. You found Mary Treat.

I ran across her name in this book I was reading about Darwin's era. I saw this name Mary Treat as a lady scientist who had corresponded with Darwin. I was amazed by the work that she had done, that [she was] a champion of Darwin, that she is so little-known in modern times. I found out her papers and archives are in this place called Vineland, at the historical and antiquarian society. I thought, "Well, I better go there," and the novel was born.

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