The author and her daughter Lily Kingsolver have written an illustrated children’s book together
Barbara Kingsolver: ‘The first time I set foot in Ireland I felt so at home. Something about the language, the culture’and her daughter Lily Kingsolver about their new book. They spent much of their time plotting and writing Coyote’s Wild Home, an illustrated children’s book, over countless phone, and video calls. Lily lives in Florida, where she works as an environmental educator, while her mother is still in the family home in Appalachia.
'I probably say yes to about one per cent of the things I am invited to do,' says Barbara. Photograph: University of Edinburgh/PA Wire Barbara confesses that she herself has several stories of frightening encounters with predators. 'But I’m not going to share them', she laughs. Photograph: Ian West/PA
A realistic views of predators is so much of what I am trying to communicate to children. They don’t want to hurt you. Nothing wants to hurt youOne of the reasons both women wanted to highlight a predator in the story was to reposition all predatory animals from threat to a vital part of the ecosystem.
Barbara confesses that she has several stories of frightening encounters with predators. “But I’m not going to share them,” she laughs, explaining that she doesn’t want to contribute to the fearmongering. Instead, she returns to an extraordinary hour spent with Lily in Denali National Park in Alaska, where they camped and hiked for a week. They were with a park ranger who noticed a grizzly and her cubs were trailing them. They switched track but still, the bear followed.
“And again, I think with good intentions, parents try to shield their kids from so much and are causing a kind of deficiency of understanding of how the world works.” Both Kingsolver women are fierce advocates for Appalachia, the vast mountainous region which runs from Pennsylvania through to Alabama, and Barbara is quick to agree that people who live in Appalachia have come to feel voiceless in how they are represented in the national conversation.
“This has been happening continually since the 1970s in the US and because it is a big country and because the population is divided half in half, it has left half of us disenfranchised. And people don’t understand how invisible we feel. So, we welcomed writing this book because this was going to be a country grandpa showing his granddaughter from the city this place that means so much to him. It is going to be a blending of worlds here.
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