Creative lessons from: Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver
Channel: Narrative Podcasts
Date: 2023-10-17

On Saturday, October 14, Barbara Kingsolver had an event at Stanford University. You may have first heard of her from her mega-bestseller The Poisonwood Bible; she has also written over ten other novels, short story collections, and essays. Her interview was packed with valuable insights, such as starting a new novel means becoming an expert at new things; having to love your characters to make them believable; and how putting ourselves inside other people is a key part of the job of creating fiction. 

But her most memorable revelation of the whole night is the one I'll talk about in this video, and it came in the context of her talking about being form Appalachia, an area of the United States that is poorly understood, mispronounced, and negatively stereotyped. Like her, we may all have embarrassing or uncomfortable aspects of our backgrounds that we may not want to bring up in her work — but here's what she had to say about that.  . . .

P.S. Her most recent novel, Demon Copperhead, won the Pulitzer Prize. It was the book "she had to wait a long time to write."