SOURCE: “Barbara Kingsolver: Her Fiction Features Ordinary People Heroically Committed to Political Issues,” in Publishers Weekly, August 31, 1990, pp. 46-7.

In the following interview, Kingsolver comments on her life, work, and sociopolitical preoccupations.

Across the scorched desert toward the lower Tucson Mountains, up a gravel-covered dirt road identifiable only by two weather-bleached yellow pillars, lies a house almost hidden by native cacti and scrub. Here Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Bean Trees, Homeland and Other Stories and Harper Collins's soon-to-be released Animal Dreams, weaves her stories of plucky, sometimes downtrodden, characters “ecologically” placed in a world of issues—the U.S. involvement in Central America, Native American traditions, feminism, the environment. Her office is reached through a courtyard draped with grapevines and flourishing with squash. The window looks out across a terrain that to many seems inhospitable but to Kingsolver brings inspiration and solace. On the bulletin board above...