Today's Read Contributor Acclaimed novelist Barbara Kingsolver recently spoke with TodaysRead.com about how her relationship with ecology and storytelling has evolved, and how the natural world is reemerging as a central force in her creative work. After years of concentrating on sociopolitical themes, she says, her time hiking through Indiana’s woodlands rekindled her impulse to weave nature more deeply into her fiction.
During the interview, Kingsolver explained that for her new novel she intentionally structured the story around the cycles of the seasons—spring’s renewal, summer’s growth, autumn’s decay—as a metaphor for human resilience, change, and regeneration. In doing so, she aims to mirror how ecosystems ebb and pulse, how time shapes growth, and how narratives of loss and revival mirror the land itself. She also shared that her research involved working with entomologists and field biologists to portray insect life with authenticity—seeing insects not just as quirky details, but as agents that shape ecosystems in meaningful ways.
When asked how she balances describing landscapes with the demands of plot and pacing, Kingsolver offered a revealing insight: “A field full of grasses isn’t passive background; it lives, breathes, plays a role.” She acknowledged that the tension between lyrical description and narrative momentum is one she still wrestles with during revisions. For her, the goal is not to linger on every leaf or gust of wind, but to let place inform character and plot in ways that evoke the living world without slowing the story’s forward drive.
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Kingsolver also recounted how, during her walks, she became attuned to patterns—how light shifts, how insects respond to humidity, how undergrowth sways in microclimates—and how those observations became seeds for scenes, metaphors, and emotional resonance in her writing. She said she often carries a small notebook to capture moments that later find their way into drafts, in gestures of bird movement or moss on stone, rather than grand statements about nature.
Toward the end of the interview, she offered a short reading list for those inspired to bring natural detail into fiction. She recommended Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work for its fusion of science and spirit, Richard Powers for the way he meshes consciousness with ecosystems, and Helen Macdonald for blending grief, memory, and ornithology in lyrical form.
Reading the interview, one senses that for Kingsolver, ecology is never separate from story—it is a lens, a structure, and a moral compass. She is not writing about nature as a backdrop or a cause, but as an active participant in narrative life. In returning to themes of wildness and place, she seems to reaffirm a conviction that in stories, as in ecology, everything is connected.
