Stonecrop Magazine

Kim Barnes’ 1997 memoir, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, was given to me by my father in 2021, not long after he was diagnosed with cancer. He wanted me to read it because of Barnes’ powerful ability to capture the physical landscape of the Bitterroots, a subrange of the Rocky Mountains that my dad and I fished often when I was a little girl. It is hard to imagine that he also knew I would find comfort in the story of this rebellious, fundamentalist Pentecostal girl from the 1960s, or that it would help me cope with his grim diagnosis while cementing this passion I have for writing nonfiction. If he did know this and is reading this now, I must say thank you, Dad. And of course, thank you, Kim.

It is not that I had a childhood like Kim Barnes—her upbringing in isolation is a unique and compelling story. Instead, my feelings are a result of her ability to create a truly human story that anyone can relate to (an ability that led to the book being nominated for a Pulitzer). Kim Barnes is an award-winning novelist and memoirist. She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Idaho and an avid angler and outdoorsperson. I believe she is a true literary force and spokesperson for the beauty and power of the wild. It felt like a long shot to interview one of my personal heroes; I was starstruck when she accepted my invitation. She patiently and gracefully gave shape to this interview. As a group of Idaho students, it is a pleasure to present this interview with one of Idaho’s great writers.

This interview has been shortened and edited for the page.

KB: Is the light okay?

AM: Yes, how about us?

KB: Oh, you guys look great. You have a lot more experience with this than I do, especially now that I’m retired.

AM: Well, this is our first interview, so— yes! I love those trout earrings, they’re beautiful.

KB: Thank you, I wear them when I can’t fish.

AM: Nice! I love that. Well, it’s a huge honor for you to be doing this, it’s a big opportunity for us as students and you’re certainly the biggest name to have graced the pages of our student-run magazine. So, thank you so much.

KB: Oh, it's a pleasure.

AM: As a professor from the MFA program at U of I, do you have a soft spot for college-level students?

KB: I do! Because I remember so vividly my own college experience, which I came to a little bit late. I started my college education three years after I graduated from high school, and it was a tough time for me. When I finally did start going to college, I felt not only behind, but I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know what a syllabus was. I didn’t have a clue. I mean, I had been raised in such isolation for so long. So, I do have a soft spot for all college students, especially my Idaho people. It matters a great deal to me.

AM: That is awesome. I think the students are lucky to have you, and that we’re lucky to have you here. I am personally a huge fan of yours, so, I’ve got a lot of nervous energy.

KB: Oh, that’s all right. We’ve been getting ready to take off on a bucket list trip for 10 weeks. I’m trying to pack everything into one little backpack and one little carry-on. So, I have a different kind of nervous energy.

AM: Where are you going?

KB: Well, my husband Robert Wrigley is a poet and he retired before I did. We cashed in all our frequent flyer miles. That’s the thing, you got to publish a book, and then you got to go on a book tour. Because no matter where you fly out of Idaho, you get massive frequent flyer miles because it takes so many legs. So, we just walk out of the airport at Pullman-Moscow and we get 500 miles, right? And so, all those book tours have paid off. We’re going to fly to Italy, and we have a little rental and we’re going to spend nine weeks writing on the island of Capri. It’s on the Mediterranean shore, so it’s warm.

AM: Gorgeous.

KB: We are keeping our fingers crossed that everything holds until we can get there next week.

AM: Amazing! Well, I am glad we caught you.

KB: I’m seeing the snow in the background. Here, we have the same.

AM: Yes, it is brisk out. Well, I wanted to talk a little about In the Wilderness with you because that book came into my life at a very integral time and helped me quite a bit. It’s a beautifully crafted autobiographical story about Northern Idaho. You’ve already mentioned you love Idaho—it’s still very special to you, right?

KB: Absolutely.

AM: You speak of it like a cathedral in your book, and I wanted to get your feelings on how valuable of a resource that is, for writers to have nature at their fingertips like that.

KB: For me, it’s essential and for a number of people, it’s essential. But one thing I came to realize is that Westerners are—they’re what might be called provincial. I mean, we think that if you could live in a place like this, why would you live anywhere else? I’m serious, right? So, we have that kind of pride of place, many of us. Meanwhile, I have cousins in New York who spend time in Idaho and were like, “No. No, thank you. I will take Chelsea or the Village anytime over the Tetons.”

So, I think it depends on the individual very much. For me part of it is familiarity, but I know any number of people I grew up with who hated that familiarity and couldn’t wait to get out of this place. For me, I feel safer in the wilderness than I do in the city. Some of that is upbringing, right? But that is not all. I’ve learned over the years since I published In the Wilderness to be comfortable out in the world, whether it’s Rome, Iceland, or Florida, wherever. New York, I love being in New York and I can find my way around now. But the place that makes my soul sing is the place of my birth. The Idaho rivers, the Clearwater especially. Of course, where I was raised on the North Fork before the dams went in… and it still very much feels like the most sacred place to me and my husband, especially now that we’re retired.

We spend all summer and much of the fall fly fishing and dry camping, which is something not everybody knows about. I’ve had a few friends say, “Dry camping?” We camp without facilities, where we can find a place to pitch our tent along the river. Honestly, especially in this book I’m working on right now, and have been working on for going on 10 years, is set on this river my husband disallows me naming — we call it the river that has no name — but it is in the wilderness, near the Montana and Idaho divide, it’s in the Bitterroots and very isolated. We go way to the end of the road and that’s where I’ve been doing most of my writing. At home, it’s harder for me to write. But I take my laptop and I go and set up my table and chair. I mean, I literally can stick my feet in the river, it’s just a wild, wild river, and I can just write for hours and so it’s become more so for me, Ali, than less so. It has become more and more my sacred place, where I feel like I can hear the thoughts and inspiration I need to hear.

AM: We talked about fishing; it is a huge part of your life as it is mine. You know that In the Wilderness was given to me by my father, he also gave me A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean, which I had kept in my tackle. So, I was wondering if there are any regional authors, like Maclean for me, that you really like?

KB: In the context of fishing or just any?

AM: From the Rocky Mountain, Pacific Northwest region, specifically?

KB: Oh my gosh, yes. Where do I start, right? I’ve been lucky enough to meet so many of them as an Idaho Writer in Residence while on book tours. Many of my closest writer friends live in Spokane. You know, Pacific Northwest and Spokane, WA, is actually part of the Palouse, as well. And of course, Jess Walter is a dear friend. He and his wife are going to be in Italy and are going to come and visit us. And I thought, “Fun, I can’t believe my life!” Right? I am going to be out on the Mediterranean and Jess Walter, #1 bestselling author is going to come and visit. The thing about Jess, he was born and raised in Spokane and his father worked at Kaiser Aluminum. You know, just a factory blue-collar worker. So, Jess and I have more in common that has to do with being raised in this part of the West and having that blue-collar background. I think he’s as surprised as I am to find himself there, even though he travels all over the world now.

I think though I will pick a couple of people. One of them is CMarie Fuhrman, she was a non-traditional student at U of I. She started out in poetry, she got into the program and I had her in a nonfiction workshop, and I thought, whoa. You just can see it in her writing, and I could see it in her sensibility. I mean, often professors will say, “Oh they have the sensibility of a writer”, and it is kind of hard to explain. It’s kind of like Buddhism when you’re a writer. You wake up a Buddhist, and you go to bed a Buddhist, you know what I mean? You practice, it is your practice. It is not just something you do, it’s something it is. A way you see the world. So, a writer sees the world through a writer’s lens, we are always making stories. Even within conversations we hear, phrases I hear, I come across a phrase even in a news story, and I’m like, “Bob, this is a poem!” and I hand him the phrase.

With CMarie, I could tell she saw the world through the eyes of a writer and a storyteller. Some of her essays have just knocked me out. I can’t wait for that book to get out. She and I are always talking, mostly on Facebook Messenger, and I mean who does that right? She calls it our screen door. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a neighbor who comes and scratches on your screen door to come in and have coffee. She said Facebook Messenger is like our screen door. It’s the only place we communicate like that, like neighbors. And we have so many similarities even though she was mostly raised in Colorado. So you know, a lot of that has to do with father figures. It has to do with a connection to the land and nature. So, I would like to put my attention on her work right now as far as someone who speaks to me and is of a younger generation and coming up. She has a website I should point out, it’s cmariefuhrman.com, and if you get a chance, go on her website. She has one essay that she started writing out of my class, it’s called the knife assignment, where I bring in my knife. This has gotten riskier, of course. But still, it’s a matter of instilling trust in a nonfiction workshop. Where, as you may know, in a nonfiction workshop at the graduate level especially, you have to have trust. In your classmates and the other writers in there, there has to be a shared sense of responsibility and purpose.

So, in the first workshop, I always would bring in a knife, my father’s knife. It’s a big pocketknife with a single, locked back blade and I pass it around, open. I hand it to the first person and say, “Tell me a knife memory”, and just spontaneously they have to come up with a real knife memory. It is fascinating because they have to go into detail, like, what did the knife look like? Where did it come from? I ask them questions as they’re telling me this story, and how a student or workshop participant handles a knife is fascinating. It’s like I learned more about that student in 5 minutes than I could in any other way. Some of them won’t touch it, and they take the knife and they, like, put it down on the table and they don’t want to handle it anymore. Some of them are like waving it around and everybody in the classroom is ducking around the table. But I have had some of the most amazing stories come out of that assignment and many of them have been published. This essay, and Aspen by CMarie, is one of those essays where it took her into a great deal of heartache and grief and pain, but also celebration. That is the one you should read. There is no art without balance between the sacred and the profane. If it’s too sacred, even when we are writing about nature, if it’s too sacred it’s propaganda, which is not the artist. If it is too profane, it’s pornography. We see pieces all the time that ride that edge and I’ve found that edge, but that balance between the sacred and profane— that gives our writing emotional texture and tension. That’s where you want to be. That’s the sweet spot and that’s the spot that CMarie is at.

AM: That is amazing to hear you talk about a student that way. You started to mention this emotional journey that authors often go through while writing a story, and In the Wilderness, you talk about your family very candidly, very openly. What advice would you give an author, like me, who is considering writing these intimate details of other people’s lives? These intimate details of others that have affected me as a person.

KB: It’s a very important consideration because one thing that I found is when we as memoirists and essayists write down a memory that involves other people in our history, it becomes strangely definitive. I hadn’t realized that till I wrote In the Wilderness and started understanding that what I had written was taking over everybody else’s narrative. They were remembering my book, rather than their own memories. I mean that is the power of the story… you know, our brains don’t know the differences. John Gardner in On Writing Fiction talks about the uninterrupted dream that you have to bring your reader into it, so they have the willing suspension of disbelief. And they enter into your book, and forget that they’re sitting, they are with you in the story just like a good novel or a good film. And to create that willing suspension of disbelief and that sense of the uninterrupted dream you have to recreate the setting and the event and the character so carefully that they become real to us and we feel the cold water, we feel the hot sun, we feel the belt on our legs, we feel first love, right?

The thing about memoir, literary memoir, is that even though it’s all about you, it’s not about you. It’s about the human condition. So, if you write it well enough and I read your memoir, I should come away knowing more about myself than I do about you. That’s what any good art should do. As far as advice I would give… number one, I think that’s where you got to start, you got to think about it that way. You can’t worry about censors when you’re first writing, because you might as well stop. Do you know Nan Goldberg? She talks about the monkey mind and the wild mind. Censors are your monkey mind, and how many voices do you have saying you can’t write, that you can’t write well… well, yeah you can. You can write anything you want. It doesn’t mean you are going to publish it, but you might be surprised at where that leads you, but you can’t censor yourself when you sit down to write the truth. Even if it is brutal. You can go back later and ask does this fit? Yes, it happened, and it’s interesting, but does it fit my thematic concern and the arc of my story? Just like a piece of fiction, it’s no different. Memory is like the blood in your veins, you share that with your dad. You can no more separate your story from your father’s story than you can separate your blood. Story is communal, it is not individual.

So, then I’d say you’ve got to do it for the right reasons. To me, this becomes a matter of integrity. So, if someone wants to write a tell-all and make money then you know, OK, fine, that is a decision you make. From my standpoint, to simply publish to make money or to go on book tours, that’s not the right reason. The reason I write memoir and personal essays, is first and foremost, to serve the art. If you serve the art, everything else will take care of itself, and the art is what you are learning to do. The art is craft. The art is imagination. The art is knowing your thematic concerns, how you can use motifs and symbols, and everything else to deepen that. If you serve the art the other things will fall into place.

The second reason I write memoir and personal nonfiction is to bear witness to the story I have lived in order to bear witness to the story of others. It is like a gift. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, but it’s this idea that not all of us can write. Just like not all of us can put a new engine in a car or you know, get on the trapeze. There’s a way in which you can tell a story and you are a storyteller; it is not only a gift but a responsibility to your community. It almost becomes this kind of boon, in the sense of the hero’s journey. And so, when I write my story, even though it is all about me it is not about me. It’s about the human condition.

So, in bearing witness to my own stories and the emotions, whether it’s the coming of age or fear or loss or grief it's about the readers’ feelings. One of my very favorite compliments was from when I was writing In the Wilderness. My editor at the time, you know, he was a New Yorker, he was a gay man, and he loved my work. I don’t know if he’d never been out West, but he was— he was there with me. His husband, who is also a lifelong New Yorker and Jewish, wrote to me. He said, “Kim, you little Pentecostal girl, living up there in the woods… when I read your story, I felt like I was reading about myself.”

It wasn’t because he lived on the next logging road over or was a Pentecostal fundamentalist, but because he felt the same emotions no matter what he was going through. So, first and foremost, serve the art. This is my advice, pay attention to your practice. Second, to bear witness to your own stories in order to bear witness to the stories of others. Third, to understand your own story. Writing narrative requires logic. I don’t know if you have had this happen, where you sit down to write a scene or memory and you realize you got it all wrong.

AM: Well, yeah.

KB: Your aunt couldn’t have been there because she wasn’t married to your uncle yet, and you’re like, wait a minute, what else am I remembering wrong? And so, if one thing that you’re required to do is create a logical narrative, you have to impose a narrative of meaning, right? You do not make stuff up, that is not my thing. It’s a very personal decision. I’m interested in the tool, the instrument of nonfiction, and the tension that comes from having to stay inside and wrestle with memory. To me, that’s where the art is. Because it is wrestling with memory, not with what happened but why. Why do you remember what you do, or not? Remember there can be as much emotion or poignancy in a memoirist saying I don’t remember my father. I don’t remember him getting up for work. I don’t remember him sitting at the breakfast table. I don’t remember if he smoked. I don’t remember what kind of shoes if they were cowboy boots or logging boots, or Romeo slippers, or Converse. You know, if you tell us that and you’re giving us a story of this man you’ve never known, how much does that break your heart?

To me, in nonfiction, if you feel the need to make stuff up it’s a failure of the imagination. You’ve got to see it as opportunity. I can tell you any number of cautionary tales. But, after the need to make sense of my own life, then it is just joy and pleasure. And if it goes out into the world and finds a place, that is icing on the cake. If you don’t attend to those first things, it can be a bitter pill.

AM: Thank you. I’m literally moved to tears, so thank you so much. Sorry. It was very profound and perfectly stated. I think for me, you know, these emotions often feel like a roadblock. You know, this kind of fear of not honoring my parents’ story and I feel so far it’s kind of pushed them away a little bit, from my writing journey. I was wondering if you had advice to kind of overcome this roadblock— to what feels like the healing process of writing. Do you know what I mean?

KB: Yes, and… I mean, you'll know what I say when healing is not guaranteed. And it’s not your primary reason, if healing comes, that’s part of the icing on the cake, right? You write first and foremost to serve the art. But I like the questions you're asking. Because you have got to come to this responsibility with enormous humility, I believe. And so how does an artist balance these things? So, I'll tell you my story and I will tell you how I went to that.

So, when I first started writing the memoir In the Wilderness, and you know from having read it, that I ran away from home when I was a young teenager. Father found me and dragged me back. I was punished. I came back into the faith, into the church, and then the night of high school graduation, my father and I had a final falling out. I was 18 by a week and he told me I must take my things and leave my house, my home, my family, and never come back. And I did. And I lost everything. That's why I didn't go to college for three years because I couldn't. I had to support myself. I had to get a place to live. I had all these scholarships and I lost them all because I couldn't do it. I had to eat. I had to feed myself, had to get an apartment.

During that time that followed, my father shunned me. He wouldn't talk to me. I was dead to him, and therefore my mother wasn't allowed to have a relationship with me. My younger brother who's three-and-a-half years younger than I am, I missed that whole time of his life. He was a high school basketball sports star and I never got to see him play. And if I tried to go to my parent’s house, like to have dinner or just say 'hi', my father would get up and leave the room. He wouldn't even look at me.

It took several years and I write about this in In the Wilderness, where we, my brother and I, asked my dad to go take us hunting back up into this wilderness where he logged. It's a forest and he intentionally lets my brother and me get lost and then forces me to lead us out. And it was a lesson, a hard lesson, but I've never forgotten it. But then he started allowing me to be in his presence again. Then I met my husband, we got married, we have three kids and my relationship with my father started getting close again. He's a difficult man. He both shaped me and scarred me. And I had to find a way to keep myself open to his honest love and his wisdom; while protecting myself from what was destructive and damaging. Because he was made up of both those things, very much so, and I found I could do that, and my kids had a grandpa and a grandma.

So, when I started writing In the Wilderness, I knew I might lose that. I knew a couple of things. If I was going to write good literature, if I was gonna try to write art, one thing I had to remember is that there are no villains. We know this in literary fiction, right? No one can be one-dimensional, and we accept that. In a fiction course, if you're writing genre, you have bad vampires and good vampires. You know, you're going to have villains and that kind of thing, but if you're trying to write what you're trying to write, Ali, there are no villains. Some people still see my dad as a villain, even though I worked very hard and I didn't include a lot in there. That would have made it impossible to see him as complex as he was because people would judge him too harshly.

I wasn't spending very much time with my mom and dad because we were living in Missoula. They were in Lewiston, Idaho but I was talking to them about the memoir, but I wasn't asking them. A literary memoir isn't about what you remember, but why you remember what you do. I knew I had to stay with that and acknowledge that in the book so that it's on the page. Was my father a good man? Was my father a bad man? Writing on the page and interacting with your own memories is where the art of memoir is. It's what sets it apart from autobiography, you know, first I was born, and now I'm not yet dead. That's autobiography, you know. But memoir is thematically concerned and so when I would talk to my mom and dad, and my brother, and we didn't talk about memory. I would talk to them about what it was like to try and write memory. And I would talk to them about my thematic concerns, for instance, that I had my father's stories, but I didn't have my mother's stories because she wasn't allowed to tell her stories and the stories of the other women in my memory and my experience. So, I paid a lot of attention to try to understand the memories I didn't have.

So, I called my mom and dad, and my dad didn't use the phone. I mean, he was such an old-world guy and so my mom answered. I had sent them the manuscript; my mom had read it and she started crying. It surprised me, so this is what you don't see coming. I'm going back up and saying, my goal was to honor the complexity of my family's life; to try and understand who they were and why. I wanted to understand them, who are they, and why? And my mom was crying. Because she said it was the first time anyone had ever tried to understand her story. I didn't see that coming. And then she started crying again because she felt like she had failed me. Like when, you know, they took me to live with the preacher and his family up in Spokane and that did not go well, and we've never talked about that ever. And I said, “Mom, look at me. I'm here in Missoula. I'm going to get an MFA. I've got these beautiful children; I have this great life. I mean, it's not perfect, right? But I’m married. I'm a college professor. Look at my life. That's because of you and Dad too.” We talked for a while longer and then she said, “Your father is gonna call”, and my father never called me in his life, literally.

I thought, this is going to be it, he's going to shun me. He talked like an Old Testament God, and he had so few words, ‘Yes’, ‘no’. He just didn't talk, you know, he was an authoritarian father. And so, my husband got the kids and took them to McDonald's because I didn't know what was going to happen. I got up and went into the bedroom and crawled into bed, pulled up the covers, and waited for the phone to ring. When it rang I picked up the phone and my father said— just the first words out of his mouth were, “You are my daughter and you have made a terrible mistake.” And you know, I just went away, as I had learned to do. Over the years, when you go through trauma, I separated. I just quit listening and I just kind of floated up to the ceiling. I disassociated.

That's why I mean it took me a little while to hear what he was saying, which was, “If you had asked me, I could have told you what color or model your uncle’s car was.” And I was like, “What?!” We talked for four hours, I mean, I swear we had not talked for four hours the entirety of my life. So, at the end of that conversation, he told me things that he had never told me before. We talked about everything; it was overwhelming. And at the end of that conversation, having read my book, he said, “Do I want you to publish this book? No, I don't. Do I think that you should? Yes, I do.” And it was just such an incredible gift. What a gift. It wasn't that he remembered things like I do. It wasn't that he wasn't hurt and wounded by some of the ways he was portrayed, even though I did my best. I honored him while I still told certain truths that were hurtful to all of us that changed our entire relationship. So, after that, he couldn't quit telling me stuff, and my family couldn't quit telling me stuff.

I don't know if you've heard of people who are born without vision or without hearing, through the miracles of modern technology they can hear or see again, and they can get overwhelmed and phenomenally depressed and even suicidal. That's the way I felt it was like it was all coming. I couldn't process it. So, I mean not that it was a happy ending but that I was eventually able to process it. But it allowed me to write books after that.

But I think the thing to remember is if you do it for the right reasons and you try to honor the people in your memoir— not by shoving the truth aside or trying to whitewash them, but treat them fairly and honor their journeys. And talk about your passion and why you do it. So, if you go to your family and they say, as my father did to me, “Why are you writing this?” If they say that, I’d say, “Because I believe in story, I believe it is healing because I believe it's not just about me and you, it's about the human condition.”

AM: Well, that's very beautiful and in my writing, in my life, I want to have that moment with my father, you know, before he's gone. So, yeah I do want to express to you how big of a gift your words have been today and how your book was in general to my life, and that it really helped inspire me. It it's just really just amazing that you're here. It means so much to me, and to Stonecrop.

KB: That's wonderful. I'm so glad. 

AM: Is there anything else you'd like to leave with the Stonecrop readers and writers? 

KB: The best piece of advice is— butt in chair. 

For more information on Kim Barnes: www.kimbarnes.com

For more information on CMarie Fuhrman: www.cmariefuhrman.com

Interview and Preface by Ali Murphy