Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum | March/April 2013

Kim Barnes

EXCERPT

Kim Barnes has published two memoirs. In the Wilderness was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her second, Hungry for the World, was a Border’s Books New Voices Selection. She has also published two novels, Finding Caruso and A Country Called Home, and Knopf released her new novel, In the Kingdom of Men, in 2012. In the Kingdom of Men, named a Best Book of 2012 by The Seattle Times and San Francisco Chronicle, is a richly imaginative novel set in 1960s Saudi Arabia. It chronicles the life of Gin McPhee who leaves the dusty farmlands of Oklahoma to follow her husband, a star basketball player and burgeoning activist, to the developing oil fields of the Persian Gulf, where he will supervise an offshore drilling operation run by the Arabian American Oil Company. They are seeking a better life for themselves, but what they soon discover is a world of wealth, glamor, American privilege, and corruption.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: Let’s talk about In the Kingdom of Men.

Barnes: This book was especially interesting and demanding because it takes place in 1960s Saudi Arabia. I felt like a doctoral student doing all this research on the history, not only of the country and the people who were there before it was a country, but also about the Bedouins and the House of Saud before that. The Arabian-American Oil Company and its history is fascinating.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Is Aramco a real company? Please forgive my ignorance.

Barnes: Oh yes. It’s amazing how little we know and how important Aramco’s role in our own history has been along with the history of the Arab countries and that of Israel. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve realized that I needed to learn and how it would take a lifetime to become a specialist in that area. Every now and then I panic, wondering if my understanding is still too shallow.

I keep saying to myself, “Remember, Kim, this is fiction.” In a memoir, you attempt to be an authority on your own history. But fiction is about my characters, and I’ve focused on that. One of my characters in the book is a Jewish woman, Ruthie, who was educated in Beirut and whose family died in the death camps. She lives in the compound of Abqaiq. It’s my understanding that there were Jews who worked in Arabia for Aramco who couldn’t identify themselves as Jewish.

McFadyen-Ketchum: I don’t remember Ruthie being particularly Jewish, but that’s kind of important.

Barnes: In Iran, it’s my understanding from talking to the Aramcons (Americans who worked for Aramco), that there were Jewish employees who were in the American camps—as they called them—but Aramco would change their passports so they wouldn’t be identified as Jewish.

McFadyen-Ketchum: When I was a young writer trying to figure out what I was doing—am I a poet? am I a fiction writer?—I would try to write stories and feel like I didn’t know about anything. Much of what you deal with in the book has to do with the history of the region and with the place itself. It’s extraordinarily authentic. Did you go over and live there for a while? Have you ever been in a desert like that? How did you do it?

Barnes: One thing I recognized right away was that Saudi Arabia was just another kind of wilderness. My first book, In the Wilderness, and all of my books since then, have been set in places of isolation and marginalization, on the cusp of change. Being raised in a Fundamentalist church with the King James Bible, one thing I came to understand is that our sense of wilderness is quite different than what is talked about in the Bible, and of course that is the true wilderness of the desert: the Empty Quarter. So I’ve been dealing with elements of isolation, including self-isolation and themes of social and cultural dislocation and isolation, for some time.

In The Kingdom of Men came to me through my aunt and uncle. My aunt is my father’s oldest sibling. I’m first generation Idaho, and all my family on both sides is from Oklahoma. They were sharecroppers and marginal farmers, sometimes living in dirt floor shacks.

When my aunt married my uncle, who was a roughneck in the oil fields, and he went to work for Halliburton, their quality of life shot through the roof. They were still living in apartments, and she was working to bring in a little extra money at that time. There was a change, though, when Aramco needed these oilfields developed in Saudi Arabia, and there was no one to develop them. Aramco was trying to put the Bedouins to work, but the whole infrastructure had to be built from the ground up. There were no roads.

McFadyen-Ketchum: There was nothing.

Barnes: Well, in the context of oil development there was nothing. Of course there was a very rich culture, both the Bedouin culture and what they called the “town Arab” culture. So my uncle became a roughneck on an offshore drilling site in the Persian Gulf.

McFadyen-Ketchum: So this novel is a fictionalization of real life?

Barnes: It’s very much a fictionalization as far as the story, but the idea for the book came to me from my aunt and uncle. When they retired, they moved to the Northwest, so I was able to spend more time with them than I had before. On one Thanksgiving holiday with them it dawned on me that Saudi Arabia was such a great place to set a novel.

What fascinated me was the story of the women who lived within the gated American compounds. It was the American dream. They had swimming pools and the best doctors. My aunt and uncle were suddenly living the middle class dream and had, as my uncle said, more money than they knew what to do with and nowhere to spend it.

The women inside had beauty parlors, and some wore imported Italian designer gowns to their cocktail parties—but the women, once they stepped outside that gate, could no longer drive; they had to dress modestly; they had to be in the company of a male relative or a guardian.

I was really fascinated by that: that combination of sudden wealth, on the Americans’ side, and the Saudi side and the Bedouins’ transformation. It gives nouveau riche a new definition. I had never been to Arabia, and when I started writing this book and researching it, I realized the complexity of what I was trying to do. I was talking to another author, Selden Edwards, at the time, whose book was set in Venice at the turn of the 20^th century. I told him I was trying to decide whether to go to Saudi Arabia, which is not easy. I mean, we are not just allowed to travel to Saudi Arabia.

McFadyen-Ketchum: You can’t just hop on a bus…

Barnes: No, you have to be sponsored; it’s very different now than it was in the ’60s. My aunt, in the early ’60s, was able to get on the company bus and go to Khobar and shop and not have to cover up. It was expected that you dress like you’re going to church but not the full abaya. Now it’s much more strict. Aramco at that time was granted special dispensation so that American women not covering their heads were tolerated. Selden Edwards chose not to go to Venice because the Venice of 1897 is no longer there. It doesn’t exist anymore. The same is true of 1960s Saudi Arabia.

McFadyen-Ketchum: That’s a really interesting bit of wisdom. You must have been somewhat drawn in by the allure of going and visiting this foreign land, but he was right.

Barnes: I do love the idea of being on the cusp of change. I love being in places where certain things are becoming anachronistic. And truly—and this is an American romanticization in a way—my family’s experience was an adventure. It was another frontier. That’s another thing I talk about in the book: that, for the Americans, it was just another kind of Manifest Destiny. At the same time, it was where any number of people were remaking themselves, and that’s always very dangerous and intriguing.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Let’s talk about Mason McPhee, Gin McPhee’s husband. He’s a high school basketball star who quotes Martin Luther King in their poor hometown in Oklahoma in the ’60s. When Gin gets pregnant, he immediately commits to her. He’s an unusual guy.

Barnes: He is; he’s what we might call a man of destiny. He has a larger vision, and he’s an idealist. In that way, he also has hubris, which is what interested me in his character.

McFadyen-Ketchum: I think you just described my father to a tee.

Barnes: And perhaps mine, too.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Good men, but men who can sometimes be a pain, right? So Gin and Mason get married and, long story short, the story you basically just told of your aunt and uncle is pretty much what happens to them. He gets an offer to go to Aramco, and they move together. What happens then?

Barnes: This is where the story of my aunt and uncle and the story of the book diverge. My uncle, as he told me, remained a roughneck. He’s also laughingly told me that he didn’t remember a great deal because he was drunk all the time—which I love. It was kind of one big party.

McFadyen-Ketchum: It’s rather scandalous within the American compound.

Barnes: It is, and that it’s happening in Saudi Arabia is especially scandalous. In Arabia, the whole thing is: if you don’t see it, then it isn’t happening. It’s very much “don’t ask don’t tell.”

McFadyen-Ketchum: There’s an interesting moment when Gin and Mason get into the house they’ve been given to live in with a marble floor in the master bath. They also have a servant, a middle-aged “house boy,” who has been married and has his own tragic story. Great character.

Barnes: I love Yash.

McFadyen-Ketchum: At one point, Gin wants to open the curtains and Yash says, “No, no, no, that means people will be able to see in. You don’t want that.”

Barnes: As Yash tells her, the compound is not there to protect the Americans from the Arabs; it’s to protect the Saudi Arabians from the Americans. My aunt and uncle’s story is one of really great adventure. My two cousins were young and were raised inside the compound, went to school there. As my cousin Terry said, “When we lived there, we were little princes and princesses.” They called themselves Aramco Brats and still do. When Aramco children graduated from eighth grade, they were sent to some of the finest boarding schools in the country—in the world, actually—subsidized by Aramco. It changed those people’s lives. My aunt and uncle were there for a few years and then came back, having moved up the ladder in amazing ways. The story of Gin and Mason McPhee takes a much darker turn because of Mason’s ambition and his idealism and his hubris and his blindness. He fails to realize there is much more he cannot control.

McFadyen-Ketchum: As I was reading the book, I found myself wishing someone would tell him to stop poking his nose in such dangerous territory. It’s implied, but he never picks up on it.

Barnes: Well, he’s blind. He’s a tragic character; I mean that in a classical, Aristotelian way. A challenge in the book was to take a female character like Gin, our main character, and give her some of those attributes, too. Women writers really aren’t allowed to write truly tragic female characters. Aristotle said that women are not noble enough to be tragic; they can never fall from grace because they are never high enough. We won’t allow our female characters to suffer true penance.

McFadyen-Ketchum: I don’t know if you listened to Terry Gross’s interview with Meryl Streep. Streep said something along the lines of, “Being a woman actress is difficult because so few people, even women, can identify with a female lead role.”

Barnes: The big difference is that we’ll allow women to be victims and to be victimized by men. In Thelma and Louise, we saw something we had never seen. They took control of their own destiny, but their choices were very limited. They could either go back into the system, or they could take their own lives. This is different from, say, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who went out in a blaze of glory. When Thelma and Louise go, they’re victims.

Trying to change that paradigm is a fascinating exercise and frustrating. I actually think we’re going to see more of it in such movies as, say, Kill Bill, where we have a female lead capable of making mistakes and bringing about her own fall. I wanted Gin to be possessed of real blindness, for her to make a tragic error, and to fall from grace and to bring about chaos and then to suffer penance. I mean, think about it.

I don’t know if you’ve ever read Andre Dubus’s A Father’s Story. It’s written in first person, and our main character is Catholic but has made a decision to protect his daughter, to lie to protect her from judgment because she has killed someone by accident. He covers it up even though he’s a good Catholic and goes to confession. At the end of the story—it’s a really fascinating move, really risky on Dubus’s part—he talks to God directly. When God says, “What you did is not right,” the main character says, “But if it had been Your child, You would have done the same thing.” God, of course, says “Well, I did sacrifice my own son.” And the main character says, “But if it had been your daughter rather than your son, you could not have borne her passion.” “Passion” in this context means pain.

Dubus is right: we cannot bear our womenfolk to tolerate so much pain. When Bob (my husband, the poet Robert Wrigley) and I were in the airport, recently there was a female serviceperson dressed in her fatigues, getting ready to ship out. She had in her arms her little baby—maybe six months old—and I could not bear her passion. It was overwhelming to me even as I absolutely support women’s roles in the military.

As fiction writers, women are judged for including violence because we are expected to redeem. I was having an argument with one of my poet friends recently about Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She criticized the book for not having any female characters. She said, “If he had had female characters, then the male characters would have been redeemed.” She considers herself a feminist, but to me that’s an anti-feminist argument. I don’t have that requirement. It is hard for us to accept female authors writing violence that is not linked to the victimization of women.  It’s now more acceptable for us to write about abuse and rape, and our characters can react against that, but it is still outside the expected and accepted roles for women to be violent of their own volition.  We accept and even support it when female characters who have been victimized themselves create violence, but we really can’t tolerate it when female characters bring chaos into the “pre-ordained” order by acting against their “nature”—their role as mother, wife, redeeming Madonna. Frankly, such stories are not often allowed by the publishing industry.

McFadyen-Ketchum: They didn’t allow you to do that?

Barnes: No. In the Kingdom of Men doesn’t end the way it was originally written. The ending was too dark; I was asked to reconsider.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Let’s backtrack a little bit. You grew up dirt poor in the middle of nowhere in Idaho. Your father was a logger. The logging camps you grew up in were made up of rings of wooden trailers. The snow would get so high you would dig cave-like passages to the outhouses and such and survive through hunting, stores of food…

Barnes: We hunted, as I say, no matter the season, and in the summer we picked huckleberries. We got fruit from my grandmother who lived in Lewiston, which was a couple hours away, and canned and froze it.

McFadyen-Ketchum: It was hard reading your memoirs. There’s a difference between reading fiction and nonfiction for the reader. What is it like for you? In Hungry for the World, you basically reveal—I’m not exactly sure what words to use—that you were briefly a prostitute? Some kind of sex…

Barnes: That was what the man I was with, David I call him, was pointing me toward. Now we would call him a sexual predator. That phrase didn’t exist in the ’70s. There was no lexicon or context. We’re talking about a time when I turned eighteen, graduated from high school, had a final falling out with my father, and left home. He shunned me. It was a very ritualized kind of shunning, an Amish kind of shunning. That lasted for a couple of years.

When I left home on the night of high school graduation, I lost every community I’d had. I was heavily involved in the church and the faith. I had my family. And I had my friends from high school. That night everything changed: I lost my family; I could no longer be a part of that family; I lost my faith because—having gone up against my father and not submitted to his will—I was failing to submit to God’s will. Our faith taught that God was over man, man over woman, and woman over child.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Your memoirs really did a wonderful job of opening my eyes to fundamentalism.

Barnes: It is one of the things that drew me to the story in Saudi Arabia because of the parallels to my own character. I had been raised Pentecostal Fundamentalist in a sect called Pilgrim Holiness or Holiness. It teaches literal separation from the world.

McFadyen-Ketchum: And when you left home, you were suddenly thrust back into it.

Barnes: Exactly, without any awareness or preparation or “armor,” as I call it in the book. So when this older man came courting me with roses and fine dinners and a yellow Corvette, I was blind to what that really was. At the end of that year we were together, and I was in great danger. He had a history of rape and violence. I lost everything, all the trappings of the independence I so desired. I lost my job. I lost my car. He took my guns.

McFadyen-Ketchum: He absorbed you.

Barnes: Absolutely. This was part of his mode of operation; he hadn’t just done this with me. But it wasn’t really until I wrote Hungry for the World that I understood what kind of danger I was in. I had become numb with the kind of emotional and verbal and sexual abuse that went with the relationship.

One thing I talk about in the book is that when I finally did disobey “David,” it was like disobeying my father. Strangely and paradoxically, surviving my father gave me the strength to believe that I could survive David James. And I did. I paid a particular price. He came back and raped me as he promised he would when I left him.

I started to write Hungry for the World as fiction because I didn’t want to deal with these truths. I didn’t want that story to be me. I took the first chapter into William Kittredge’s workshop at the University of Montana—Bob, my husband, was the Richard Hugo Chair there, and I was a student in the MFA Program. It was written well, and I knew it was intriguing. It had a kind of Mr. Goodbar feel to it. It was going to be dark, but the girl was kind of a party girl. It was both me and not me, but it didn’t have a tone of lament; rather, it had a tone of danger.

People were very kind and generous with it in the workshop. It was a fiction workshop, and no one knew me, so it was being read as complete fiction. They were able to talk about it very openly at the level of craft. But Kittredge just sat there quietly. He didn’t say a word.

At the end, he kind of nodded and looked at me and said, “Well, Kim, I think you could probably send this off and get a book deal right now.” Of course I smiled, thinking, “Wow! That’s great!” But then he looked at me and said, “The question is why would you write this as fiction?” He outed me, right in class.

McFadyen-Ketchum: He removed your armor.

Barnes: Yes. Some people have said that wasn’t right. But it was right, and Kittredge knew it was right.

McFadyen-Ketchum: It sounds like it was right and wrong at the same time.

Barnes: Well, he did out me. He didn’t know my past, but he knew intuitively. No one knew. Bob, as it turns out, didn’t know. I thought I had told him everything, but I hadn’t. I went home devastated, but I knew Kitteridge was right, and he knew I could take it.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Good teachers know what their students can take.

Barnes: It floored me, but the next day I got up and started writing it as a memoir. I knew it would be a different book. In the Wilderness was a finalist for the Pulitzer, it won the Pen/Jerard Award for an emerging female writer, but I knew this memoir would be different because it was not going to be easy to read. It was going to be transgressive, about things you shouldn’t talk about. It was going to make people mad. It was going to make people uncomfortable. People were going to put the book down.

McFadyen-Ketchum: I certainly did.

Barnes: A lot of people did, and it was very controversial. I’ve had very mixed responses to that book. But the reason I write memoir is first and foremost to serve the art. I do not believe in making things up in nonfiction, I’m really strict about this with my students and with myself. I believe in staying in the form; that’s part of the challenge. It’s like a sonnet. To me, it’s always a failure of the imagination when people knowingly make stuff up in nonfiction. It’s because they don’t trust their ability with the craft.

McFadyen-Ketchum: It’s certainly easier to go into la-la land than to say, “No, this is what happened. How am I going to say this in a way that works?”

Barnes: In literary memoir, the story isn’t what happened; it’s why. It’s the vertical movement inside and how you make sense of memory. That’s where the tension is. True, there’s tension in Hungry for the World because you’re worried about me, but the true tension resides in my ability to make art in this telling of the story of what happened. The real tension is intellectual and emotional.

McFadyen-Ketchum: It’s making me think of Picasso’s Guernica; it’s not the story of what happened that matters but whatever is on the canvas.

Barnes: The presentation.

McFadyen-Ketchum: And why things happen. In fiction, I guess the reader’s question would be, “What is going to happen?”

Barnes: Well, it depends if the story or book is plot-driven. What happens becomes very important, but most literary fiction is character-driven. Plot-driven books—which Stephen King does very well—are very formulaic. Then there are voice-driven books that are more literary. Of course, in memoir, the voice is incredibly important. That’s why writing Hungry for the World was so difficult. When I sat down to write it, I had to go back and remember. Before I had put that girl—that young woman—in the closet.

I did not want her in my life anymore. I had a wonderful relationship with my husband. We had two children of our own and Bob’s son from a previous relationship. I was on a good track, and things were going well. In the Wilderness was doing great.

But I write to serve the art; I tell my story to bear witness to the stories of others.

One thing I often tell my nonfiction students is that even though this is about you, and it’s your story, it’s not about you. It’s about the human condition and our fears and betrayals and desires.

McFadyen-Ketchum: My mother and I have developed a really nice relationship through sharing books over the last few years. She grew up in a somewhat similar situation as yours. In North Carolina’s Appalachia. Not terribly religious, but her family hid the chair legs on their chairs…

Barnes: That’s Victorian.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Right. After she read In the Wilderness, she called me up, and we talked for hours about her upbringing and all the weird (nothing like what you went through but still weird) ways in which she was completely uneducated about sex and the human body and such. I understand her now in a way I never could have without your books, and I think that’s the true power of stories. They connect people. They teach. But I still can’t imagine growing up the way so many women have in the past… I guess the way so many still are…

Barnes: Yes… the disassociation of women. Their awareness of the body. Their living inside the body and it not really belonging to them.

McFadyen-Ketchum: That’s part of what goes on in In the Kingdom of Men, I think. Gin is really quite beautiful, but she grew up completely cloistered, kind of like a woman in Saudi Arabia now. She’s a fox, so to speak, but doesn’t know it. The following scene takes place after Ruthie has taught Gin to give a blowjob on a coke bottle. Mason comes home after being away on the offshore drilling platform for about two weeks for the first time.

Barnes: And it was a surprise; they hadn’t expected the men to show up.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Right, he sort of appears out of nowhere, which is a whole other issue for Gin. She decides to perform this newly discovered act that neither she nor Mason has ever experienced. Afterwards he says: “Who are you?” to which Gin replies, “‘Just me,… Virginia Mae McPhee.’ But I wasn’t so sure anymore.”

Everything changes after that. It strikes me that some of what goes on with Gin in In the Kingdom of Men is a sort of sexual revolution.

Barnes: Absolutely. It’s 1967. In the compounds, the Aramco wives had more power than they’d ever had before. My aunt was a career woman there. These women developed incredible female friendships that lasted the rest of their lives, and they helped raise each other’s children and so on.

Another story I wanted to tell is the difference between the coming-of-age story of men and that of women. For men it’s: you lose your virginity, you start shaving, you start drinking, you get drunk and play cards—not necessarily in that order.

McFadyen-Ketchum: For me, it was the other way around.

Barnes: I’ve always loved One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest because, when Randle Patrick McMurphy comes into the mental institution, he takes the feebs (this is what he calls them anyway) through their coming of age into masculinity. Nurse Ratched, of course, has denied them this.

Leslie Fiedler, the critic, has a great piece, looking at McMurphy and Nurse Ratched in this regard. McMurphy teaches the men how to play cards, how to gamble. He takes them out fishing; they play sports. Billy loses his virginity to the prostitute Randle brings in, etc. All of this is to spite Nurse Ratched because, according to that paradigm, you have to spite the female, you have to differentiate from the mother in order to become the dominant man.

“What is coming of age like for women?” When I ask myself this question, even now… when I ask my female students what is the woman’s coming of age, they say: you start your period, you shave your legs, you get married, and you have babies.

McFadyen-Ketchum: It’s mostly awful.

Barnes: Well, it’s changed so much. For Gin McPhee to break out of that was pretty radical. What I really loved about her story was finding and discovering her friends. Ruthie is one of my favorite characters. She banters like men do. There’s a little bit of insulting that happens back and forth between her and Gin. Sexual teasing and sexual talk. So to see these women as Gin’s guides into this world—I really cherished that.

McFadyen-Ketchum: You must have enjoyed writing it.

Barnes: I did! Gin becomes, in her way, empowered through Ruthie and the other friends she makes at Aramco. Of course, my vision of women becoming empowered is always tempered by fear. In my experience, whenever a woman believes she can control her own destiny, she’s punished.

McFadyen-Ketchum: It’s certainly a scary proposition to be the pioneer in any scenario. What I think is really remarkable about the book is that it’s an adventure story.

Barnes: It’s an adventure story and a cautionary tale, as the characters discuss in the book.

McFadyen-Ketchum: And it’s a tragic tale. I think it’s going to be very interesting to see the readership for it. It could be received across ages and generations very differently. I think that’s what good literature does; it’s read differently by different people; it’s multi-dimensional. Listening to you talk about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I’m thinking that I missed a lot of it.

Something I’ve been wanting to ask: What’s your relationship with your father like now?

Barnes: After living away from home, I met Bob, got married, and had children, reestablishing my relationship with my father along the way. I am my father’s daughter; I am the one who’s most like him. It’s one of those contradictions: I was the child who disobeyed, ran away from home in eighth grade and left the house the night of high school graduation. This turns out to be its own kind of stubbornness.

I think he respected me for refusing to submit. He was the kind of man who lost respect for you if you did so. So he’s a double-edged sword. People in my family have paid the price for trying to please him and giving him what he demanded. He was an autodidact and very intellectually demanding even though he spoke “old world Okie.”

So our relationship became more and more based on an intellectual give-and-take. I sent In the Wilderness for him and my mom to read—I wanted them to see it first. It was their lives, too—I was afraid I’d lose him again. My mother would never go against his demands, so I would lose her; my children would lose their grandparents… In short, a lot was at stake.

My mom called first after I sent it to them. She was crying. She apologized for failing me. Of course, that’s not what I wanted her to feel at all, but she specifically said that she wished she had intervened when my father was being tyrannical.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Well, he flipped like a switch. You guys weren’t even religious and then, BOOM!, he became a fundamentalist.

Barnes: Yes, my father always said he believed in demons. I think he was probably struggling with some type of bipolar disorder.

McFadyen-Ketchum: At home in Lewiston he would read in dead silence in the living room. When you left the wilderness, he ripped himself away from what he loved.

Barnes: I told my mom, “Don’t feel guilty. I have this wonderful life; it’s what you’ve given me.” She started crying and—this surprised me—she said, “No one has ever tried to understand my story.” She was crying for her own lost self, that girl who got married at sixteen, who got into this fundamentalist religion, who disappeared, who became invisible. I hadn’t seen that coming. Then she said, “Your father is going to be calling soon.”

So… yeah… TERROR… I felt like I was sixteen all over again. I was sure he was going to shun me, so Bob took the kids and left the house. I crawled into bed and got underneath the covers. The bedside phone rang, and the first words out of his mouth were, “You are my daughter, and you have made a terrible mistake.” He spoke like this Old Testament God.

I thought, “This is it,” so I disassociated. I had learned how to do this in this relationship I had with “David.” You bifurcate. Your body’s still there, but your awareness floats onto the ceiling like you’re looking down on yourself. All there was was silence. Then he started talking.

It took me a little while to hear what he was saying, but then I heard him say, “If you had called me and asked me, I would have told you what year your uncle’s Chevy was.”

All of a sudden I realized he wasn’t shunning me; he was actually talking to me about my life. When I think about this now, I think he changed his mind in that minute or so of silence. He wasn’t kidding when he said, “you’ve made a terrible mistake,” but after that silence his tone completely changed. We talked for four hours. More than my father and I had ever talked in our entire lives.

This was a man who spoke in monosyllables, and he never talked about emotions. Emotions made you weak. At the end of that four hours, it was like this dam of everything we had never talked about was finally broken. It was absolutely overwhelming. At the end of that conversation he asked, “Do I want you to publish this book? No, I don’t.” Then he said, “Do I think that you should?... Yes, I do.”

McFadyen-Ketchum: He finally let you make a choice without abandoning you for doing so…

Barnes: It was an amazing gift. From that point on, our relationship became more and more enmeshed. I enmeshed with my father, which isn’t always healthy. We over-identified with each other. But I learned in that time to keep myself open to my father’s wisdom and his love and the good, constructive stuff and to protect myself from what was destructive. I was able to create better boundaries.

He was very ill for ten years. He had a dissected aorta that didn’t kill him, though it kills most people. That it didn’t kill my father was not a surprise to anyone. During those ten years, one of the side effects was chronic pain that not even narcotics could knock down. I became one of his primary caretakers. So we had that time before he lapsed into dementia.

McFadyen-Ketchum: This goes back again to why we write. It’s to build those connections to each other: between you and your father and me and my mother and between your audience and… whoever… It’s remarkable.

Barnes: Story is communal.

McFadyen-Ketchum: I don’t know that there’s another tool the human race has that can do this. It’s too bad more people don’t engage in it.

You’ve said that In the Wilderness is a mythology whereas Hungry for the World (I’m quoting the book here) is “a narrative of shame.” It’s almost as if you finished Hungry for the World and then you were done with memoir.

Barnes: For now.

McFadyen-Ketchum: So you came up with Finding Caruso. You said earlier that you first wrote Hungry for the World as a novel in which the female character is in love with danger. Irene in Finding Caruso is a lot like this. She enters the small town of Snake Junction, and seduces the novel’s main character, Buddy, a seventeen-year-old virgin. She struck me as someone who had been abused as a young woman but who also knows how to navigate the world of men. She struck me as someone you wish you might have (at one time or another) been.

Barnes: Well, you’re asking a question around something that isn’t in the book, but is something you sense in the book. Finding Caruso was originally titled Goodnight, Irene. It’s a retelling of Shane, which was a big book and movie in the lives of my generation and earlier. It’s a Western; Shane is a gunslinger who comes into town in the middle of this cusp of change in the West between ranchers and farmers.

My eldest uncle is very much like Buddy’s older brother, Lee—a country western singer who probably could have been famous but didn’t have the ambition. They come from Oklahoma. “The Stables” of Caruso really was an amazing little nightclub right on the Clearwater River on the edge of Nez Perce Indian Reservation.

From the beginning, I was interested in the story of these two brothers. I started Caruso in third person; when you write memoir everyone says, “Oh sure, you’re writing a novel in first person; how hard is that?” and I was determined to show people that I could write in third. So I wrote three hundred pages and took it to my writing group that’s been meeting every summer for twenty-five years. They said they didn’t know who my main character was. That was really hard to hear after all that work.

Then again, I was at a party one time with James Welch while he was working on The Indian Lawyer, I think. Jim was always sun shiny: big smile, sweet, kind, gentle. But on this occasion, he had a drink in hand and was sitting all by himself. I asked him what was wrong. He just looked at me and said, “It’s point of view. I got it wrong. It’s all wrong.” If point of view doesn’t work, nothing works.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Beth Lordan taught me that at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. She says that point of view is everything.

Barnes: Jim had to go back and work on the book for another year, and I realized I had to do the same thing. I thank God for those kinds of mentors and guardians. It happens, right? So I went back and was trying to figure out who my main character was. I was thinking it had to be Irene. I just love Irene.

McFadyen-Ketchum: She is a great character. So mysterious. And sexy as hell.

Barnes: She is a woman of mystery; we don’t know why she drives into town. So I started thinking about Irene as if she were Shane. The gunslinger, Shane, is an anachronism. We’re at a point of change in that film: his law had been his guns, but it’s beginning to be about rules and barbed wire and law and political power.

So he had laid down his guns, trying to escape his fate. He’s no longer of use in this culture, but the bad guy is trying to push the farmers out for the ranchers, and Shane’s the only one who can set it right. He cannot escape his fate; he has to pick up his guns and do what he was meant to do before he self-exiles.

In the archetypal story, these sin-eater characters can never stay. They can never find a home. They are always trying to out-distance their fates, and that’s tragic.

I thought about Irene in this regard. She’s not a gunslinger, but she’s got her cunning and her sexuality. It’s been brought about by unfortunate events, but it’s the power she has to set things right. During the course of the story, she rides into town in her black car, in her green dress, and with her red hair.

McFadyen-Ketchum: When I was reading Caruso, I kept thinking,  “I wish I was there. I just want to look at her.” You drew her up very well.

Barnes: Her beauty and charm and upper-class carriage is based on my uncle the country singer’s then wife. She was stunning and red-haired. She was fascinating to me as a girl. When there is a wrong in the book that needs to be made right, Irene has to use her sexuality to set things right, and then she has to leave town.

McFadyen-Ketchum: I’ll never forget when Buddy just misses her on her way out. He thinks about killing the horse, running the horse into the ground to catch up with her, but decides against it.

Barnes: Why do you think that has to happen? Why is that the thing to do? Why does he have to make that decision in the context of his longer story? How does that resolve where the book opens?

McFadyen-Ketchum: I’m not sure; you’ve stumped me.

Barnes: It’s important. We’re talking academically here, but it has to do with where this book opens because the opening of the book is very controversial.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Okay, pardon me. Let me get in there now. In the beginning, when he’s just a boy, he has a horse his father plows through with a truck because it’s being disobedient. By the end of the novel, Buddy doesn’t want to “run down” another horse.

Barnes: Right! It’s redemption. I write very much out of tragedy, and violence is a part of it. You know: blood on the stage, the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare—there are a lot of bodies on the stage when it’s all done.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Titus Andronicus.

Barnes: Right. So the opening of Finding Caruso is very brutal; I’ve had people get up and leave at readings. I understand. It also helps me see how I normalize the violence that took place in my own extended family where the men killed their animals with regularity.

So the violence against this horse is brutal; I knew it was brutal. My mother called after reading; she was crying. She said, “I can’t bear what happened to that horse.” “Remember,” I said, “this is fiction.” “I don’t care if it’s fiction,” she said. “This could have happened in our family.”

Redemption out of violence is very much part of the story I tell; you see this in everything I write. The set up of that story and that opening violence is the set-up for Buddy to redeem that story.

McFadyen-Ketchum: The redemption being not to do that violence again… moving beyond the pattern.

Barnes: Exactly. It’s the story of the redeeming of not only yourself but your father’s sins as well. I exist in a fairly Old Testament world.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Well, your life was torn apart by religion. You had an idyllic life in the wilderness. You worked with the land, and you knew the land. Then, suddenly, your father has visions of demons and takes you to a small town to grow up where you don’t get to make any decisions. At one point, your preacher says you’re a healer, confiscates your glasses, and says, “If you believe in God enough, thou shalt be healed.” When it didn’t work, he blamed you.

Barnes: Right, right.

McFadyen-Ketchum: That’s remarkably bizarre! And, yes, even the title In The Kingdom of Men sounds Old Testament. Are you religious at all these days? Are you spiritual? Do you have faith?

Barnes: That was one of the most difficult things for me when I wrote In the Wilderness. When I left the church and left my father’s house, I really left it; my religion taught me that there was no in-between.

McFadyen-Ketchum: You didn’t have any other option.

Barnes: No, you were either going to heaven or you were going to hell, and you know—like Huck says—“I’ll go to hell.”

Like with many other things, I started writing In the Wilderness as poems with titles like “In the Wilderness.” Then I turned them into short stories, and I published a couple of stories with titles like “In the Wilderness,” and “Baptism.” Then I started writing In the Wilderness as a novel, but it turned absurd. There was something almost grotesque about this story of good country people and their religion happening in the middle of nowhere. That worked as short stories.

McFadyen-Ketchum: It’s entertaining.

Barnes: It is entertaining! But when I sat down to write it as memoir—and this is one of the big differences—I had to go back and try to recapture what I really felt as a young girl growing up, which was not absurd, not ridiculous.

McFadyen-Ketchum: You were indoctrinated.

Barnes: I was, but I felt faith. I felt it when I was a child healer. I felt that heat come into my hands, and I had to feel whatever that is again. We see healers across world religions; it’s not particular to ours.

I felt vulnerable returning to that place. I had to go back to that place of faith and move forward. You know, with memoir, it has to be both the most objective thing you can offer and the most subjective. It’s challenging being on both sides.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Maybe I shouldn’t be thinking about writing in that form…

Barnes: It’s really demanding and challenging to do well. That’s what I want to do. To do it well. But your judgment should reside with your readers. That’s the case in anything we try to write.

When I went back to rewrite that story, I wanted to reenter that place of community that church gave us and the true fears and desires of the people we were in that church with, and their losses and betrayals and deaths, the losses of marriage, the accusations of bewitchment, and the loss of the identity of those shunned. In such a small community, the shunned, in many ways, lost their lives.

McFadyen-Ketchum: And usually it happened to the women.

Barnes: That was often the case. But writing the book allowed me to come back and start over again, and to understand that I could live in a place where I existed in wonder and in awe and curiosity and celebration. I love this; in another life, I’d like to be a neuroscientist. I no longer believe in free will, and I love that I no longer believe in free will because it’s something you have to “believe in.”

If you don’t believe in the soul, then you can’t believe in free will. Because, where does it reside?

McFadyen-Ketchum: It is its own sort of mystery.

Barnes: It is. And it’s nice to be able to exist in the world without thinking so much about damnation and judgment and being afraid of my very own thoughts. It feels, in a way, spiritual. I am very much more in the spirit of what we call the world and community.

McFadyen-Ketchum: So no heaven or hell? None of that stuff for you?

Barnes: No. We raised our children with an awareness of religion. We put world religion books on our shelves and talked very openly and told our children that if they ever wanted to attend church, we would take them. Our daughter decided when she was in grade school that she wanted to be Jewish because she was absolutely convinced that if only she were Jewish, then she could play the violin.

I loved it. She went to the Catholic Church, to the Methodist, the Lutheran, to Unitarian churches looking for that community. When she was about fourteen she said, “If I never dedicate myself to a faith, how will I know what faith feels like?” It killed me because I do know what faith feels like.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Well, that sort of faith.

Barnes: It taught me what faith feels like to continue a marriage. It taught me what faith feels like to bring children into the world, knowing that they could be taken away at any moment. I often say that that experience of growing up in that kind of physical and cultural isolation—and growing up with my father—shaped and scarred me. It’s my responsibility to take away from it what works.

McFadyen-Ketchum: You mentioned that you first wrote poems about your old life, and then stories, and eventually came to the memoir. In your work, you often write very poetically. The prose leaps into what I would call poems… without line breaks. Of this, of course, your husband, Bob, would say, “mmmm.”

Barnes: Oh, he agrees.

McFadyen-Ketchum: There are passages from Hungry for the World and A Country Called Home that read like poetry. There’s a clear switch between poetry and prose in your work. It sounds like you do this on purpose.

Barnes: Oh, yes. I could write three hundred pages of that kind of lyrical material, but the reader can’t tolerate it. It’s really hard for me. I love lyrical flights, but you have to be careful. In memoir, I’ll do it in passages as reflection after more narrative scenes. Reflection allows you to bring that lyrical voice forward.

McFadyen-Ketchum: So you’re in scene, and then you reflect, which allows for lyricism.

Barnes: Right, lyricism is the intrusion of authorial voice. It’s one of the challenges of writing memoir if you’re a lyrical writer; where do you bring it in? There’s this chapter, for instance, of In the Wilderness that transitions between the scenes in which I’ve run away from home and have been sent to live with a preacher and his family. I’m jaded and cynical, and I hate everybody. Really, I’m just being a typical teenager, but that was not allowed.

So I was kind of exiled in a way in this parsonage. One day we go fishing, and I get into this one particular fish. A monster who can’t be reeled in. As I get more and more into the fish, the writing gets more and more lyrical. We start to have more emotional tension along with the tension of the action. After losing the fish, I go back to the parsonage and I toss the cigarettes I’ve been sneaking out the window. It’s a transformative moment, and I’m able to reflect on that climax in that lyric voice.

McFadyen-Ketchum: What’s the simile again? The cigarettes out the window?

Barnes: “As though every sin could be rolled tight as tobacco and dropped out the window into another world.”

McFadyen-Ketchum: When I heard you read that simile at the Ropewalk Writers Retreat, I realized how much I’d erred in not reading you. And I’ve erred many, many times when it comes to being too lyrical. And I claim to be a poet!

Barnes: It’s a real balancing act; people have told me that I take too many lyrical leaps. But I know I’m risking it; I’m trying to risk it.

When I started In the Wilderness, I’d been writing poetry and had written some lyrical essays. My agent took my proposal for a full-length memoir having read only one of those essays. She said, “Write 30 pages into the book, and I’ll send it to Carol Houck Smith, the senior editor at Norton,” one of the great editors of all time. I was so excited; I couldn’t believe it. So I sat down and I wrote thirty pages, and, damn, it was beautiful.

So I sent it to my agent, and she sent it to Carol Houck Smith in New York. When my agent called, she informed me Carol had read it and was going to call. I was ecstatic. I was sure she was going to want it, and then I was going to be off into the world of authordom.

So the phone rings, and she says, “Kim!” and I say, “Yes!” and she says “What is all this poetic bullshit?” Those were the first words about my writing out of her mouth.

“You’re not writing poetry,” she went on. “This is not a poem. You’re trying to write a full-length prose narrative. You’ve got to start at the beginning and go to the end.” That’s all she said.

McFadyen-Ketchum: That was the whole conversation?

Barnes: No no, we talked more. But that was the takeaway. And of course she was right. “Just go back to your first memory,” she told me. “Ask yourself: ‘Where does the story start?’” I realized I had no idea.

I was devastated. I went to bed but couldn’t sleep. At two in the morning, I got up and took out my thirty pages, scissors, and tape. I cut the pages into pieces and lined them out chronologically and taped them all back together. Then I turned out the light and the next day started filling in the white space from the beginning to the end.

That eventually became In the Wilderness.

McFadyen-Ketchum: That makes so much sense. Like I was saying, there are multiple moments of poetry sans line breaks throughout the book. You don’t construct your books like that now, I assume? Now you understand how to intertwine scene and lyricism more intentionally?

Barnes: Well… it’s hard in memoir because memory is lyrical. In novels, it’s hardest for me to get at the emotional core and much of my lyricism delivers that emotional core. I have a tendency (a flaw really) to want to rely on lyricism to carry the story for me when what I really need is to tell the story, as Kittredge says.

When I wrote Hungry for the World, my editor, Bruce Tracy at Doubleday, just loved it. But then he took it to his people, and they didn’t love it, but he said they needed more of the story and less of the lyricism. “Sometimes,” Bruce said, “your writing is so beautiful it disguises the fact that there’s no story.”

That hurt. But editors aren’t in the job of being nice. And he was right. I thought about something my grandmother used to tell me: “Too much perfume covers up dirty underwear.” I use that one with my students when there is more lyricism than story in a prose narrative.

McFadyen-Ketchum: In poetry, I feel that far too often you get pure lyric or pure narrative. What you want is some sort of combination of the two, what I call “lyric-narrative.”

Barnes: What’s the derivation of the word lyric?

McFadyen-Ketchum: Are you asking me as if I might know? Hold on… Where’s my iPhone?

Barnes: The derivation of the word lyric comes from the word lyre, the musical instrument. But that word is associated with the choral lyric, the Greek chorus, the role of which was to comment on the action of the story. The chorus comes in to talk about moral judgment, to warn, to talk about moral commentary, to say BEWARE.

And while it’s always in that lyrical style, with that sense of song, the chorus isn’t simply musical. It’s the texture that it brings to the content of the story—within that is tension.

Tension has to exist at the level of the language; it has to exist at the level of the story; it has to exist at the level of the intellect; it has to exist at that level of the heart; it has to exist at the level of what we would call the soul, that archetypal tension of inherent dichotomies, the moving forward in life between morality and aesthetics.

When we write, we’re asking our readers to engage in that tension because without tension there is no resolution. And it’s the resolution, at some level, that story relies most upon. Even if it’s at the level of aesthetics or if there’s no plot whatsoever or action, we still have to have the resolution of the tension.

McFadyen-Ketchum: Well you’re pulling on your rubber band, and eventually it has to resolve, and that might even mean that it breaks, right?

Barnes: It all depends. The lyric poem, if it doesn’t involve lyric movement, has to resolve something else. So the question for the lyric poet is, “What is resolved?” That’s often at the level of the emotional atmosphere of the poem, and is always at the level of the intellect. 

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum’s work recently appeared or is forthcoming in many literary reviews. His anthology, Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days, was published by Upper Rubber Boot Books. He writes a column, poetry=am^k, as a contributing editor for the Southern Indiana Review; and he is Founder and Editor of PoemoftheWeek.org and Managing Editor of AdHominem.weebly.com.

Excerpt

from In the Kingdom of Men

January 1, 1970

Rome, Italy

Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I’m a bare-foot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that.

Here is the second thing: that young woman they pulled from the Arabian shore, her hair tangled with mangrove—my husband didn’t kill her, not the way they say he did.

There is so much, now, that you will want to know, that you believe I will be able to tell you. If not, why even begin?

Because I can’t stop thinking of her, not yet eighteen, perfectly, immutably silent, just as they wanted her to be. It is the dream of her face shining up from the sea like a watery moon that still haunts me. Not even her mother will speak her name.

Because, among these Roman people whose language flows like a river over rocks, my own name drops heavy as a stone, no husband, no father, no family or tribe to tether me.

Because I don’t know who I am anymore and have forgotten who it was I meant to be.

Let me tell it from the beginning, then, remember the truths of my own story so that I might better bear witness to hers, trace the threads to that place where our lives intertwined—one of us birthed to iron-steeped clay, the other to fallow sand, each of us brought to this place by men born of oil.

Chapter One

In the beginning—these three words my daily bread, recited at the kitchen table in our shack in Shawnee, the Bible open in front of me. Before then, just as the Korean War was beginning, I remember my mother humming honky-tonk as she fried spuds for our dinner, two-stepping to the table in an imaginary waltz. She was the daughter of a Methodist circuit preacher who extolled separation from the world, and his wife, who bowed her head in submission and held her tongue even as she secreted away the money she made selling eggs, a penny at a time added to the sock hidden beneath the nest of her beloved Rhode Island Red, a hen so fierce and prone to peck that my grandfather gave it wide berth.

My mother loved to tell the story: how my grandmother scraped and saved until she had enough for a train ticket back to her family in Pawhuska, then rose one morning, fixed her husband a big pot of pork hocks and brown beans—enough to last him a week—made bacon and extra biscuits so he wouldn’t have to go without breakfast, ironed his handkerchiefs and starched his shirts, then told him that one of the ladies of the church was having female troubles and needed her care. My grandmother walked out the door with a bundle of biscuits under one arm, her infant daughter in the other, went straight to the train station, didn’t even leave a note. My grandfather refused to divorce her, would never forgive the way she had deceived him, but maybe he should have known—the way that women have always lied, risking their souls to save their sorry lives.

It was eighteen years later when my father, two weeks hitchhiking Route 66 and still no job, came looking for work at the Osage County Fair and first laid eyes on my mother—a rodeo princess pitching cow chips for charity. He must have fallen in love with her right then—the way she could clean up pretty as a new nickel or muck down on her knees in manure, that sunshine smile never breaking. She brought him home to meet her mother, and I like to imagine that moment: the three of them at the table, the late light warm through the window, and all of them laughing at their good fortune—to have found one another, to share the sweet fruit of that pie.

My parents were married that winter, and the next winter, I was born. When my father was drafted, my mother and I moved in with my grandmother to wait out the war. Two years later, the official from the State Department arrived, telling how my father had died in the Home-by-Christmas Offensive, that the president was sorry, as was the nation. My only memories of him reside in the stories my mother told.

Excerpted from In the Kingdom of Men by Kim Barnes. Copyright © 2012 by Kim Barnes. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.