Idaho Commission for Libraries

In the Wilderness is a memoir about growing up in the isolated logging camps of North Idaho during the 1960s, a work about family and identity.  Kim Barnes’ parents moved from the Oklahoma dustbowl to North Idaho, where her father became a logger and the family lived a modest but happy life.  Then, in the economic downturn on the 1960s and with mechanization, loggers’ jobs began disappearing.  Barnes’ father was determined to stay on, however, and the family sought community and consolation in a Pentecostal sect.  This conversion had a profound effect on the family, influencing everything from dress to gender roles to fundamental assumptions about the world.  At first docile, Barnes rebelled as an adolescent.�

Full of anecdotal detail, uncompromising and painful, the memoir depicts a young woman’s struggles to discover who she is.  It traces a passage into, as Barnes has written, “a wilderness that was something other than physical: the wilderness brought on by physical isolation; the wilderness that is the sexuality of a young girl coming of age in such an isolated environment; and the wilderness of our souls, from which our church helped to save us.”  Admitting that she still carries “resentment and bitterness,” Barnes nevertheless demonstrates in this narrative that she “can live in the wilderness and outside of it, that I can embrace the whole.”  The book’s ending depicts the narrator’s return to the beloved woods of her youth.  In the Wilderness was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1997.

Author Essay and Notebook - Random House

Author Information

Kim Barnes was born in 1958 in North Idaho and grew up in isolated logging camps. In the mid-1960s, her family joined the Pilgrim Holiness Church in Pierce, becoming members of a fundamentalist sect related to snake-handlers.  Barnes was a rebellious adolescent, and after her graduation from Lewiston High School (as a member of the National Honor Society) she held a variety of jobs. In the early 1980s, she enrolled in Lewis and Clark State College in Lewiston, studying English.  There she met her husband, the poet and professor Robert Wrigley.�

Barnes currently teaches at the University of Idaho and writes poetry, short stories, and memoir.  Her work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines, including Shenandoah and The Georgia Review.   She is co-editor with Mary Blew of Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers.  In addition to In the Wilderness, she is also author of a second memoir, Hungry for the World, and several novels.  She lives in Moscow, Idaho, with her husband and two children.

Idaho Commission for the Arts Current Writer in Residence
Northwest Schools of Literature Interview

Discussion Questions

1. Barnes has written that the family’s early life was “short on material wealth, but long on the riches of family and friends, and the great sheltering power of the wilderness.”  In what sense(s) was the young girl “sheltered” by the wilderness?  How does that relationship help explain the book’s ending?

2. Why do you think that Barnes’ family turned to fundamentalism?  What did the sect give them that was lacking, or that they wanted, in their lives?

3. How does entering the church change their lives?  Does it make sense to you that the young girl at first embraces this new orientation with her parents?

4. Why does she rebel?  Do you, as a reader, have sympathy for her rebellion?�

5. What are some of the ways that you might define “wilderness,” as the term is used in this book?  How do these various sorts of wildernesses help the narrator to “shape [her] heart and soul” and “face [her] demons,” as one book description puts it?

6. Barnes told an interviewer that “personal nonfiction destabilizes.  It redefines the present, and tells us how to act now.”  She has also written, “I want to trace my own journey as I remember and then remake my past.”  In what respect does a writer of memoir necessarily “remake” the past?  How could such an act “redefine the present?”

7. Barnes makes it clear that she has turned her back on her parents’ fundamentalism. Is this book’s narrator still a person of faith?  In what?