Kim Barnes - 1958
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Advanced English 3,
Emmett High School, Emmett, Idaho
I. Personal and Professional Biography
The modern Kim Marie Barnes, the successful author, is the product of pure talent cultivated in the logging country of Northern Idaho. From her beginnings in the wilderness through the roller coaster ride of her youth into her crash with true love, Kim Barnes puts truth to paper in her memoirs, poems, and other publications.
Barnes's parents were still teenagers when they were married in 1956. Her father, Arthur O'Neil Barnes, was eighteen and her mother, Claudette Keasling Barnes, was only sixteen. Kim Barnes was born only two years later on the 22 nd of May in 1958 in a hospital in Lewiston, Idaho (Interview). There she remained with her mother and grandmother for a week before returning to their home in Orofino Creek, Idaho, where her father awaited their arrival. Her father was a logger by trade, working alongside his brothers. As a large family they moved up and down the Clearwater River living in the small camps and communities created by North Idaho-Pierce Logging ( Contemporary).
Life was simple and sweet for the Barneses; what they lacked in the bank they made up in their loving relationships. Kim Barnes's best friend was Greg, her younger brother. They spent most of their time exploring the wilderness where they lived and fishing for cold-water char (Wilderness 29). In 1966 their simplistic life came to a halt. Barnes's aunts and cousins moved to urban areas, leaving her family to fend for themselves in the wilderness. Besides their lonely state, the economy was weakening and automation in the logging industry was inclining, which meant less work for her father (Wilderness).
Grasping in the darkness for a reason to remain, when Barnes was twelve, her mother investigated a Pentecostal church. After attending a few services her father joined, making their family membership official. They now prayed mornings, evenings, and over every meal. Barnes and her mother were now not allowed to adorn themselves with make-up, jewelry, to cut their hair, or to wear anything to attract attention as it was taught that it was a woman's sin should she cause a man to lust. Now, her father began to believe in the presence of angels and demons walking among them. The Church labeled Barnes, at age eleven, a healer. Where love and simplicity had held the Barnes family together, now Mr. Barnes's high fidelity toward the Pentecostal Church replaced those feelings with respect and submission. As Barnes grew up, she craved independence and began to grow apart from her family (Wilderness).
In her second memoir, Kim Barnes describes hard lessons learned in her teenage years. During her freshman year of high school, she had intimate boyfriends and wore makeup, worrying her mother and displeasing her father (Hungry). High school drudged on in this rebellious direction until she graduated from Lewiston High School on May 29th 1976 as a National Honor Society member (Wilderness 231). This same day, she got into an argument with her father, because he did not want her to attend one of the wild parties after the graduation ceremony. She went anyway. He would shun her for two years after that.
Barnes had been working since she was thirteen--her first job at Taco Time--but after she left home, working was a priority (Interview). She was a pharmaceutical technician until 1979 and then went through a variety of jobs such as life insurance sales, cocktail waiting, river guiding, and secretarial work, a short-lived job due to sexual harassment by her boss (Hungry 224). That was the least of Barnes's troubles with men, though. During this period, she had an abusive trucker boyfriend named "David." He had a trucking route from Lewiston to Seattle, Washington, where she spent a good portion of her time. He manipulated her to the core until their mutual breakup in the early 80's (Hungry).
After David left her life, she says she felt lost and depressed, but she moved on. Her dream was to become an English teacher so she applied to numerous schools including Harvard, but chose Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. There she received financial aide, but after she failed her classes, she lost all financial assistance, and it was then she met Robert Wrigley, a poet and professor at Lewis-Clark (Interview).
He re-introduced her to writings of Richard Hugo, William Kittredge's short stories, Ivan Doig, and Guthrie (Wilderness 255). He rekindled her love to read that she had developed as a youth in the wilderness, and she continued her life at Lewis-Clark, becoming a teacher's assistant in 1983. That same year she and Robert married after having known each other two years. They have two children together, one boy and one girl, Jordan and Jace, and, also, one stepson, Phillip. They lived peacefully in Lenore above the Clearwater River where Barnes was an English Professor at LCSC and writer, until the fall of 2000 when they moved to Moscow. Now her husband, Robert Wrigley, is the Master of Fine Arts Director at the University of Idaho, and Barnes continues as an English professor and writer, also working at the University of Idaho.
Since her beginning as a Lewis and Clark professor, Barnes has been writing. She evolved from writing poems to short stories, and in 1993 she joined Mary Clearman Blew in editing Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers in which she also contributed three poems: "Circle of Women," "Calling the Coyotes In," and "The Smell of Rain." During this time, Blew influenced Barnes to write her first memoir, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, which Barnes actually began writing as a novel. In this book, Barnes describes how her family came to live in Idaho and the change she endured when her family turned to Pentecostalism.
Her second memoir, Hungry for the World , describes her rebellion and move into the harsh reality she had been protected from as a child living in the woods. She is currently working on the third of her memoir trilogy, which she says, "will be the happy ending."
Other works can be found in periodicals such as Shenandoah, Flying, and more recently, a short essay, "The Ashes of August," in the Georgia Review, which tells of forest fires encountered by her father and her husband in the Idaho wilderness. In May of 2001 it won the Pushcart Award (Statesman ). Her latest novel, Goodnight Irene, which holds the name of song from the 1950's, is currently being reviewed in New York for publication (Interview).
Kim Barnes's writing has been far from unnoticed. In 1991 she received a $5,000 grant from the Idaho Commission on Arts. In 1995 she was fellowshipped by the Pen/Jerard Foundation for being an emerging woman writer of non-fiction. And, most memorably, her first memoir, In the Wilderness, was a Pulitzer Prize nominee (Random).
Barnes has reconciled with her family. Before she published her first memoir, she sent a copy to her parents to see how they felt about it. Her mother felt disappointed, not in her daughter, but in herself as a mother. They exchanged a sort of mutual forgiveness, and later Barnes spoke with her father on the phone for four hours, the longest they had ever talked in her life. They had reconciled. He is now disabled from a heart attack. Her brother, Greg, lives in Moscow, also, and now works with computers. All the Barneses, but Kim, are still firm in the Pentecostal faith. Though Barnes has not committed herself to another church, Wrigley describes them as belonging to "the church of nature," where they live somewhat by the concepts of Yin and Yang. Barnes says she keeps her spiritual side alive with her passion of writing (Interview).
She is one of Idaho's most promising and prominent authors. As long as her works continue to be read, Barnes will continue to inspire and captivate with her story of overcoming a sweet life become bleak, to following her dream of being a teacher and falling in love. The ink of Kim Barnes testifies of talent.
II. Works Cited
"Barnes, Kim." Contemporary Authors. Ed. Scott Peacock. Vol. 163. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 23-24.
---. In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country. New York: Doubleday, 1996. New York: Anchor, 1997.
---. Hungry for the World: a Memoir. New York: Villard, 2000.
--- and Mary Clearman Blew, ed. Circle of Women: an Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.
---. Personal Interview. 26 Apr. 2001.
---. "Why I Wrote in the Wilderness." Random House: Bold Type 1997. 18 Apr. 2001
"U of I Professor Wins Pushcart Prize." The Idaho Statesman 13 May 2001: Local 4. III. Bibliography "Barnes, Kim and Robert Wrigley." Idaho Writers in Place. Prod. Alan Lifton and Keith
Browning. Unedited videocassettes. 1993. MSS 144. Idaho Writers' Archive. Albertsons Library. Boise State University, Boise, ID. ---. "The Uneasy Chair: This Dark Moist Soil." George Jr. May 1997. 18 Apr. 2001.
Davis, Joanne M. "Blood Knot, Brain Weave: Evolution of Music and Meaning In the Poetry of Robert Wrigley." Thesis. Boise State U, 2000. Karinen, Jennifer. "Book 'Hungry for the World' Explores Author's Struggles." Lewiston
Morning Tribune 9 Apr. 2000: 6 B. "Kim Barnes." New Books and Videos at Bemis Public Library Apr. 2000. 18 Apr. 2001
Proctor, David. "Circle of Writers." Idaho Statesman 2 Sept. 1994. Rev. of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, by Kim Barnes.
Suek, Phil. "Wrigley at Home as Resident Writer." The Daily Idahonian [Moscow] 2 Oct. 1986. "Women Writing in the West." Book TV. Log Cabin Bookfest 2000. 18 Apr. 2001
This essay was submitted by a student of Joanne Davis, an English teacher at Emmett High School in Idaho.