In the Wilderness - by Kim Barnes (Paperback)

About the Book

Winner of the 1995 PEN/Jerard Fund Award, "In the Wilderness" is poet Kim Barnes' account of her journey toward adulthood, set against an interior landscape as awesome, as wondrous, and as fraught with hidden peril as the isolated northern Idaho logging camps where she grew up.

Book Synopsis

Poet Kim Barnes grew up in northern Idaho, in the isolated camps where her father worked as a logger and her mother made a home for her husband and two children. Their lives were short on material wealth, but long on the riches of family, friendship, and the great sheltering power of the wilderness. But in the mid-1960s, as automation and a declining economy drove more and more loggers out of the wilderness and into despair, Barnes's father dug in, and his determination to stay fueled the family's turn toward Pentecostalism.

Winner of the 1995 PEN/Jerard Fund Award, In the Wilderness is this poet's account of a journey toward adulthood against an interior landscape as awesome, as wondrous, and as fraught with hidden peril as the great Idaho forest itself. It is an examination of how both geography and faith can shape the heart and soul, and of the uncharted territory we all must enter to face our own demons. It is the clear-eyed and deeply moving story of a young woman's coming to terms with her family, her homeland, her spirituality, and herself.

About the Author

Kim Barnes is the author of the novel Finding Caruso and two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country--a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize--and Hungry for the World. She is coeditor with Mary Clearman Blew of Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers, and with Claire Davis of Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, MORE magazine, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She teaches writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.