Kim Barnes is the author of two memoirs and two novels, most recently A Country Called Home, winner of the 2009 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and named a best book of 2008 by The Washington Post, The Kansas City Star, and The Oregonian.  She is a recipient of the PEN/Jerard Award for an emerging woman writer of nonfiction.  Her first memoir, In the Wilderness, was nominated for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals and anthologies, including MORE, O Magazine, Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Her next novel, In the Kingdom of Men, an exploration of Americans living in 1960s Saudi Arabia, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Where or when were you the happiest?
In any given August, standing hip-high in an Idaho mountain river, sailing my fly across the water.

What are your pet peeves?
Lack of empathy, generosity, compassion, and curiosity.

What is your favorite season?  
Fishing season.

What living person do you most admire? 
Each day brings a new person to admire, respect, and support. Today, that person is Robina Niaz, who founded and serves as the Executive Director of Turning Point for Women, the first non-profit in New York that directly addresses domestic violence in the Muslim community and has a youth development program for Muslim girls and young women. Ms. Niaz is a fierce advocate of Muslim women’s rights and has dedicated her life to working against domestic violence.

If you could be a non-human animal for a day, what would you be?
I have to second poet Dana Levin here: raven, because when I hear ravens talking (and that is what they are doing), I can almost believe that I could be a part of that conversation.

What is your most marked characteristic?
At its worst, plain old stubbornness; at its best, an absolute refusal to quit and a willful belief in my ability to survive just about anything.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Pettiness.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Cowardice, which is the basis for almost every other trait I deplore in myself and others.

What do your friends say about you behind your back? 
Whether good or bad, I don't need to know.

Who are your favorite heroes or heroines in fiction?
Hero: Hemingway's Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea; and Luke Ripley in Andre Dubus's "A Father's Story."
Heroine: The female equivalents of Santiago and Luke Ripley, who have yet to be written: heroines who are noble but flawed, blind to their errors and allowed to suffer for it, who fall from grace and perform their penance...in other words, female characters who embrace their agency without being cast as victims or monsters but simply as strong, complex heroines.

What fictional characters do you most dislike?
None that is written well.

Who are your favorite musicians?
I'm a sucker for anything by Vivaldi and Miles Davis. Arcangelo Corelli makes me happy. Barber's Adagio for Strings makes me cry. The Pres (Lester Young), Billie Holiday, Sara Vaughan, Etta James, Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, Bill Evans. Baroque, jazz, old-school country--I'm there.

Who are your heroes in real life?
Family, friends, and strangers who endure with bright-eyed grace and a wicked mix of the sacred and the profane. I think of a dear elder friend who died several years ago. When the ambulance came to take her to the hospital for what she knew would be her final journey, her "baby brother," himself nearing seventy, asked her if she was afraid. "No," she said, "not afraid. Just curious." She remains someone I hope to model my own life--and death--upon.

What talent do you wish you had? 
I wish I were one of those people who spontaneously burst into song.

What is your present state of mind?
I'm an obsessive problem solver, which is a problem. I have what our veterinarian, while talking about our black Lab's stick-fetching habit, described as "function lust." I need a project to organize and put to bed in order to experience a sense of wellbeing, which is why writing books appeals to me. A story is a problem to be solved. And so is this questionnaire, so I'm happy.

On what occasions do you lie? 
I inherited my father's strict codes of behavior, one of which is that you never lie, no matter what, because it's a form of self-protection and cowardice, but I find that when I do lie, it's usually to protect other people, most often from themselves.

What historical figure do you most identify with? 
The Stoics and the Mystics

What is your favorite journey?
The journey to the river.

What living person do you most despise?
I don't seem to have the "despise" gene, and because I think that people often act badly out of fear, what I feel is a kind of compassion for even those we consider most despicable. Intelligent and empowered people who have turned away from their own compassion and act in their own self-interest, or those people who are so fearful that they become viciously self-defensive and lash out at those with even less power than they have, are people I cannot trust, and, in my book, not being able to trust someone with your emotional and physical wellbeing is about as bad as it gets.

What is your greatest fear?
That I will lose my moral conviction and compassion and cause someone to distrust me.

What is your greatest extravagance?
A good Italian wine, a good Italian meal, and a good flyfishing reel, all enjoyed on the banks and waters of a blue-ribbon trout stream.

What is your greatest hope?
That the inevitable entropy of life will lead to a final moment of brilliant enlightenment before the candle is extinguished.

What do you most value in your friends?
Bravery, honesty, self-reliance, curiosity, profanity, and wonder.

Who are your favorite writers?
Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, Ann Patchett, Marilynne Robinson, Anthony Doerr, Margaret Atwood, Robert Wrigley, Rebecca Solnit, and every author I've ever read or have yet to read who gives me even one sentence of thrilling, transcendent, new awareness.

What is your motto?
An exhuberant and demanding directive that came from the mother of a talented writing student, Inga Aesoph, as she was leaving for her first trip abroad: Be brave! Be interesting!