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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No to bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we mean without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblad, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I have a guest who's a favorite of mine.

It's Barbara Kingsolver, who's just published her second book of

poetry with Harper. It's got the arresting title How to Fly in 10,000 Easy Lessons. Now, most of my

guests will know Barbara Kingsolver as a novelist, as an essayist,

as the writer of autobiographical works.

This is her second book of poetry, and I think you'll all be amazed.

I guess I'm going to ask you first,

how did you learn to trust yourself in so many genres?

Oh, by flying by the seat of my pants, I guess.

It's a funny thing.

I have never really thought that much about kind of asking permission to enter the domain of one genre or another.

It's just always seemed to me that writing is writing and different genre are like vehicles and you decide where you're going to go and then you choose the right vehicle.

And so I've always really moved pretty easily between fiction, nonfiction, journalism, the essay form, and poetry. Poetry, in fact,

was the first writing of my own that I took at all seriously in my 20s. I was working more in poetry than anything else. I think because I didn't really

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