Hello I'm Ian Sulling and I'm with one of McCain's farmers who grow their

petite hang on these are odd looking potatoes. That's kale Ian. You do know you

need potato to make chips right? Yes but we don't just grow potatoes we actually

rotate different crops to help keep the soil healthy. So we eat McCain chips I'm

helping do some good. Exactly yeah you're supporting the move to regenerative

farming. By the way I do know the difference between kale and potatoes. Of course

you do. McCain let's all check in. Hello and welcome to Gavfest Reads for

August 2023. I'm Emily Bazon one of the hosts of Slade's political Gavfest. I'm

here with David Plott and John Dickerson. Hey David. Emily. Hey John. Hey Emily.

We are thrilled to be talking with Barbara King Solver about her recent book

Demon Copperhead which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year. Barbara

welcome to Gavfest Reads. Thanks I'm glad to be here. David and John and I

usually take turns interviewing writers but today we're all here because we all

want to talk about this book so Demon Copperhead is a recasting of David

Copperfield the classic novel by Charles Dickens and Barbara you're following the

path that Dickens laid out to tell a story in his time of a boy growing up in

19th century England and you're telling the story of a boy growing up in our

times in Appalachia. I wanted to ask you for so long why Dickens and as your

source of inspiration I especially want to know this now because I was reading a

recent essay in the New Yorker by Zadie Smith and she was disparaging Dickens

as being too sentimental, too theatrical, too moralistic and too controlling and it

just made me so curious because you have sought him out as a source of material

...