Come spend an evening with Kim Barnes

SANDPOINT —  Idaho author Kim Barnes claims that there are no new stories, only new ways to tell them.

And that is exactly what she did in her newest novel, In the Kingdom of Men, which she will be reading at “An Evening with Kim Barnes” on June 12.

In the world of literature, the story of a woman’s fight to find freedom and liberation has been told and retold. However, Barnes paints a picture of self exploration in such vivid detail that it is unlike other stories.

The novel opens in 1970 with a pair of shocking disclaimers: “Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I’m a barefoot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that. Here is the second thing: that young woman they pulled from the Arabian shore, her hair tangled with mangrove - my husband didn’t kill her, not the way they say he did.”

The novel then backtracks two years, and starts again, in first person narrative, with heroine Gin Mitchell’s life, wrought with suffering, until she marries the hometown hero, Mason. The two move halfway around the world to Saudi Arabia and Gin’s life turns from dirt to marble floors overnight.

The novel is most aptly explained by the character Yash, the houseboy, as “the education of Mrs. Gin.”

However, Barnes says the novel presented her with an education as well.

Barnes did not understand at first what direction the story would take, but after five years of research and writing, she learned just as much about herself as she did about Gin. Barnes even pulls lessons from writing about Gin’s grandfather to understand more about her own life, and her strict upbringing.

“What I came to realize about my own father,” Barnes said, “was that he punished me because he loved me and because he was afraid of losing me.”

Barnes draws from her own Pentecostal Fundamentalism upbringing, an off-shoot of the early Methodist doctrine that she bases Gin’s Oklahoma life around. She says she is familiar with Gin’s type of childhood, though not to the harsh extent that Gin experienced.

Throughout her novel, Barnes uses the even the smallest characters to convey the larger world of the story.

“Every character is a vessel for heartbreak,” Barnes says, “Past, present or future.”

By no means is the book a fairy tale — instead, it is the tale of a couple who discovers a different world, the wrongs in it, and try to make them right, even when they cannot see the consequences of their actions. Barnes writes intensely about personal conflict, and helps the reader to understand the political tension within the Middle East, and Gin’s world.

Barnes is the author of two memoirs and two previous novels, including A Country Called Home, which received the PEN Center USA Literary Award in fiction, and was named best book of 2008 by The Washington Post, the Kansas City Star and The Oregonian. Her first memoir, In the Wilderness, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1997. Barnes is also the recipient of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for an emerging woman writer of nonfiction.

Barnes will be reading an excerpt from In the Kingdom of Men at the Sandpoint Branch of the East Bonner County Library on June 12. The reading and book signing will start at 7 p.m. Admission is free, and all audience types are welcome.

Copies of In the Kingdom of Men will be available for purchase prior to the reading, as well as the night of, from Common Knowledge Books.