In the wilderness : coming of age in unknown country

ISBN: 0385478216
ISBN: 9780385478212
Physical Description: 257 pages ; 21 cm
Edition: 1st Anchor Books Trade pbk. ed.
Publisher: New York : Anchor Books, 1997, ©1996.

Book

In the wilderness : coming of age in unknown country / Kim Barnes.

Barnes, Kim, 1958- (Author).

Summary:

Author's memoir of her coming of age in the 1960s in Idaho, recalling her rebellion against her strict Pentecostal father, and her attempts to reconcile the child she was to the woman she became.

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 and 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, Kim's father dug in, determined to stay.

It was then the family turned fervently toward Pentecostalism. It was then things changed.

In the Wilderness is the story of this poet's journey toward adulthood, set against an interior landscape every bit 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 must all 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.