On a mild September afternoon, we sat in rocking chairs on her porch, the vibrant landscape spread out before us like a psychedelic terrarium. The region stretches from New York to northern Mississippi, but its cultural identity, as Kingsolver pointed out, is most identified with a handful of states.

It’s more than 200 miles from where she grew up, but it’s still Appalachia. These days, Kingsolver, now 67, lives in a century-old farmhouse nestled in a hollow in the picturesque town of Meadowview, Va., right over the border from Tennessee, with a population just shy of 1,000. “I come from practical people,” she said. She switched to biology because, as she said, it seemed more sensible she didn’t want to end up playing “The Shadow of Your Smile” in hotel lobbies.

In high school, Kingsolver took a correspondence course in philosophy, read Hume, Kant and Tolstoy when her peers were making out in cars, and won a piano scholarship to DePauw University in Indiana. Like her father, she was a bit of an oddball in a community where, as she described it, the goal was survival. Kingsolver was raised in a rural town in Kentucky her father was the local doctor, often paid in baked goods or labor, and the first member of his family to go to college.

His 2016 best seller, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was a bootstrapping memoir wrapped in a polemic Kingsolver found especially condescending. She is fiercely protective of its communities and irritated by the prejudice heaped on it. Kingsolver is a child of the region, and a biologist with an intimate knowledge of and love for its unique ecosystem - its flora and its fauna, including the human kind. 18, which reimagines the hero of “David Copperfield” as a young man in contemporary Southern Appalachia. “I don’t usually talk to dead people,” she said.) The result of the conversation, her 17th book in nearly three decades as a best-selling author, is “Demon Copperhead,” out on Oct. The answer came, she said, from a visitation by Charles Dickens. Her latest book began with the question of how to tell a story about the opioid epidemic that is ravaging Appalachia. Most of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels begin with a question, usually involving an injustice: how to tell a story about America’s exploitation of developing countries, for example, or the effects of climate change on rural communities.

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