Balancing a strong sense of social justice with a warm narrative voice, novelist Barbara Kingsolver won the loyalty of tens of thousands of readers with her first three novels , "The Bean Trees," "Animal Dreams," and "Pigs in Heaven." Her new book of essays, "High Tide in Tucson," was published in October. In a recent interview at San Francisco's City Arts & Lectures series, Kingsolver talked about multiculturalism, the pressures of publicity, and how she learned to write with a Southern accent.

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You write a lot about racial and ethnic pride. You say in one essay: "I'm not so much interested in bloodlines as I am in the motivation for multicultural appreciation. I appreciate because I am interested. Just as I can admire tropical fish without being part fish; and if I am part fish, that's my business." How does that fit with movements for the celebration of racial and ethnic pride in schools and in the larger society?

It's probably separate, I hope no one questions that it's a terrific thing to know your own history and ethnicity and celebrate it, and celebrate your holidays and your food and your language and be pleased about that, and be open to sharing it with others.

The transfer to writing gets tricky. We're always writing about someone else, unless we're writing our autobiography. So the question gets to be, how far can you go and not be stealing? I know writers who say if I execute it well, I can write about anybody on the planet, from the point of view of anyone on the planet.

On the other end, there are writers I admire very much who say it's wrong to write from the point of view of anyone you have not been; even for a woman to write from the point of view of a man is wrong. The arguments for that are compelling. One is that you probably won't get it right. Another is that you are indeed usurping the position of someone who could have told that story better. And if you view publishing as a world in which there are finite slots for books to come through, then if I as a white woman use the slot that Spike Lee could have used, then that's wrong. And I agree with that, too.

Are there are a limited number of slots?

Well, it's a pretty big limited number, but sure. The way I've settled this question for myself is this: I will first of all observe the world in which I live, which happens to be racially and ethnically very diverse. My first task is to pay close attention to other points of view as they come into my world, and to report accurately. And to invent characters who are true to what I see, in order to play out the questions that I want to answer. I look to John Steinbeck as a terrific model. He wrote characters who were Mexican laborers, he wrote women wonderfully, a character who was mentally retarded, and he did all that without ever entering their consciousness. He did it from the outside, and he did it wonderfully.

That seems like solid ground for a writer: I know what it looks like and what it sounds like, but I just don't know what it's like to live my life in that skin.

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