Barry Lopez



Selected Works

Fiction
Resistance
Nine interrelated stories. H.L. Davis Award for Short Fiction 2005 (Knopf 2004, Vintage 2005)
Vintage Lopez
This collection includes five essays and an excerpt from Arctic Dreams in addition to six short stories. (Vintage 2004)
Giving Birth to Thunder
Retold tales of Coyote as trickster and sage, from the traditions of Native America. (Andrews and McMeel 1978, Avon 1981)
Interviews
"The Leadership Imperative: An Interview with Oren Lyons by Barry Lopez"
BL talks with Oren Lyons, Orion (January/February 2007)
Interviews of BL
Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2005), Northwest Review (Spring 2006), Georgia Review (Spring 2006), No Bottom (2008)
Nonfiction
"Eden Is a Conversation"
BL's closing remarks at Quest for Global Healing, Ubud, Bali, Portland Magazine (Autumn 2006)
"Une phrase de Primo Levi"
Libération (June 24-25, 2006). Also published in English as chapbook ¡Nunca Más! (Red Dragonfly Press 2007)
Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney
With an Introduction by Barry Lopez (Trinity University Press 2006)
"Out West"
Introductory essay by Barry Lopez in Emily Ballew Neff's The Modern West (Yale University Press 2006)
"Waiting for Salmon"
Granta (Summer 2005)
"A Scary Abundance of Water"
Memoir of Lopez's childhood in California's San Fernando Valley. Nominated by LA Weekly for a Pulitzer Prize. (January 11-17, 2002)
Of Wolves and Men
25th Anniversary Edition with an Afterword by BL. Photographs and marginalia throughout. (Scribner 2004)


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News/Photos


Left to right, Juanita Pahdopony, Comanche tribal chairman Wallace Coffey, BL, Kim Winkleman, President of Comanche Nation College, and Vice-Provost James Brink and President Jon Whitmore of Texas Tech University.
On September 9, 2007, BL and others from Texas Tech University made a formal offer of reconciliation between the University, which stands on former Comanche ground, and the Comanche Nation. The ceremony marked the culmination of many months of preparation. Story and photos below.
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Barry Lopez is a corresponding editor with Manoa, a book-length literary journal published twice a year by the University of Hawai'i Press and edited by Frank Stewart. A recent issue, Where the Rivers Meet: New Writing from Australia, was guest edited by Australians Larissa Behrendt, a novelist, lawyer, and member of the Eualayai and Kammillaroi nations of northwest New South Wales, and Mark Tredinnick, a poet, essayist, and writing teacher living in Sydney, and by BL and Frank Stewart. The 184-page issue of essays, fiction, and poetry features photographs by Aboriginal photographer Ricky Maynard. Stewart and Lopez are currently editing two volumes of the journal on the theme of reconciliation. The first issue, with original work by South American, South African, eastern European, Indian, and Chinese authors, is due out in February 2008, the second in June 2008.
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Author Mike Newell has recently published No Bottom, a book about BL's fiction. The 152-page book includes a 41-page interview with BL by Newell and photographs of the author, BL, and the setting of the interview.
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Following the publication of Home Ground, edited by BL and Debra Gwartney, BL began work with Sandra Phillips, Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on an exhibit featuring the images of American landscape photographers. Entries from Home Ground will accompany many of the photographs. The show is scheduled to open in 2010.
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BL serves on the advisory boards of a diverse group of organizations. Among them are Theater Grottesco in Santa Fe, New Mexico; The Mountain Lion Foundation; The Orion Society; and Reader-to-Reader, which sends books, free of charge, to the nation's neediest libraries. He recently joined the advisory board of The North American Network of Cities of Refuge.
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On January 26, 2007, BL received the Rev. Robert J. Griffin Award, presented to a Notre Dame graduate who has made a significant contribution to literature. He received a B.A. degree from the University in 1966.
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BL with Desmond Tutu in Indonesia, May 2006. Wilford Welch, who invited both of them to work with him in Ubud, Bali, at Quest for Global Healing, is at center. The gathering brought together 500 people from 40 countries for presentations and workshops. Welch, BL, and Susan O'Connor are currently working with Pualani Kanahele and a small group of native Hawaiian practitioners and with other spiritual and secular advisors to design a sequel to Quest for Global Healing, scheduled to take place at Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island in June 2009.
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SNAPSHOTS



Left to right: Barry Lopez, Ted Clarke, and Al Gore
In 1988 Al Gore visited a remote field camp in southern Victorialand in the Transantarctic Mountains where BL was working with scientists drilling an ice core. Cores like these preserve a record of global climate change. See story below.
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Susitna River drainage, Nelchina Basin, Alaska, March 1976.
Photo by Craig Lofstedt
During his field research for Of Wolves and Men, BL spent several weeks with Bob Stephenson, a wolf biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. This heavily-sedated female wolf was six or seven years old and weighed about 85 pounds. See story below.
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Barry Lopez and his wife, Debra Gwartney
Photo by Cameron Browne
American culture has drifted far from the belief that community, not the individual, is the basic building block for a healthy society. Without our families and friends, and the network of reciprocal relations that makes that fabric strong, we can’t build anything that will last. Reading widely about what Homo sapiens faces in the near future—speaking only of the biological organism—suggests it would be prudent to strengthen these networks. In the simplest terms, hope for ourselves lies with love, not with righteousness, not with technology or triumph, not with violence, not with strategies to accumulate wealth and power. If we do not share, if as an advanced civilization we do not fall back in love with the Earth, our time will be short.
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Reconciliation Ceremony

  On September 9, 2007, the President, Provost, and Vice-Provost of Texas Tech University, together with a small group of representatives from the Texas Tech University community, including Barry Lopez and artist Richard Rowland, made a formal offer of reconciliation between the University and the Comanche Nation before representatives of the Comanche people. The unprecedented ceremony


Left to right, Juanita Pahdopony, Comanche tribal chairman Wallace Coffey, BL, Kim Winkleman, President of Comanche Nation College, and Vice-Provost James Brink and President Jon Whitmore of Texas Tech University.
and presentation of gifts took place on ceremonial grounds at Comanche Nation tribal headquarters near Lawton, Oklahoma. It marked the official beginning of a collaborative effort between the tribe and the University to improve educational opportunities for Comanche youth and to open the entire University community to “a Comanche way of knowing.”
 


  Projects already underway include: 1) exchange programs for faculty and students, developed according to the provisions of a Memorandum of Understanding between Comanche National College and the University; 2) a long-term oral history field project, intended to establish an historical record of post-contact events from a Comanche point of view; 3) an ethnomusicology project designed to record, collect, and archive modern and traditional Comanche music, for deposit at both the Comanche Nation Museum and at the Southwest Collection at the University; and


Inyan Mato (Stone Bear), 3, center, adopted son of Kim Winkleman and his wife, Charlotte Black Elk, second from left.
4) a program that will bring tribal elders to the University in Lubbock, Texas, to begin work with students in the Honors College aimed at establishing a cultural context for each species of plant collected on traditional Comanche lands and now housed in the University’s herbarium.
  The ceremony at Lawton began with a presentation of colors by Comanche military veterans—the American flag, the Comanche Nation flag, the Oklahoma State flag, and the flag of the Comanche Indian Veterans Association. BL and tribal chairman Wallace Coffey
 


Comanche Indian Veteran's Association (CIVA) Color Guard.
 

acted as co-masters of ceremony. Comanche drummers, singers, and dancers purified the ceremonial grounds prior to opening remarks from Chairman Coffey and by President Jon Whitmore and Vice-Provost Jim Brink. Following a statement about uniting in a common cause with the Comanche Nation, delivered by BL on behalf of the University, each of four members of the Comanche Indian Veterans Association was asked by Chairman Coffey to select an empty clay pot from a ceremonial table and to take up a position at one of the ceremonial grounds’ four cardinal points. BL asked four University representatives, each one holding a similar clay pitcher full of local groundwater, to join the veterans at the cardinal points.


Richard Rowland’s Llano Estacado pots.
  The clay vessels, designed and built by artist Richard Rowland, were created from material that lies exposed on the ground at the site of a catastrophic loss for the Comanche people, a narrow canyon on the eastern edge of Texas’s Llano Estacado, a place where more than a thousand rustled Comanche horses were shot and killed on September 29, 1874, by troops of the Fourth United States Cavalry. BL and Richard Rowland dug clay and gathered other materials for the vessels at the site and fired them in an anagama kiln, using wood from several places in Texas and Oklahoma. The water for the ceremony was borrowed from a part of the Ogallala aquifer that lies beneath traditional Comanche country, land on which the University now stands.
 


Texas Tech senior Erin Hoelting, representing the University’s student body, with one of Rowland’s Llano Estacado pitchers. The pots will stay with the Comanche Nation, the pitchers will be put on public display at Texas Tech University.
  At a signal from Chairman Coffey, the singers and drummers began a song and those holding the pitchers began slowly pouring water into the pots. At the conclusion of the song, Chairman Coffey asked that the water now in the pots be poured out onto the Earth. The University presented some of the Comanche people with Pendleton blankets, the colors were struck, and everyone joined in a slow line dance, twice circling the drummers and singers. The ceremony closed with the Comanche setting up receiving lines, so that each person present might be able to shake hands with every other person.
 


During the ceremony, Comanche horses came up from nearby pastures and stood along the fence adjacent to the ceremonial grounds.
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Global Climate Change

  In the austral spring of 1988, I camped for a month in West Antarctica with a field party of four glacial chemists, on Newell Glacier in the Transantarctic Mountains. After several weeks of surveying, the scientists pinpointed a promising site at the head of the glacier where they could drill to retrieve an ice core. Two drillers were flown in and, with some of us dressed in sterile gear to handle sections of the ice core, we began work. On November 17, 1988, Al Gore flew out to our camp from McMurdo Station, the main American base in Antarctica. He was eager to learn first-hand how ice cores, which preserve a record of the Earth’s atmospheric history, were being retrieved and how they might be used to clarify growing concerns about global climate change. Gore impressed us as someone unusually well-informed about the scientific questions involved, and he struck us as the model of a public servant. He was smart, courteous, a determined questioner, and a keen listener. It was -5° F and he'd had to hike a half-mile uphill to the drill site from the spot where the helicopter set him down. He didn’t complain and never struck a pose. He was a man on a mission. Gore refers to this visit to our Newell Glacier camp in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. In that film, the difference between the public servant and what you might call the corporate servant among America’s political leadership becomes profoundly and sickeningly clear. In a relentless and devastating way, the film dismantles the claptrap that characterizes efforts by the Bush White House and American energy corporations to misrepresent and refute global warming. Willfully uneducated, greedy, and arrogant, this small consortium of wealthy men in business and government represents one of the greatest examples of political cowardice and irresponsibility in the history of the Republic. Given what is at stake, and the number of voters who remain “unconvinced” about the importance of global climate change, they constitute a dangerous and malicious group of people. Please see the film, if you haven’t already. And thank Gore for the constancy of his citizenship.
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Wolf Research

  I was midway in my research for Of Wolves and Men when Bob Stephenson—walking behind us here—invited me to join him in the field, to learn about this kind of scientific research. I was initially drawn to Stephenson’s work because, in order to learn about these animals, he’d apprenticed himself to a group of Nunamiut Eskimo living at Anaktuvuk Pass in the Brooks Range. He had identified the wolf in the photo from the survey helicopter as “a female, an older one.” I kidded him at the time, saying nobody could be that discerning about a wild wolf, not from a distance. “Well,” he said, unassumingly, “it’s one of the things the Nunamiut taught me to do.” Indeed, during the week we spent radio collaring and tracking wolves in Nelchina Basin, Bob's ability to age and sex wolves from a distance was unerringly correct.

  One thing the wolf in this photo taught me was that, despite her age (apparent from the condition of her teeth), she had impressive fat reserves for late winter. This says a lot about community. She might not have been able actively to help in the later stages of a successful moose or caribou hunt, but she knew where to point the other wolves in her pack in pursuit of food, into which of the many valleys in this mountainous country she should direct them.

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Writers on the Air
Conversations About Books
Donna Seaman
Paul Dry Books 2005

Résistance
French edition
Actes Sud 2006

Light Action in the Caribbean
Knopf 2000
Vintage 2001

Arctic Dreams
Arabic edition
National Library, United Arab Emirates 2001

About This Life
Knopf 1998
Vintage 1999

Field Notes
Chinese edition
China One 1997

The Rediscovery of North America
Vintage 1992

Of Wolves and Men
Slovakian edition
Abies 2002


Giving Birth to Thunder
German edition
Ein O. W. Barth Buch im Scherz Verlag 1982

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Contact the author

All correspondence regarding permission to reprint and other rights, or regarding public appearances, must be directed to the appropriate address or link.

Readers may direct personal letters to the following address:

Barry Lopez
PO Box 389
Blue River OR 97413


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Contents © 1966
to current, by
Barry Holstun Lopez.
All Rights Reserved.

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Created by The Authors Guild

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