Barry Lopez

"Emancipation"
BL began traveling to Australia in 1987 and has since visited all its states, including Tasmania. At the request of The Wilderness Society of Australia he wrote an essay for their 2009 calendar. “Emancipation” treats efforts to protect wild lands as a form of emancipation, following on the themes of other emancipation efforts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

"Madre de Dios"
Brian Doyle, the editor of Portland magazine, asked BL to create a written version of a story BL had told him some years before about rescuing sea lions which had been trapped illegally in a net in the Galapagos Islands. Doyle wanted the essay for an issue of Portland magazine he was devoting to material about the Blessed Mother and he had recalled that her presence played some role in the rescue. To recount the event effectively, BL introduces it with a history of his Roman Catholic upbringing. The essay closes with the description of another event, in BL’s childhood, in which the Blessed Mother is the paramount figure, a wrenching memory few people outside BL’s family and closest friends have ever heard.

Guest Editor, Maps of Reconciliation and Gates of Reconciliation
In Maps of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination [Manoa 19:2] and Gates of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination [Manoa 20:1], fiction writers, poets, essayists, indigenous peoples, veterans of war, and our elders speak about the most compelling question of our time: how we are to imagine a future of mutual tolerance, respect, and justice–especially for those whose cultures are being eroded by political and economic superpowers.

The international voices in these two volumes come from India, North Korea, rural China, Chile, Peru, South Africa, Italy, Palestine, Israel, Australia, the native Hawaiian community, the Native American community, and elsewhere.

A multitude of questions and hopes fills these pages from writers and artists who suggest various paths to reconciliation. Three portfolios of photographs by Franco Salmoiraghi depict exemplary struggles for reconciliation by Native Hawaiians in Maps of Reconciliation. The photographs of Linda Connor and Kate Joyce grace Gates of Reconciliation.

Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney
Home Ground is a landmark work of language, geography, and folklore. The editors brought together forty-five poets and writers from across the country to create more than 850 original definitions for terms like cutbank, flatiron, yazoo, monadnock, hollow, kiss tank, gulch, birdfoot delta, detroit riprap, swale, trace, and paternoster lakes. Drawing on careful research, the writers used their own distinctive stylistic, personal, and regional approaches to portray the striking complexity of the landscapes we inhabit, from Missouri's woody draws to Virginia's runs, from the desire paths of cities to the rondes of Midwestern farmlands, from California's bajadas to Alaska's pingoes and Hawai'i's volcanic expanses of pahoehoe. The intent behind the work of this diverse group of writers was to revitalize our sense of intimacy with place. An advisory board reviewed each of the definitions for accuracy. With black-and-white line drawings by Molly O'Halloran, Introduction by Barry Lopez, index, and bibliographic note.

"ˇNunca Más!"
Written in the form of a diary over seven days, the primary focus of this essay is BL's visit to Auschwitz in the days following the launch in Paris of the French edition of Resistance.The diary appeared in a weekend edition of the French national paper Libération. A fine press limited edition, in English, entitled ˇNunca Más!, was published in September 2007 by Red Dragonfly Press.

"Eden Is a Conversation"
In May of 2006, more than 500 people from 40 countries gathered in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia, to participate in Quest for Global Healing, a determined effort to address pressing social and economic problems around the world. Among the speakers were Archbishop Desmond Tutu; two other Nobel peace laureates, Betty Williams, and Jody Williams; Gus Dur, the leader of Indonesia's 45 million Muslims; Fatima Gailani, head of Afghanistan Red Crescent; Thai political activist Chaiwat Thirapantu; Bhutan's minister of Labour and Human Resources, Lyonpo Ugyen Tishering; and BL, who delivered an opening address. This is his closing talk.

"The Leadership Imperative: An Interview with Oren Lyons by Barry Lopez"
This interview appears in the January/February 2007 issue of Orion magazine and in the September/October 2008 issue of the British periodical Resurgence. Lyons is a Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan among the Onondaga people of western New York, and he sits on the Council of Chiefs of the Haudenosaunee, or the Six Nations as they are sometimes called. The recipient of many national and international awards, Oren Lyons has been a defining presence for more than three decades on international indigenous rights and sovereignty issues.

"Out West"
BL wrote the introductory essay to Emily Ballew Neff's The Modern West: American Landscapes 1890-1950, the 315-page illustrated catalog created for an exhibit of the same name. The show opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2006, and later went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In a 3-part essay, Lopez addresses the singularity of the western American landscape; the massacres of native people that took place at Washita, Bear River, Sand Creek and elsewhere, and which are part of the obscured history of the West; the literature of the American West; and symbolic and realistic elements in the paintings and photographs in the exhibit Ms. Neff curated.

Resistance
In this work of fiction, nine men and women, all of whom went to college together in the `60s, tell separate but interrelated stories of the struggle to lead a meaningful life. Most have been world travelers and, in the moment these stories are told, are living in widely separated parts of the world--rural Hokkaido, Paris, Buenos Aires, the Brazilian jungle, Dar es Salaam, Mindanao, and Kashgar. Each one has received the same threatening letter from an ominous agency called Inland Security, in which they learn their artistic and scholarly activities have been classified as a threat to "democracy." They decide to go underground but leave behind for their pursuers these nine stories.

Light Action in the Caribbean
The stories in this collection are set in the southern California of the author's childhood, in North Dakota, the geographical setting for a number of the author's earlier stories, in his home landscape in the Pacific Northwest, and in the Middle East.

Introduction to The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005
Lopez’s introduction to The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, edited by Philip Zaleski, is largely a reflection on the meaning of the cardinal virtue of reverence. It is set in several geographical locales, including the La Gorce range in the Transantarctic Mountains, the paleolitihic cave called Altamira, and the Pahranagat Valley in southeastern Nevada.

Interviews of BL
Four interviews with BL have appeared since Fall 2005. "The Big Rhythm: A Conversation with Barry Lopez on the McKenzie River," conducted by Michael Shapiro, was published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 2005 [44:4], pages 583-610 and later excerpted in The Sun, June 2006 [Issue 366], pages 4-12, as "Against the Current."

Northwest Review published "Interview with Barry Lopez" in its Spring 2006 [44:2] issue, pages 96-116. Conducted by William E. Tydeman, it is excerpted from the second of Tydeman's long interviews with BL. (The first appeared in the First Frost 2003 [5:1] issue of Iron Horse Literary Review, pages 42-67.) The Northwest Review interview is accompanied by Diane Warner's selected, annotated bibliography of more than a hundred of BL's uncollected essays, stories, forewords, introductions, and book reviews. The annotations are based on her conversations with BL.

"On Resistance: An Interview with Barry Lopez," conducted by Christian Martin, was published in The Georgia Review, Spring 2006 [60:1], pages 13-30.

Most recently, Mike Newell published No Bottom: In Conversation with Barry Lopez, a book about BL's fiction which includes a 41-page interview.

"Waiting for Salmon"
This essay was written in response to a request from Granta for a personal reflection on global warming and climate change. Lopez focuses his thoughts on the changing numbers of spring chinook salmon he's watched spawning in front of his McKenzie River home for the past 35 years. The essay indicts the media for their complicity in the general pattern of diminishment and denial that has distinguished the Bush Administration's reaction to these international issues. In an attempt to simplify or dismiss scientific research that doesn't serve the overall goal of economic growth, the Administration and the media have pursued economic and theocratic, rather than democratic, solutions to the problem. The piece closes with Lopez wondering how to explain these issues to his two-year-old grandson, whom he takes regularly to salmon spawning grounds near his home.

Vintage Lopez
One of twelve readers published by Vintage in 2004 as "introductions to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions." Other volumes in the series include work by Martin Amis, James Baldwin, Sandra Cisneros, Joan Didion, Richard Ford, Langston Hughes, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Naipaul, and Oliver Sacks. The Lopez volume includes the essays "Landscape and Narrative," "Flight," and "Learning to See," the short stories "The Letters of Heaven," "The Mappist," and "The Entreaty of the Wiideema," and six other essays and stories.

"A Scary Abundance of Water"
Lopez writes in this essay about his early childhood in Southern California's San Fernando Valley. The cultural history of this region – after Mulholland brought water to it in 1913 from Owens Valley – and the area's geography provide the context for a childhood that included, in addition to raising pigeons and an enthrallment with nature, a prolonged period of traumatic sexual abuse. In "returning home," Lopez finds that, despite the Valley's apparent ruination by subdivisions, the automobile, and "venal dreams of wealth...its spirit remains intact." The memoir, three times as long as any piece previously published by LA Weekly, was nominated by the paper for a Pulitzer Prize.

About This Life
Audio edition
Lopez reads from all three sections of this book. The first section includes essays set outside North America, the second contains essays from his home continent, and the third comprises a selection of memoirs. The recording was one of three finalists for the 1998 Audi Award for Best Abridged Nonfiction recording.

Giving Birth to Thunder
BL's first book (not published until 1978, however, after Desert Notes), written while he was a student of Barre Toelken, one of the foremost modern scholars of Native American literature. To evoke a sense of the Trickster figure, a Paleolithic character found in the oral and written traditions of apparently every human culture, BL researched hundreds of versions of archetypal stories in translation, all anchored in the physical landscapes of North America and in the traditions of its First Peoples. These 68 stories from 43 traditions reveal the complexity of a character that reverberates with both classical renderings of the Trickster, such as Mercury and Loki, and with contemporary incarnations such as Ken Kesey's Randall P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Wile E. Coyote in Road Runner cartoons.

Of Wolves and Men
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
Lopez draws on a wide range of natural history, field studies, social history, traditional knowledge, and his own personal experience with captive and free-ranging wolves in Of Wolves and Men to illuminate the fundamentally mysterious and complex nature of this maligned creature. This is a landmark work that received the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing, the Christopher Medal for humanitarian writing, and other honors. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition, with a new Afterword by the author, is available in both paperback and hardcover editions. (Scribner 2004)