Barry Lopez

Guest Editor, Maps of Reconciliation
In Maps of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination [Manoa 19:2], 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 voices in this volume–the first in a two-part series–come from India, rural China, South Africa, 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.

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

"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.

"Une phrase de Primo Levi"
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 ¡Nunca Más!, was published in September 2007 by Red Dragonfly Press.

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.

"Out West"
Barry Lopez has written the introductory essay to Emily Ballew Neff's The Modern West: American Landscapes 1890-1950, the illustrated catalog created for the 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 of the paintings and photographs in the large 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.

Introduction to The Best Spirtual Writing
Lopez’s introduction to The Best 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
Three 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 a selected bibliography of more than a hundred of BL's uncollected essays, stories, forewords, introductions, and book reviews, each one annotated by Diane Warner from 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.

"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, Baldwin, Cisneros, Didion, Richard Ford, Langston Hughes, Munro, Murakami, 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
"In his zeal for scholarly propriety and with perfectly acceptable academic myopia, the anthropologist might easily and proudly overlook several important aspects of Old Man Coyote: that he is alive and well in the modern world, that he has survived acculturation (and triumphed over it), that–in spite of tribal differences–there is a broadly recognizable cluster of characteristics we still know as his own, regardless of our tribal backgrounds. It is this personality profile, and not the scholar's fossil, that Barry Lopez presents in this collection."

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)