An Interview with Barry Lopez

The following is an edited version of an interview that ran on Monday, May 25 on KUSP. Barry Lopez appeared at the Capitola Book Cafe on June 28, 1998 for his new book, About This Life.

E.S.: This is a very personal book. Would you say that it's more personal than your previous works?

B.L.: Oh, by far. I mean that it's a book in which I address my private life more directly than I ever have before. I have been a writer who was suspicious of writing about the self. It's just my particular kind of background...not a desire to distance myself from people who write about their private lives. But for me, as a writer, I always looked at the subject as being that which I was looking at on behalf of the reader. But after 30 years I realized that I consistently choose a certain kink of approach and often drift towards certain kinds of metaphors and issues, like justice or issues of natural history and geography. What I wanted to do in this collection was to bring some recent work together and add to it some new work and set it all in a structure that was a form of address to the reader, saying, "This is what I do and this is how I grew up and the sort of things that made an impression on me..."

E.S.: You say at one point, "Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader." If we know about who you are as a writer, who's behind those eyes looking, perhaps that strengthens the act of trust.

B.L.: You hope it does. I, like everyone else who thinks about these things, wonder where we get the stories that we read. If I look at my mail or listen to people at a reading, I'm often aware that people want to know something more about the basis for their trust. I think that's particularly important in the kind of world we live in where so much that reaches us is untrustworthy because it's calculated to have a specific effect or "spin." I don't deal in that kind of information. My ideal is that the writer is a servant in some way of the society in which he resides. That society can be defined in a variety of ways: geographic communities, intellectual communities, or even political communities. I feel beholden to people who I hear from and who have spoken to me about my work. I feel a responsibility to them to be clear about my motivation. There is a legitimate question for us all as readers, and that is, "Who are these people whose work, like mine, appears in magazines and books." Rather than write out a long piece about what I believe, I felt most comfortable saying these were the things that happened to me as I was growing up, these are the questions that were driving me when I was 20 or 25 years old and they remain the same questions today.

E.S.: You wrote that, as a young child your desire to get outside was so great that you would knock alphabet blocks out the window so your mother would have to take you out to retrieve them. The symbolism is wonderful...

B.L.: I found out more about that by accident. I have not been in that apartment since 1948, but I wrote to the superintendent of the building and described how when you came out of the elevator you would turn right, go down a hallway, jog to the right again and there was the door to the apartment, and could he tell me which apartment that was? He wrote back and said that that was apartment 2C. That made me smile because there's also in that essay the notion that I was driven in life by the desire to see, that I wanted to be there and to witness things

E.S.: You wrote in one essay about stopping frequently on rural roads to pull the carcasses of animals off the road. You call it an act of respect or awareness. I think this tells us a great deal about making a connection to the natural world that much of this book is about.

B.L.: I've had the habit for so long I don't know where it started. It bothered me to have animals lying out there on the road and being hit repeatedly by automobile traffic. I wrote the piece that you refer to because it involves a moral dilemma. How have we gotten ourselves into this position is on my mind often, and what we can do about it. When that piece appeared, I probably got more mail about it than any other piece I ever published in Harper's. Much of the mail was from people who said, "I'm bothered by this too, and I too take animals off the road, and I'm glad to know that there's someone who does this." One reason for including that piece in the collection was the amount of passion I felt in the letters I got when it first appeared.

E.S.: You write, "I imagine white silk threads of life still vibrating inside them, even if the body's husk is stretched out for yards, stuck like oiled muslin to the road." It's sheer poetry and heartbreaking. It makes you care about animals long dead.

B.L.: We're an anesthetized culture. We have gotten ourselves into a situation where we're able to live with comfort around carnage...we don't want to be there. The longer we live in this state, the deader we become to each other's plight. We have given in to an economic system of consumerism and exploitation that is creating carnage, not unlike that on the road, every day in human communities. This insight belongs not to me necessarily but to the reader. What a writer does is recognize in the society some kind of pattern and then creates a story that captures that pattern. The reader may find clarity in some combination of words and images, and in this case, may be able to resist better the injunction to lead anesthetized lives, to keep ourselves separate from the plight of all life around us. We here in Oregon have recently been through a terrible tragedy (the schoolyard shooting in Springfield). We need better answers. Even though I don't write about those sorts of things, I think it's my obligation as a writer to write stories that help a parent or a child sort through situations of emotional and moral chaos.

E.S.: To take a different approach, I thought you wrote meaningfully and mournfully about what happens to us a human beings when we have lost the feel, in our feet and our hearts, of the land.

B.L.: For me, the loss of intimacy with place means continuing diminution of sense of intimacy with the world, and it contributes to loneliness. There's no amount of money or possessions or landscaping around a house that can compensate for an intimacy with place. When you enter into an intimate relationship with landscape, it's reciprocal, the landscape enters into that relationship with you. No matter how battered your heart is, no matter how dark your future seems, you feel that you belong to a place and it belongs to you. Those feelings now are frustrated for many of us in this country where advertising, for example, has turned landscape into commodity and scenery. The same thing occurs in state legislatures and in Congress. The really important questions--what are our moral responsibilities to place--have been marginalized. This marginalization is unique in human history. Still, today, groups of people all over the world understand that if you do not include the local geography in the same moral universe that you occupy with people, you're cutting yourself off from a vital source of sustenance and eventually such a thing will kill you.

E.S.: You seem to connect some of the spatial and temporal qualities of geography with those same qualities in the memory.

B.L.: Any writer is affected by what he or she remembers from his or her own past life. The intensity of those memories causes you to look at the world in a certain way. In several of the essays in this book I was paying close attention to a sense of temporality, the way time shapes memory. In "Replacing Memory" I set out intentionally to put myself in places that I was when I was 8 years old, curious about the impact of memory on me when I was 30 or 40 or 50 years old. Memory is a repository for light as well as it is a repository for darkness. Incidents of childhood, dark things as well as moments of intense joyful delirium, can be retrieved by people in the present moment. In that sense, there is this flexibility about time that is very friendly, and I don't think we take advantage of it often enough.