Barry Lopez

[shamatha1]

I had heard of but never read Lopez before, until I got About This Life, a book of essays, for Christmas, and found a book of short stories Winter Count at the used book store.

Lopez is a 'nature' writer in the same vein of Peter Matthiessen. There's a meditational quality to his writing and his main theme is the self and the landscape (inner and outer), and art. I actually managed to find one of the stories from the collection online. It's called 'Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire' (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ ... i_20121815. It's about a guy in Oregon, and the little artistic community around him, and the making of anagama pottery. I won't try to describe it, and just say it's as good a flavor of Lopez's writing as you can get, and not a bad example of artistic communities for Studio 8 to emulate.

Other stories involve Lopez spending two years flying around the world in the cargo holds of planes, a trip to the arctic to study wolves, an apology to roadkill, a meditation of landscape photography, or just the various ways the light his the river running by his home.

Winter Count is a book of short stories. In the epigraph to the book, Lopez explains that a certain Plains Indian tribe ( I can't recall which one) keeps track of the winters by remembering a specific memorable incident for each one. These stories each single incidents, some magically realistic like the legend(true story?) of a group of buffalo trapped in a 1840s blizzard who sang a song of death and walked into the clouds, or another in which a river in Montana temporarily disappears, or a place in the desert with very unique winds. Like Garcia Marquez, the magistery of Lopez's writing will leave you believing that yes, all these things really may have happened.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Lopez is a meticulous and visually acute writer. I taught his essays for years to Freshmen.

And you're certainly right, shamatha, to put quotation marks around "nature writer."

Like Edward Hoagland ("Walking the Dead Diamond River"):

http://www.outriderbooks.com/naturepages903a.html


Barry Lopez is meditative and attentive to the implications of things.


Nice to see you here after LitKicks, shamatha.


Zlatko