Barry Lopez
Posted: January 19th, 2005, 11:37 am
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.
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.