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An Interview with Barry Lopez
by Sarah Buck, Continuations Bibliographer, and Bob Nardini

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Barry Lopez, award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction, stopped in New Hampshire recently on tour for his latest book Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, for which he recruited 45 writers including Barbara Kingsolver, Jon Krakauer, and Bill McKibben, to write definitions for hundreds of American landscape terms. Those 850 definitions were then vetted by a panel of professional geographers and folklorists to create Home Ground (Trinity University Press), at once a celebration of America's sense of place, and a unique reference work of interest to all libraries. Academia was privileged to speak with Barry while he was here and to interview Barbara Ras, director of Trinity University Press.

Barbara Ras introduced the book to YBP over a year ago. Here are some of her thoughts:

When we started work on the project, Barry knew the book would need a variety of voices, many styles, a range of approaches. He invited forty-five writers - individuals who are geographically diverse, stylistically different, and various in their personalities both on and off the page. The massive job of working with these forty-five writers fell to Debra Gwartney. She assigned writers their carefully selected terms, provided instructions, resources, bibliographies, and on-call coaching, and then negotiated between the writers and our academic advisory board-geographers William L. Graf, Kevin Blake, Kathleen C. Parker; landscape architect Kenneth I. Helphand; folklorists Mary Hufford and Enrique Lamadrid, and others-to ensure the scientific accuracy of the definitions. As you can imagine, that process required an enormous amount of back and forth, patience, tact, and tenacity. Debra Gwartney clearly got us through the toughest and the most excruciating and exhilarating challenge, and she did it with great finesse and flair.

My bosses at Trinity took a huge leap of faith in letting me invest a significant portion of my budget in a single project. But in the end, the power and spirit of Home Ground attracted other supporters. We raised $295,000 for the project, small gifts from committed individuals, a grant from the Compton Family Fund, and significant donations from an anonymous source and the Kendeda Fund.

Other challenges arose along the way. How to get from vision to trim size, text design, illustrations (exquisitely drawn by Molly O'Halloran), jacket design, binding materials. Finding the exact right way to harmonize all the elements required a lot of imaginative trial and error, drafting and redrafting, working through a number of stages until we finally just got to that point, where everything, like at the end of a poem, "comes right with a click like a closing box." It was grand.

How did this book come to go to Trinity University Press?

Barbara has been a close friend of mine for many years, starting probably in the late eighties sometime, when she became the editor for a book called Crow and Weasel. This was when she was with North Point Press. We stayed in touch on a regular basis after that. When North Point Press shut down she moved to Sierra Club Books, I think, and then to Georgia, and then this job opened up at Trinity University Press and I was one of several people, I'm sure, who wrote letters of recommendation for her to be appointed the new publisher there.

When I began developing the idea for Home Ground, I talked to Barbara about it and she "got it" and was very enthusiastic, things looked good initially, but I think Georgia was myopic about Barbara's presentation of the project and they were just of no help to her at all in raising money to do it. So I very reluctantly told Barbara I had to take care of the book, and that I was going to have to go elsewhere. My agent presented the book to a number of publishers and the one that was most appealing was Scribner, in part because people there were longtime friends of mine. Susan Moldow who was the publisher was somebody I had known for many years and she understood what I was trying to do. I knew she would support it, and another woman I knew there, a gifted literary editor, Ilene Smith, wanted to edit the book.

So that all looked good and we negotiated a contract and I was about to sign when I got a call from Barbara, whom I of course talked to regularly about what I was trying to do, just keeping her apprised of it. She told me that she was in a position to match the contract that Scribner was offering. So I said well, let me think about this, and I called my agent and I said we already have the commitment of Barbara Kingsolver, Jon Krakauer, Charles Frazier, etc. There are ways to overcome the traditional criticism that university presses get about not having any marketing savvy, etc., etc. So I said, what I want to do is say thank you and much gratitude to Scribner and go to work with Barbara, because you can never underestimate what it means to have a publisher who understands what you're trying to do and will let you go ahead and do it.

So that's what Barbara offered us, actually, a better contract, in terms of the way it was structured , so I could pay the writers and the board and researchers upfront instead of waiting until the book was out. That, and her enthusiastic support of the project. She trusted that Debra and I knew what we were doing.

A lot of people have a question about why we went with a university press, particularly one that had been revived and was relatively small. But it comes down, as publishing so often does, not only to the quality of the people you're working with, but the enthusiasm they can generate for a project that's still in need of definition. I think Barbara has a stamp. For a while there when she was at Georgia, Barbara had, if I recall, three books in a row that were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. I'd said something about Home Ground to a friend about a week or so ago, and he said this kind of book had the Barbara Ras stamp on it. I really don't know what that is. I think it's literary quality, at least, and as we say sometimes, a book that matters.

Librarians' devotion to freedom of speech and their tireless work, especially in these last six years, to protect the right of citizens to know is one of the great untold national stories.

In your essay, "Waiting for Salmon," you mention that the media doesn't always inform people about what's really happening. What advice do you have for library and information workers regarding threats facing the environment?

Well, you get into a very dangerous area when you ask librarians to support a particular politics. The key here is to read widely. The sacred obligation of the librarian is to work in every way to help create an informed public. Librarians' devotion to freedom of speech and their tireless work, especially in these last six years, to protect the right of citizens to know is I think one of the great untold national stories. When I said in that essay that the media do not keep us fully informed, that is a truism and actually a fairly banal observation. Media are a business. They're not pro bono operations. Newspapers are in the business of having to sell, and to some extent, book publishing is too. So what you need to do, I think, as an American citizen, in order to vote intelligently, is to stay broadly informed, to read widely on both sides of a question and try to keep pace-if a library can afford the subscriptions-with what's going on in your own country by listening to what foreign observers have to say. So that means foreign newspapers and periodicals.

While the book was being developed, what was your actual role as the book was being written? It must have been a different experience for you than your other books.

If you have something to say, the reader will get it. And if you don't have anything to say, the reader will get that, too.

It was. The book was a great teacher. And by that I mean yes, I did have an idea, and anybody who's honest with you, as a writer, is going to tell you that you're driven by your own ideas. But, as the book matured, week by week, month by month, as the definitions came in and I spoke with Debra, I began to understand what we-not me-were trying to do, that is, to feel the undercurrent of the book.

We're not Diderots. I am a writer not a dictionary-maker. The command of linguistics and etymology, etc. that would be required to do a stricter kind of reference book, those were not our skills, and they would certainly not be our pretensions. I wanted a book that a librarian could feel was solid. I knew as a writer that if we stayed focused on this task, a solid reference book, that whatever good we had to offer as writers would surface inevitably. That's really the story of nonfiction writing. And fiction for that matter, too. Your obligation is to tell a story that engages the imagination of the reader. If you have something to say, the reader will get it. And if you don't have anything to say, the reader will get that, too.

So what we were determined to do was to create something that was solid, that was reputable. As the project developed, one of the things I learned was that this kind of book, which was not a book I would write but one that I would edit, meant that for the first time as a writer I really had to listen closely to what other people were saying. The first time I got a clear picture about this was when Debra and I talked about what kind of writers we wanted, the geographical range and the backgrounds of the writers, and then we went to work on a list of terms. We built up a list of about 1500 terms and submitted those to the board to vet, so we could get down to a more manageable list.

Debra is far and away the better editor between the two of us. One thing I saw coming was that writers who had to listen to two editors were inevitably going to get confused and the project could become muddied. I If I say to you, this is what I think a definition should do, and Debra says to you, this is what I think a definition should look like, you're going to increase the likelihood that you'll lose that writer in the short run or even the long run, because when you're developing something where you're trying to maintain enough latitude for the project to define itself, you can't deal with too many voices. So I said to Debra, you know what, I do have a vision of this book, but you are fully capable of creating the first draft of the manuscript with the writers and I'm just going to back out here.

Debra worked with the forty-five writers for, oh, nearly three years, because people of course missed deadlines, research had to be done, and there was a lot of back-and-forth with the board about fact-checking, which I, too, got pretty heavily involved in. But I wanted to stay out of the writers' way. What I learned in doing this was that Debra's ability to edit gave us a book in which the individual voices remained distinct while the collective voice turned into something that no one really could have imagined.

When Debra was putting the manuscript together, she would say to me every once in a while, "This is getting really scary. I'm editing the book by saying yes to this and no to that, yes to this and no to that. And I'm not sure without consulting with you whether I'm conforming to the idea you originally had." And I said to her, you know what, the idea is just a rich ground in which to grow something. Let's just grow, and we're going to be fine. I completely trusted the back-and-forth that Debra was having with the writers, in part because occasionally a writer would call me and, unprompted, say something positive about the quality of Debra's editing and I would think yeah, we're going to be just fine here.

So when Debra finished the first draft of the manuscript, I went through it relatively quickly, and we produced a penultimate draft and sent that to Barbara. Barbara read the manuscript and called me, and I could tell from the trembling in her voice that she was deeply moved. As I said earlier, my thought was let's just stay focused on the creation of a first-rate reference work, and not get into any speculative discussion about what else the book might be. But when she called, I realized that something had happened here. One of the things she said was that she could not believe that a group of writers whose imaginations were all so distinct could be in service for so long a period of time to something that was larger than anybody's individual vision. What it amounted to was an act of deference on everybody's part toward the project.

After that, I worked for about eight months at a much deeper level of fact-checking and going back-and-forth with a couple of the writers about some prose that I felt was infelicitous or that hadn't really reached the level that I wanted, to enhance the literary quality of the book. So that's the role I played, and then I was doing a lot of work with Debra selecting the quotes we used in the margin and talking with Molly O'Halloran about the drawings, generally putting my finger in at a lot of places, and talking to Barbara a lot about what I thought were the deeper undercurrents in the book.

But the book you hold in your hand is really the result of a conversation that took place between Debra and the forty-five writers, Debra and the board-the board never talked directly to the writers, because that would have created an editorial mess-and of the conversation she had with me, an ongoing conversation, and then in the later stages our back-and-forth with Barbara.

Will Graf, who functioned basically as our chairman on the board, called me about six or seven weeks ago when he first held a copy of the book and said I'm so proud of what we've done here. He said, you know, in the beginning we were a little apprehensive as a group of geographers and academics about exactly what was going to happen here. Would the writers understand they're not working with a group of people who only have opinions, but that geography is a profession, the study of folklore is a profession? (They were reading the definitions to make sure that, insofar as they went, the definitions were not in error, and not misleading.) Will said they were professional people, and that they did not really know what they were going to be dealing with, working with writers who don't have this kind of backgrounds, whose background basically is a professional attention to language. For most writers, it was a background in the humanities.

it allowed them as a group of scientists and academics to see what it is that writers really do.

But he said what happened was that the writers showed such deference to their professional expertise, it allowed them as a group of scientists and academics to see what it is that writers really do. He said to me what I want you to know is that if you had sent us the terms, we could have written good definitions but we could never have told the reader what the word means. And that's what the writers did. He said there's a natural reluctance on the part of people in academe to countenance what writers might do with an expertise not their own, whatever kind of writers there are, but if we could show this kind of deference toward each other, we would be able to come up with something remarkable that neither group working alone could ever have come up with.

It was about the voice of a group of people who felt very deeply about place and about language.

When he said that, I felt one of those undercurrents in the book I was reluctant to talk about. When you start complimenting yourself in the middle of a manuscript about how good it is you can get in big trouble. Your first job is to make a solid book. What he was telling me, and what I've come to feel very strongly, is that a community emerged with the writing and editing of this book, one unlike any community I have ever been involved with. In the end it wasn't about any one person's voice. It was about the voice of a group of people who felt very deeply about place and about language. What the project recalls for me is what happened in the thirties with the writing projects and photography and art projects sponsored by the WPA. This was a period of time when people were not just suffering through financial depression in America, but suffering through a crisis of identity in national character. Many parents were profoundly concerned about how they were going to pay for their children's education, where food was going to come from. In a general sort of way, we'd lost confidence back then in ourselves as a people.

We got out of that of course, but some argue that we've drifted back into the same place, that we're uncertain about ourselves now that foreign nations criticize us all the time, and we're at odds with each other about what it means to be an American, what American character is all about, and I think that's what a lot of the writers were responding to. Not with politics, certainly, I mean the book's not a political book. But I think there is an effort on the part of this group of writers, to say, look, what we take care of is language. And here's the language that we use to say precisely, and accurately, and evocatively, and fetchingly, what we mean when we say, This is my place, or, I love my place. Here's the language.

You just put the book in the hands of the reader and say, Wherever this takes you, that's great for us. We're not here to tell you how to use the language. You write the letter-to-the-editor, but here is some of the stuff that we've let slip away, that could bring us back into an awareness, a sense of pride I guess, in what it means to be an American.

In your introduction, you mention taking family trips to New Hampshire. We're in New Hampshire and you're in New Hampshire today. Can you tell a little about that?

My memories are, I think, so colored by romantic recall that any precision I tried to offer would be inaccurate. What I remember is that I grew up in Southern California and when I moved at the age of eleven to New York, to Manhattan, I was struggling with a densely urban area that didn't offer me the same things I'd known as a boy growing up in a more agricultural part of California, where on weekends I was always in the Mojave Desert or something like that. New Hampshire seemed like the place I needed to get to, the place in the East where I could feel comfortable again, being close to unmanaged landscapes, even though a lot of timber's been cut there, and all those arguments come into play. But I remember as a kid driving with my parents on roads in New Hampshire and feeling giddy about being back in a wild landscape with, certainly, tons more water than I had seen in Southern California as a kid. But I felt I was back in touch with a primal reality that fed something very important to my psyche.

If you could tell all the librarians around the country the one place in their collection where they had to shelve this book, where would you tell them to put it?

I couldn't. I've watched in bookstores where I've been, to see where the book gets shelved. Powell's, the big bookstore in Portland, has it in five different places. I think it presents a problem for a librarian. Home Ground is a step away from a standard reference text. So, a lot of what makes it a valuable book for library patrons wouldn't be well-served, I think, if it was shelved only in reference. It has a strong element of folklore, of Americana, in it. It's decidedly literary. It's not an anthology, exactly, because it was written from scratch and the identity of the writers is somewhat in the background. So that's an intimidating issue. I'm sure librarians will work out among themselves where to go, where to put the book on the shelf. But I wouldn't presume to know.

This book began, as you may know, in a library. The idea struck me in the main library at the University of Oregon one evening. What it might become became clear to me later that night, though not in detail. A writer like me can't function without a library. I have thousands of books at home, and use them regularly, but I'm still dependent on librarians and libraries to do the work I'm doing.

There's a name there on our advisory board, Isabel Stirling. She was the head of the science library at the University of Oregon when I met her in 1980. She came up from the library at UC Riverside and sent me a note saying I know about your work, I'm the new science librarian, and if I can ever do anything to help you please call on me. Well, that was 25 years ago, and she's been indispensable in my work ever since as a friend and colleague. She's now the associate dean of libraries at UC Berkeley. I called on her repeatedly with reference questions for Home Ground -some were really esoteric-and was regularly amazed that sometimes even while I was still on the phone she could track down something that I needed, you know, or recommend a periodical that I should look at, or something like that.

The research librarian's task will never be supplanted by a technology

Every time I talk to Isabel I get the sense that it is not actually all there on the Internet. The research librarian's task will never be supplanted by a technology, because a research librarian has a gift for understanding the inquirer's poorly phrased question. Time and again I can recall being at a reference librarian's desk, telling them what I wanted, and feeling them adjust my question to get closer to what it was I was actually after, that ability they have to understand the vague request and to sense what you're actually looking for. You can't get that out of a technology. You can't buy that gift. The librarian in her or his own mind, can still do a search that's light years beyond the best search engines that are in computers now.

The librarian in her or his own mind, can still do a search that's light years beyond the best search engines that are in computers now.

So, to posit that somehow a library can be maintained by technologies instead of people, I think the idea is crazy. When you say to me, where would the book go, where would it be shelved, I think I'd like to be the proverbial fly on the wall and listen to librarians say, here's my argument for why it should go here, here's my argument for why it should go there.

We'll just ask you one last thing. I have an excerpt from one of your stories in Resistance, where you talk about being in a university library and you dug out a book of landscape terms in Uygur. I'll probably mispronounce this-EYE-gar, OO-gar-and two hundred of them applied only to sand deserts. Is that a true story?

No, no, virtually everything in my fiction is made up. The word is pronounced WEE-gar, by the way-I was corrected on it, too. There was a man last night at this reading here in Keene who had a copy of Resistance with him, and he said he was just curious whether this collection of short stories had triggered work on Home Ground, because the same thing happens-a community of people comes together to resist the erosion of something important.

It is a terrible thing in American society that our children are educated by people who are undervalued, and that the information we need to vote intelligently is maintained by another group of undervalued people.

His question made me made see for the first time the connection between writing a book like Resistance, a work of fiction, and actually bringing a community of men and women together to produce a nonfiction book, to work together on a project. This is one reason I like to go on book tour. When somebody makes an observation like this man did, it's an opportunity to celebrate the relationship between the writer and the reader. What drives many of the people who contributed to this book, I think, is a sense of a writer in service to society, a writer who sees herself or himself as the reader's companion, and not necessarily as the reader's authority.

We certainly appreciate your time this morning. It's a wonderful book you've created. And we are very happy to be able to do our best to put it into libraries around the country, and the world for that matter.

I hope you do. I care deeply about libraries. It has been a source of grief to me to learn how much money has to be spent by libraries to protect themselves against the kind of government intruders that have surfaced over the last six years. These monies should go into acquisitions and they should go toward the maintenance of the public's sense of how valuable-indispensible-librarians are to a civilization. It is a terrible thing in American society that our children are educated by people who are undervalued, and that the information we need to vote intelligently is maintained by another group of undervalued people. It is a criminal thing.

HOME GROUND: LANGUAGE FOR AN AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

AUTHOR: BARRY LOPEZ

PUBLISHER: TRINITY UNIVERSITY PRESS

CONTENT LEVEL: GEN-AC

LC CLASS: G108.E5H66

$29.95 CLOTH (449 P.)

ISBN: 1595340246

ISBN-13: 9781595340245

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