The Mumpsimus

My new book About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community has now been published by Punctum Books as an Open Access work, which means there is a free PDF and the paperback is published at a reasonable price. The book's copyright is replaced by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, giving everyone the freedom to copy, share, and remix the work for noncommercial purposes. This summer, I'm going to play around with alternate forms myself (at the very least an ePub file for ebooks, but maybe also an illustrated website). About That Life was not going to be a book. I began writing it moments after I learned of Barry Lopez's death on Christmas Day, 2020. Lopez had been my workshop leader at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the summer of 2000, and he really changed my approach to life and especially to writing. I wanted to write a short article in his memory, and I especially wanted to share the writing exercises he h...

  "Barry was not one to invest in answers. It was the questions that pulsed in his body and propelled him forward no matter where he traveled in the world." —Debra Gwartney, "Fire and Ice"   Barry Lopez died on December 25, 2020, shortly before January 6, 2021, which would have been his 76th birthday. Of course, that date two years now lives in infamy, a day of insurrection in the United States. Within the next few months, a little book I wrote in the wake of that day will be published: About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community . (It was originally scheduled to come out this past fall, but the publisher got a little backed up.) It will be published as an open-access book with a Creative Commons License by Punctum Books, so the PDF will be freely available and the paperback will be as affordable as possible. I will have more to say about the book when it is released. I want to note Lopez's birthday today, however. Of the people I have met in my life, ...

2020 has been such a difficult, strange year that I often forget a book I wrote got published at the beginning of it. The publication of that book feels like it was a lifetime ago, something from a different world. And in many ways it was a different world, because the book was released just as we were becoming aware that COVID-19 might be something of a problem for the United States. A month after the book's publication, we knew things were serious. Two months after, the routines of the world had changed. Trying to do a year in review post this year is especially difficult because the year felt so long and life was so upended that memory is both hazy and untrustworthy. This year, I didn't write a lot, but I read far more than I thought I had — once I started making a list in preparation for this post, I was surprised at just how much reading I did. This realization made me somewhat less depressed about how little success I've had this year at writing fiction or essays, ...

I'm not writing about nature. I'm writing about humanity. And if I have a subject, it is justice. And the rediscovery of the manifold way in which our lives can be shaped by the recovery of a sense of reverence for life. --Barry Lopez The final guest on the final episode of Bill Moyers Journal was Barry Lopez , and it's half an hour of riveting, inspiring conversation.  The video is here. Ten years ago this summer, I attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and Barry Lopez was my workshop leader.  Those were some of the most powerful and invigorating days of my life, because Lopez was exactly the person I needed to work with at that particular moment, a moment when I doubted the purpose of writing and felt that I had wasted the countless time I had spent in the activity of writing stories and plays and essays, almost none of which at that point had been read by anyone other than my friends and teachers.  I went to Bread Loaf because it felt like a last cha...