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.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.
--Barry Lopez
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 chance, and I went in cynical. I left with the tools with which to build a stronger, less avaricious, more personal sense of purpose. I still have a fraught, conflicted relationship to the idea of writing for an audience, and writing remains the most vexing activity in my life, but Barry Lopez gave me ways to work through the vexation, a way to use the despair that resides in the chasm between words and things, between writer and reader.
