About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community


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 had given us. One of those exercises led directly to my story "Blood" (which led to the movie Jill, currently making its way through festivals).

While I was beginning to write the article, I started pitching publishing outlets. Nobody was interested. They had Famous People to write about Lopez, so didn't need me. This was frustrating. Angering, even. I had something to say and nobody wanted to hear it! My frustration and anger kept me writing, and before I knew it the piece was longer than any of the places I might publish it would ever consider. (We live in a time when "longform" means 3,000 words.) I decided to lean in to the weird shape the piece was taking. Seek to make your faults into virtues is good writing advice. I explored beyond Lopez toward other things that had influenced my writing, my approach to art, and my feelings about life in a world of suffering. In a few months, I had about 20,000 words written.

Luckily, just then I saw a call from Punctum for manuscripts. It was one of their open reading periods. I wasn't sure of what I had written, so sent a bit of it to their email address to see if it was worth my sending it their way, and editor Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy got right back to me saying that on a quick glance it looked like something they'd be interested in, so I should send it when the reading period opened. I did, and Eileen said yes, let's publish this. I spent the summer revising, sent a finished manuscript, and then various family and health emergencies caused Eileen and Punctum's other editor, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, to have to delay publication from last fall to now.

Actually, the delay ended up being a good thing, because a posthumous collection of Lopez's essays, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, was published in the meantime, and a couple of essays in it were hugely helpful in clarifying some of what I wanted to say in my book. And once we were able to start the editing process, it was one of the best experiences I've ever had with editors.

Writers, if you want your text to be cared for with both enthusiasm and sharp insight, submit to Punctum. My manuscript was in pretty good shape when I sent the final in, but it was still a bit unformed, still suffering some of its birth pains, still gesturing awkwardly instead of eloquently — and Eileen's absolutely brilliant questions and laser-focused line editing helped me bring it to a level the submitted manuscript only hinted at. Then Vincent did multiple rounds of proofreading while he designed the book. (Just a couple days ago, he caught some tiny errors that had slipped by us all in the footnotes.) To have editors and publishers care so much and so generously about a book is truly a blessing.

At first, I was worried that having the delay push this book alongside the release of The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories next month would be to its detriment. LVM is a trade book for a general audience, it has its own publicist, we're doing events ... and About That Life might get a little lost. But now I don't think so. Because on rereading the final copy, I realize that About That Life is a nonfiction companion to LVM, even something of a reader's guide for it. Lopez's work and ideas resonate throughout my stories — my favorite of Lopez's tales, "The Mappist", is directly alluded to in my own story "Mass", for instance, and the scholarly characters in "Mass" and other stories in the book are drawn less from my own experience as an academic than from Lopez's fiction (which draws from, among other sources, the scholars in Borges's stories). The careful, quiet tone of those stories is the sound of Lopez's voice resonating in my ears as I write.

But About That Life is about more than Barry Lopez. It is also about Chinese poetry and Korean pottery and Japanese imperialism and the ways and reasons we make things and the nature of living in a world of suffering... A lot. It's also something of a memoir. Certainly, it's the most sustained personal writing I've ever published. (So of course it has footnotes.)

The book is dedicated to my friends Rick, Beth, Pat, and Scott. Rick, Beth, Pat, and I all worked together over 20 years ago at a little boarding school, and the pressure-cooker existence of boarding school life made us fast friends. Rick was the pottery teacher, and everything I know about pottery I first learned from him. (I have no talent for making pottery myself, but I have an absolute passion for it and collect it seriously.) He first introduced me to the book The Unknown Craftsman, which plays an important role in About That Life (and supplied the cover image). Indeed, The Unknown Craftsman is a kind of character in my story, and one that has some twists and turns by the end.

Rick and Beth got married to each other. A little bit later, Pat left the boarding school and made her way back home to the Pacific Northwest, and there married Scott, whom she'd known for much of her life. I spent time at their ranch in Oregon, and loved it and them even as I mourned having them on the other side of the continent from me. Rick and Beth moved to New Mexico when I moved to New Jersey — we had all had enough of boarding school life and needed new adventures. I spent time out there with them as well. Rick, Pat, and I all lost parents within a few months of each other, and once we were through the worst of it, we met up in Tucson for a week. We discovered that since it was off season, renting a mansion was cheaper than getting hotel rooms, so that's what we did. It felt surreal and wonderful and healing. I took this photo of Pat's son Nate jumping into the outdoor pool:

We all still talk regularly, and I see Rick and sometimes Beth and their son Alyosha when Rick comes back to New Hampshire for a big annual crafts fair. He's primarily a jeweler now. I help him out in the booth, as it's a nice way to hang out, to be around artists, to talk about art. Even though I know very little about jewelry, it's easy for me to sell it because I legitimately think what Rick makes is beautiful and meaningful, and it's easier for someone who's not the artist to say that. Pat and Scott sold the ranch, moved to Washington, and now work with bees and in public schools. Among other things. Most of the kids are grown now. I'm the only one of us who isn't a grandparent.

The image of Barry Lopez I put above is one I have a print of. Rick sent it to me some years ago, having gotten it himself from the photographer, Robert Kaiser. (I hope Mr. Kaiser will forgive my appropriating it here. I try to avoid distributing copyrighted work without permission, but perhaps my purpose will justify it.) It was used as the image for Lopez's obituary in The Oregonian. It was strange to read Lopez's local obituary with an image that I was so familiar with, one that has sat in my home for some time, one that I feel real connection to, because it makes me think not only of Lopez but also of Rick. And Pat and Scott, our Oregonian friends. How strange, and how appropriate.

The art of community. That's the book's subtitle. It has all sorts of meanings, all sorts of possibilities, and that's why I had to dedicate this particular book to some of my greatest friends, each one of them an artist in their own right and in their own way.

Given the book's Open Access status, I could link to the PDF here, but I would rather that you click through to Punctum's website at least, and maybe consider either buying the book or supporting Punctum with a subscription (I've had a Punctum subscription for years now, myself). Ask your local academic library to join Punctum's library program if they can. They are doing heroic work trying to make the ecosystem of academic and quasi-academic publishing less awful, less exploitative, less elitist, more accessible.

“If it weren’t for the ways we love each other,” Lopez told us, in words I wrote directly into my notebook, “we’d never write a word. You’ll never compromise your gifts by being attentive to other people, other things.”

image: Oregon, 2013, by me

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