Conversations with Barry Lopez: Walking the Path of Imagination by William E. Tydeman (review)

William Tydeman’s Conversations with Barry Lopez: Walking the Path of Imagination presents a collection of his interviews with the author, Barry Lopez, who is best known for his writings on nature. Tydeman, a librarian at Texas Tech University where Lopez’s literary archive is housed, divides the book into three main conversations that touch on Lopez’s evolving thoughts on authorship, humans’ relationship to nature, the role of artists, social justice, indigenous knowledges, and activism. The book also includes a short biography with photographs of Lopez in the field, a complete bibliography of Lopez’s works, and some of Tydeman’s observations of Lopez’s practice as a writer and teacher.

Tydeman notes that the interviews took place over the course of a decade and were recorded, transcribed, and edited for clarity. He refers to himself not as an oral historian or interviewer but as a “compiler” whose “luck was to bear witness” to Lopez’s thought processes (xi). However, Tydeman’s questions—which are present in Conversations—are thoughtful, skilled, and reveal the growth of his friendship with Lopez, and it is clear that Tydeman’s role is more essential than he admits. Lopez speaks to Tydeman in these conversations, and the reader benefits from Tydeman’s knowledge of Lopez’s work and how that work has been praised, unexplored, or misunderstood.

The book’s main value to oral historians resides in Lopez’s articulation of respect for the subjects he takes on and in his discussion of forms of writing—in other words, his methods of listening and interpretation. Lopez considers himself a student of communities that consist not only of people but also landscapes, animals, intentions, and social realities such as economic and environmental injustice. He stresses to “look always for the knowledgeable person,” bringing to mind the words of Mildred Shackleford, who similarly assessed Alessandro Portelli’s intention in Harlan County (They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History [New York: Oxford University Press, 2011]) as being a mission to gather knowledge from a community rather than to instruct or exploit (14). Tydeman phrases this approach as “radical ways of reconfiguring the critical thinking and learning processes,” which are necessary for writers, artists, scientists, politicians, and others, particularly in the face of current crises such as climate change (53). The approach Lopez brings to the field is “immersion, momentum, and dedication,” describing a process akin to ethnography and guided by a commitment to the study of place (89).

Lopez also discusses the role of memory in his work, pointing out his difficulty with the concept of “imperfect memory,” which he calls a misnomer (39). He instead approaches memory as a function of selection, noting that people recall events differently, because of their individual difference, in terms of personal history or experiences, and speculates that “story originated as a response to the development of complex memory” (40). Stories, the result of memories, thus preserve a sense of community by balancing the individual with the collective and the familiar with what must be imagined.

When oral historians refer to stories, we often first think of narratives that are recorded, collected, or documented; Lopez here refers to stories as what he produces in his role as a writer, respectfully guiding the reader through a set of imagined events that could be true (39). In fact, Lopez produces imagined stories with such believability that his books, Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven (Kansas City, KS: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 1976) and River Notes: The Dance of Herons (Kansas City, KS: Andrews and McMeel, 1979), have been marketed incorrectly as nonfiction by his own publisher (76). I found Lopez’s consideration of story, from his perspective as an author creating a narrative for the benefit of a community of readers, a refreshing reminder of the format’s capaciousness rather than its limitations, especially given recent examination of the role of...