Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects

by Barry Lopez, Julia Martin

Overview

Barry Lopez had no illusions about the seriousness of our global crisis, yet he also felt a deep conviction about the power of hope and the sources of renewal in the living world. Syntax of the River is an extended conversation spanning three days between Lopez and Julia Martin in which he explores what this juxtaposition means for him as a writer.

On the first day Lopez reflects on years watching the McKenzie River near his home in Oregon. He describes the quality of attention he learned from intimacy with the place itself: a very fine distinction between silence and stillness, the rich complexities of the present moment, and the syntax of interrelationships between living things. The second day is concerned with craft: the work of making sentences and books. Lopez shares his practical strategies for writing and revising a manuscript and goes on to speak about vulnerability. He says he often experienced a deep sense of doubt about his capacity to achieve whatever he was trying to do in a particular project. Over time, though, this characteristic experience of not-knowing became a kind of fuel for his work, and even a weapon at times.

On the final day, Lopez ponders the idea of writing as a praxis, a way of life, even a prayer for the earth, while concurrently being terrified by the portents of its destruction. Here, the experience of being an attentive participant emerges as his core teaching. Over the decades he developed a practice of attention that was endlessly curious and enthralled by the living world, what he calls its pattern or syntax. Despite acclaim as a celebrated writer, throughout his career Lopez humbly tasked himself with making a combination of wonder and horror work together to effectively communicate a life journey of contemplation, exploration, and discovery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595349897
Publisher:	Trinity University Press
Publication date:	01/17/2023
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Barry Lopez was an essayist, author, and short-story writer who traveled extensively in both remote and populated parts of the world. He is the author of Arctic Dreams, which received the National Book Award; Of Wolves and Men, Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape; and eight works of fiction, including Light Action in the Caribbean, Field Notes, and Resistance. His essays are collected in two books, Crossing Open Ground and About This Life. Lopez lived in western Oregon.

Julia Martin is a South African writer and a professor of English at the University of the Western Cape. In addition to academic work in ecocriticism, she writes creative nonfiction with a particular interest in metaphors of interconnectedness and the representation of place. She is the author of Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects with Barry Lopez, A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites and The Blackridge House: A Memoir, and she collaborated with Gary Snyder on Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places, a collection of three decades of their letters and interviews. She and her family live in Cape Town, South Africa.

Read an Excerpt

THE SOUND OF WATER

julia martin

There was a little black plastic bear on the dashboard of the truck when Barry Lopez fetched me from the airport. I noticed because it was just like the one I’d been carrying in my backpack since arriving in the United States. “The polar bear’s elsewhere in the truck,” he said, “the big mother.” Bears in the old Toyota truck seemed about right. For decades Barry had pondered the conundrum of human peo ple’s relation to other beings, traveling across the world to explore the mystery, and returning to write luminous prose that somehow combined lyrical observation with a great deal of information. His writing spoke directly to work in literature and ecology that I’d been doing in South Africa for some years. And after we met through our mutual friend Gary Snyder, Barry became a dear friend too, even a teacher.

So in fall 2010, I visited him at his home in Finn Rock, Oregon. The formal part of the visit involved recording a

conversation about his work that extended over three days. For this, we sat at the window of a small wood cabin at the edge of the McKenzie River, with my little black bear on the table beside us. During the rest of the time we drove for hours through deep green forests, slowing the truck to a walk so as to get out and look at Douglas fir cones with the little mouse tails peeping out, a piece of horsetail snapped off and used for cleaning teeth, wild garlic chewed, mushrooms in the damp near a waterfall, a Townsend’s chipmunk, a chickadee, a marten crossing our path. And we told many stories: stories of bear and elk and mountain lion passing through, stories of home and away, and stories of the interwoven joys and sadnesses of our lives. In all this, Barry’s capacity for openness focus, and seriousness were unrelenting. It was an intense time, and I felt at once exhausted and elevated, the recipient of something irreplaceable. Three words in my journal noted what seemed like the heart of it: respect, kindness, suffering.

On returning to Cape Town, I had the recording transcribed. The typist noted that the sound of water was continuous in the background throughout the interview and said working on it had been a gift of peace at the end of the year. This was good to hear, and I sent the text to Barry to edit, hoping to publish it soon. But there it sat. He kept meaning to work on it, but the conversation was really long, and rather more rambling in structure than he’d have preferred. And of course other things kept intervening. His massive book project, Horizon, which was finally completed in 2018, took up most of his writing energy. Then there was a serious cancer 

diagnosis, and the years of diminishing strength and determined courage that followed. Curiously, the deferred publication of the interview became a background thread to our contact over the years, a conversation in itself. Barry would feel remorseful that he hadn’t done it, and I would remind him that the main thing was the opportunity the visit had given us to be together.

Two years now since his death on Christmas day of 2020, the deep blue agapanthus I planted for him are flowering again, and it feels at last time to share our conversation. His wife, Debra Gwartney, whom I met on a later visit and who became a dear friend, is keen for others to read it. And I think Barry would have been too. His words from a letter in 2015 are a poignant nudge to complete the project. “I’ve no intention of letting that interview slide,” he wrote. “We worked hard on it and I’m determined to do my part with it. It is a beautiful record of our time together, yes, but there is something else there more than worthy of our continued atten-

tion. The ball is in my court and one day I will surprise you by returning your serve.”

Table of Contents

1  THE SOUND OF WATER:        Julia Martin

5  INTERVIEWS

7  DAY 1: PATTERN

46  DAY 2: CRAFT

82  DAY 3: FLAMES

121  WORKS BY BARRY LOPEZ MENTIONED IN THE CONVERSATION

123  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

125  THE MCKENZIE RIVER TRUST

Editorial Reviews

When a sensational writer delivers another outstanding work, it is a gift to all of us. When he manages to do so from beyond the grave, it’s another thing entirely. Something ethereal. That’s exactly what Barry Lopez gives us with Syntax of the River. On its surface, the book is simply the transcript of a 2010 conversation between writer-professor Julia Martin and Lopez, an outdoorsman — he told Martin he wasn’t a “naturalist” — and master of multiple genres of writing. Yet it brings to life mental images of something most of us have never seen: Oregon’s McKenzie River, Lopez’s sacred place.” — Washington Independant Review of Books

From the Publisher