Barry Lopez (1945-2020) in conversation with Richard Wolinsky on June 11, 2004 while he was on tour for Resistance, a collection of interrelated short stories with the theme of resistance.
Barry Lopez, who died on December 25, 2020 at the age of 75, was a master of the short form, both fiction and non-fiction. His non-fiction, collected in such books as Arctic Dreams and his last published work, Horizon, and his fiction in collections such as Light Action in the Caribbean, focused on exploration, biology, morality, transcendence, biology, politics, philosophy and much more.
In this second of three interview, he discusses how he came to write this particular book, and then moves on to discussing what in 2004 was an unnamed threat of totalitarianism. Today, of course, it’s named. While the interview was conducted during the Bush Administration, it’s not hard to project ahead from what Lopez is saying to the current crisis point with a would-be dictator poised to become the Republican nominee for President. He speaks of the inattentiveness of the masses as well, which also has great resonance today.