Lapidary Prose from Barry Lopez

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

We were saddened to learn of the recent death of nature writer Barry Lopez. He wrote wonderful books like Arctic Dreams, for which he won a National Book Award. He’s just a beautiful, beautiful writer, just lapidary prose.

And I’m reminded of a passage from one of his books of essays called About This Life. From the 1990s. And in it, he’s talking about how he was on a very long flight with somebody who had a 15-year-old daughter who was just starting to get interested in writing. And the guy asked Barry Lopez for advice for his daughter about writing. And Barry said, tell your daughter three things. Tell her to read whatever interests her and protect her if someone declares what she’s reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else’s comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind.

Tell her to read classics like the Odyssey. They’ve been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly useful. And he goes on to say, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well, she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn’t come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means. Finally, tell your daughter to get out of town and help her do that. I don’t necessarily mean travel to Kazakhstan or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things.

So read, find out what you truly believe, get away from the familiar. And Grant, I can’t imagine much better writing advice than that.

Oh, it’s perfect. I don’t know that I could add anything to it. I think anything I would say would just elaborate on that. And as a matter of fact, he says in better words stuff that you and I have said before. I particularly like the part where he’s talking about protecting the child from criticism about what they’re reading because there are many on ramps to becoming a lifelong reader. And almost none of them start with reading the great classics.

People don’t go from classic to classic in the beginning. They go from cereal box to a waiting room magazine to something their teacher recommended to a gift bought by grandma to something that they were loaned by an older sibling. It just is a strange path, right? And the writing is the same. You go from notes to diary to an essay for class to deciding to write a story or to an idea that you thought you could do better than the author you were reading did it. It’s just many different paths.

Right.

Right. I mean, the language itself is a magical gift. And I just love the way that he celebrates that. I guess the only thing that we can add is do yourself a favor and go read some Barry Lopez.

Right. He’ll be missed, but his works are here. He’s left something of himself behind.

We’d love to hear from you about an author or a writer who left a great impression on you. Maybe there’s a passage that you cherish. Share it with us so we can cherish it too.

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