Barry Lopez
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SAL Presents

Barry Lopez

Past Event: Wednesday, April 7, 2010

At Benaroya Hall — Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall

Co-Presented by North Cascades Institute.
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To read Barry Lopez is to commune with a deep thinker.

His writings have frequently been compared to those of Henry David Thoreau, as he brings a depth of erudition to the text by immersing himself in his surroundings, deftly integrating his environmental and humanitarian concerns. In his nonfiction, he often examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape. In his fiction, he frequently addresses issues of intimacy, ethics, and identity.

Barry Lopez is best known as the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award. Among his other nonfiction books are About This Life, and Of Wolves and Men, which was a National Book Award finalist. He is also the author of several award-winning works of fiction, including Field Notes, Winter Count, and a novella-length fable, Crow and Weasel. His recent work includes Light Action in the Caribbean, a collection of stories, and Resistance (2004), a book of interrelated stories—Lopez’s eloquent response to the recent ideological changes in American society. He is also the co-editor with Debra Gwartney of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, a landmark work of language, geography, and folklore.  His books, along with his magazine work, reflect a life of travel and cultural inquiry that has taken him to nearly seventy countries.

Once a landscape photographer, Barry Lopez continues to maintain close contact with a diverse community of artists. He is on the advisory board of Theater Grottesco in Santa Fe. He has collaborated with composer John Luther Adams on several concert and theater productions and spoken at openings for sculptor Michael Singer and photographer Robert Adams. In another arena of work, he recently collaborated with E. O. Wilson in the design of a university curriculum that combines the sciences and humanities in a new undergraduate major.

Barry Lopez has received numerous awards and prizes, among them the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John Burroughs Medal, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, five National Science Foundation Fellowships, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and the John Hay Medal, as well as Pushcart Prizes in fiction and nonfiction. He is a regular contributor to GrantaThe Paris ReviewOrionManoaOutsideThe Georgia ReviewNational Geographic, and other periodicals. He lives in rural Western Oregon.

Excerpt from the introduction to Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (2006)
It had come to me as a fourteen-year-old reading Moby-Dick, a moral drama set in an intensely physical place, that this seemingly unfettered, nearly unmeasurable American landscape I had become acquainted with (Colorado’s fourteeners, Appalachia’s Carolina bays, Manhattan’s tidal races, a complex landscape, robust with suggestions of freedom, powers, and purity) it came to me that this particular landscape had distinctively stamped the long line of American literature, starting with Cooper and Hawthorne and coming up through Twain, Cather, and Steinbeck, through Stegner, Mary Oliver, and Peter Matthiessen, through Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. In fact, it is striking the degree to which the work of so many American writers is informed by sentences of wonder, meditation, and confoundment, of intimacy, alienation, and homage, inspired by the feature—plowed land, deep woods, mountain stream—of American landscapes. In Inheritance of Night, William Styron writes: “You look out once more at the late summer landscape and the low sorrowful beauty of the tideland stream, turgid and involute and secret and winding through marshes full of small, darting, frightened noises and glistening and dead silent at noon except for a whistle, far off, and a distant rumble on the rails.”

Whatever their styles and emphases, many American poets and novelists have recognized that something emotive abides in the land, and that it can be recognized and evoked even if it cannot be thoroughly plumbed. It is inaccessible to the analytic researcher, invisible to the ironist. To hear the unembodied call of a place, that numinous voice, one has to wait for it to speak through the harmony of its features—the soughing of the wind across it, its upward reach against a clear night sky, its fragrance after a rain. One must wait for the moment when the thing—the hill, the tarn, the lunette, the kiss tank, the caliche flat, the bajada—ceases to be a thing and becomes something that knows we are there.

Selected Work:

Fiction
“Hidian,” TriQuarterly #133, Spring 2009
Field Notes (1994)
Crow and Weasel (1990)

Nonfiction
“An Intimate Geography,” The American ScholarFall 2009
“On the Border,” The Georgia Review, Fall 2009
Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (co-edited with Debra Gwartney, 2006)
Arctic Dreams (2001)
Crossing Open Ground (1989)
Of Wolves and Men (1979)

Links
Barry Lopez’s homepage
January Magazine: Interview by Linda Richards
CBS Radio audio interview, by Don Swaim

Event Details

Benaroya Hall — Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall

200 University Street
Seattle, WA 98101

View directions.

Transportation & Parking

This event will be held in the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall. The Recital Hall is located on the upper level of Benaroya Hall, up the stairs to the left side of the Box Office. Benaroya Hall is located at 200 University Street, directly across Second Avenue from the Seattle Art Museum. The public entrance to Benaroya Hall is along Third Avenue.


By Car

  • From Southbound I-5
    Take the Union Street exit (#165B). Continue onto Union Street and proceed approximately five blocks to Second Avenue. Turn left onto Second Avenue. The Benaroya Hall parking garage will be on your immediate left. The garage entrance is on Second Avenue, just south of Union Street.
  • From Northbound I-5
    Exit left onto Seneca Street (exit #165). Proceed two blocks and turn right onto Fourth Avenue. Continue two blocks. Turn left onto Union Street. Continue two blocks. Turn left onto Second Avenue. The Benaroya Hall parking garage will be on your immediate left. The garage entrance is on Second Avenue, just south of Union Street.
  • From Northbound Highway 99 (Aurora Avenue)
    Take the Seneca Street exit and move into the left lane. Turn left onto First Avenue and proceed one block. Take the next right (at the Hammering Man sculpture) onto University Street. Continue up the hill two blocks to Third Avenue. Turn left onto Third Avenue. Continue to the next block and turn left onto Union Street. Make the next left onto Second Avenue. The Benaroya Hall parking garage will be on your immediate left. The garage entrance is on Second Avenue, just south of Union Street.
  • From Southbound Highway 99 (Aurora Avenue)
    Take the Denny Way/Downtown exit. Keep right and cross over Denny Way onto Wall Street. Proceed approximately five blocks and turn left onto Second Avenue. Continue south on Second Avenue approximately eight blocks. The Benaroya Hall parking garage will be on your left. The garage entrance is on Second Avenue, just south of Union Street.

By Public Transit (Bus & Light Rail)

Benaroya Hall is served by numerous bus routes. Digital reader boards along Third Avenue display real-time bus arrival information. For details and trip planning tools, call Metro Rider Information at 206.553.3000 (voice) or 206.684.1739 (TDD), or visit Metro online. The Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel, served by light rail, has a stop just below the Hall (University Street Station).

Parking
The 430-car underground garage at Benaroya Hall provides direct access from the enclosed parking area into the Hall via elevators leading to The Boeing Company Gallery. Enter the garage on Second Avenue, just south of Union Street. Maximum vehicle height is 6’8″. Blink charging stations are available for electric vehicles. Visit the Benaroya Hall website for event pricing.

Parking is also available at:

  • The Cobb Building (enter on University Street between Third and Fourth Avenues).
  • The Russell Investments Center (enter on Union Street between First and Second Avenues).
  • There are many other garages within a one-block radius of Benaroya Hall, along with numerous on-street parking options.

Accessibility

Open Captioning is an option for people who have hearing loss, where a captioning screen displaying the words that are spoken or sung is placed on stage. This option is present at every event at Benaroya Hall in our 2021/22 Season.

Closed Captioning is an option for people who have hearing loss, where captioning displays the words that are spoken or sung at the bottom of the video during an online event. Captioning is available for all online events; click the “CC” button to view captions during the event.

Assistive Listening Devices (ALDs) are devices that people with hearing loss use in conjunction with their hearing device (hearing aids or cochlear implants). Benaroya Hall has an infrared hearing system, which transmits sound by light beams. Headsets are available in The Boeing Company Gallery coat check and the Head Usher stations in both lobbies.

Sign Language Interpretation is available upon request for Deaf, DeafBlind, and hard of hearing individuals for both in-person and online events. To make a request for interpretation, please contact us at [email protected] or 206.621.2230×10, or select “Sign Language Interpretation” from the Accessibility section during your ticket checkout process and we will contact you to confirm details. Please note: we appreciate a two-week advance notice to allow us time to secure interpretation.

Wheelchair Accessible Seating and Accessible Restrooms are available in all sections at our venues, and our venues are fully accessible to ticket holders with physical mobility concerns. Among other features, Benaroya Hall has designated parking spaces adjacent to elevators in their parking garage. Elevators with Braille signage go to all levels within the Hall. To reserve seating for a specific mobility concern, you may select “Wheelchair Accessible or Alternative Seating Options” during ticket checkout, and we will contact you to confirm details. For more details on their accessibility features, click here.

Guide and service dogs are welcome.

Gender neutral restrooms are available.

We are pleased to offer these accessibility services at our venues, and they are provided at no additional cost to ticket holders. Please contact us with any questions and feedback about how we can be more accessible and inclusive. Our Patron Services Manager is available at [email protected], or Monday-Friday from 10:00am – 5:00pm at 206.621.2230×10.

For more accessibility information, please head to lectures.org/accessibility. If you would like to make accessibility arrangements you do not see listed here, please contact our box office or select “Other Accommodations” from the Accessibility section during your ticket checkout process, and we will contact you to confirm details.