Barry Lopez & “Resistance”

Greetings, readers. Today I want to honor Barry Lopez (1945 – Christmas Day, 2020), one of America’s finest thinkers and writers. I so admire and love his honesty and especially love and recommend his book Resistance (Vintage Books, 2004). It’s a slim little volume of nine fictional stories about individuals resisting oppression. They are writers, artists, crafts people, business people. While writing my second book, From the Porch to the Page: A Guidebook for the Writing Life, (2022), I learned that Lopez died in 2020 on December 25th.

Lopez’s death shocked me. I’d met this wonderful author years ago and revered him. And I was writing about him when I discovered he’d passed away. That was when I was revising a short essay to include in my second book that offers some things about writing I learned from him during his master class at Rollins College in 2010, ten years before he died.

After that master class, that night at Rollins he gave a public reading, mostly from his award-winning book, Artic Dreams. The auditorium was packed. Afterwards, I stood in line to meet him and he signed my copy of Resistance. (Featured photo.)

Keep reading for an excerpt from a poignant interview with Lopez. Notice it was conducted in 2006. It’s still relevant today. Maybe more so.

Resistance

I first read Resistance about sixteen years ago, and nearly every year since, I’ve read it again. Each year it feels so timely, it seems to speak like a Delphic oracle. The book’s time is now. How did Lopez know we’d need such a book year after year? For encouragement during these highly charged times, let me nudge you towards reading Resistance and as many other good books you can find that raise important questions and show us how to remain human and loving in the face of oppression.

Goodreads says Resistance is: ” … a highly charged, stunningly original work of fiction–a passionate response to the changes shaping our country today.”

P.S. I get no commission from Lopez’s publisher for promoting his work. I just like it and want to praise it.

Praise for Resistance

“A manifesto for the twenty-first century … Crammed with action, heartbreak, exotic locales and dangerous ideas. … Potent medicine for readers—especially American readers—exhausted by contemporary events and close to surrender.” —Santa Cruz Sentinel

Interview with Lopez about Resistance

“On Resistance: An interview with Barry Lopez,” conducted by Christian Martin, was published in The Georgia Review, Spring 2006 [60:1], pages 13-30.

Excerpt:

CM: “I have one final question. I wonder whether you, and this particular book [Resistance], are ultimately hopeful? How does one cultivate hope when, as you recently wrote, ‘To read the newspapers today, to merely answer the phone, is to know the world is in flames’?”

BL: “I’m hopeful but not optimistic. The mind deals with optimism in an analytic way; it analyzes the data and then decides “I’m optimistic or pessimistic.”

The imagination, on the other hand, considers all the data and reinvests itself again in hope. The imagination believes in its own power to see what it’s never seen before. It’s not constrained by analysis.

So I get downcast, but I remain hopeful, and I think Resistance is hopeful. Its allegiance is to the imagination and to acts of imagination, and this is what tyrants most fear. They fear acts of imagination because they threaten the tyrant’s control of reality.

The book, I think, is also a kind of defense of the political imagination. It’s saying, ‘We will give the tyrant neither our bodies nor our imaginations. We will not cease looking into these matters. And the tyrant won’t know where we are. We’ll turn up in some dark basement somewhere, like a light going on.’

I love what Owen Daniels says at the end of his story [in Resistance]. It’s so remarkable to me, his quiet elucidation of those civic principles, which are so easy to subscribe to. He doesn’t want them to be forgotten. I don’t either.”

—–END of Interview Excerpt—–

Writing advice from Barry Lopez

For writers interested in Lopez’s writing advice, the following post, Velcro Moments: Making Your Writing Stick, by yours truly, was first published on the Florida Writers Association blog, November 1, 2018. It is republished in my book, From the Porch to the Page: A Guidebook for the Writing Life (New Wings Press, LLC. 2022)

Thanks for reading!

Your writer on the wing,

Charlene

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