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This episode is dedicated to writer Barry Lopez, author of numerous books on travel, landscape, animals, and humanity and a longtime Oregon resident. Lopez passed away in December 2020, just three months after losing a significant portion of his property on the McKenzie River to the Holiday Farm Fire. We’ll listen to a conversation with Lopez from 2015 and hear from Debra Gwartney, Lopez’s wife, reading from her essay “Fire and Ice,” originally published in Granta, about Lopez’s life and final days.

Barry Lopez wrote many books, including Arctic Dreams, Of Wolves and Men, and Horizon, along with many short stories and essays. Essays mentioned in this program are “Sliver of Sky” (Harper’s, 2013) and “A Dark Light in the West” (The Georgia Review, 2010).

Full recordings of our 2015 conversation with Lopez are available at Soundcloud and YouTube.

Debra Gwartney is author of the memoirs Live Through This and I Am a Stranger Here Myself. She and Lopez edited the collection Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. Her essay “Fire and Ice” was published in Granta in July 2021.

To listen to the full episode and view a transcript, visit the Oregon Humanities website.

Alexandra Powell Bugden
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