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Each year, the organisers of the Perth Writer’s Festival invite an eminent author to close the festival. This year they asked Barry Lopez, best known for Arctic Dreams but also the author of many other fiction and non-fiction works, including About This Life, Of Wolves and Men, Field Notes and Crow and Weasel. He has received numerous awards and prizes for his writing and is a regular contributor to Granta, The Paris Review, Orion, Manoa, Harper’s and National Geographic magazine.

Oregon-based Lopez has the best kind of American accent – gentle and agreeable. Standing behind a lectern on the Octagon Theatre stage, he looked like a typical academic with a sports jacket and shirt, spectacles and white hair – a kind of Richard Dreyfus. He spoke with a remarkable graciousness and emotional intelligence, often sounding more like a poet than an academic.

Lopez started his address with a number of stories about his grandchildren, the last of these leading into a sobering question – whom among us is invincible? His thesis was that writers of prose need to provide stories that help rather than just entertain. Lopez commented that humanity has come a long way very fast and perhaps we don’t know where we are any more. He cited capitalism, terrorism, addiction to pharmaceutical drugs, too much religion and disbelief in global warming as some of the things wrong with the world.

His plea to listeners was simple: we need to fall in love. With each other and with the earth. Lopez said he had travelled to shattered places and always came away changed by the tragedies he had encountered. Meeting people of quiet determination and working with people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu to foster reconciliation affirmed his faith in humanity. Lopez exhorted his listeners to reclaim love. And for writers, to help their readers remember and understand what love is. Writers should write for the fate of the people and leave readers with the possibility of survival, not in despair, he said.

It was textbook secular humanism but Lopez managed to preach his message with such warmth and intelligence that I forgave him for preaching. He littered his speech with disclaimers and concluded by saying he recognised his vision was flawed and imperfect. The reception at the close of his talk went far beyond polite applause – it was clear that he had moved a number of people in the room, including University of WA’s Professor Dennis Haskell, who choked up when thanking Lopez for his message.


2010 Perth Writers Festival presents
Barry Lopez

Venue: University of Western Australia, Perth
Dates: February 28 – March 1, 2010
Visit: Perth Writers Festival