Description: A conversation with beloved writer Barry Lopez about attentiveness, humility, and hope in a troubled natural world
Brief description: Julia Martin is a South African writer and a professor of English at the University of the Western Cape. In addition to academic work in ecocriticism, she writes creative nonfiction with a particular interest in metaphors of interconnectedness and the representation of place. She is the author of Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects with Barry Lopez, A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites and The Blackridge House: A Memoir, and she collaborated with Gary Snyder on Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places, a collection of three decades of their letters and interviews. She and her family live in Cape Town, South Africa.
Review Quotes: "When a sensational writer delivers another outstanding work, it is a gift to all of us. When he manages to do so from beyond the grave, it's another thing entirely. Something ethereal. That's exactly what Barry Lopez gives us with Syntax of the River. On its surface, the book is simply the transcript of a 2010 conversation between writer-professor Julia Martin and Lopez, an outdoorsman -- he told Martin he wasn't a "naturalist" -- and master of multiple genres of writing. Yet it brings to life mental images of something most of us have never seen: Oregon's McKenzie River, Lopez's sacred place." -- Washington Independant Review of Books