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SPEAKER: This is a story about a poet who lived and wrote and died a half century ago in the small town of Mountain, North Dakota. Káinn Júlíus was apparently a genius, but he's almost unknown in this country. In fact, he's best known in Iceland. He was born in that country and wrote in Icelandic. But Júlíus is also known and revered by some older people in his North Dakota hometown, people who still speak Icelandic and who remember the eccentric farmhand and gravedigger who lived in their town and wrote some of the most cherished verse in the Icelandic language.

In the next half hour, we're going to take you to Mountain, North Dakota, where we'll explore the life of Káinn Júlíus. Our guide for the half hour is Bill Holm, another poet of Icelandic descent who lives in Minneota, Minnesota. Holm and Moorhead photographer Wayne Gudmundson are working on a book about Káinn Júlíus. This program, entitled The Poet with Calloused Hands, was written and produced by John Biewen of our Mainstreet Radio team, with reporting by Dan Olson. The narrator is Beth Friend.

BILL HOLM: We are in Mountain, North Dakota, about 15 miles south of the Canadian border. There are no mountains in North Dakota. What are we doing here? Mountain is an Icelandic village built on the edge of the old Lake Agassiz escarpment. I'm looking east now, and the land falls away maybe 50 or 60 feet. And you can see, my guess is, all the way to the Minnesota border from here, perhaps 30 miles.

Icelanders settled here about 110 years ago and made a little town which, at the turn of the century, had a lively business community. You can hear a pickup truck going by and a dog barking. That's the first pickup truck that's gone by in 10 minutes. But the second dog, which gives, I think, a fair description of what the liveliness of Mountain, North Dakota, on a Wednesday morning is like.

BETH FRIEND: Writer Bill Holm stands in front of the Vikur Lutheran Church and cemetery in Mountain, population about 100. Like a thousand other fading farm towns, Mountain consists of a couple of dozen houses, a junkyard, two bars, and a handsome new nursing home. Bill Holm was in Mountain recently to do research for a book that he's working on with photographer Wayne Gudmundson, a book about a dead poet named Káinn Júlíus.

BILL HOLM: Wayne Gudmundson called me on the telephone over a year ago and said, I'm an Icelander. I'm from Moorhead. I take pictures. Káinn Júlíus, the poet, was from my grandfather's hometown. Have you ever heard of him? And of course I had heard of him. So we started talking about Káinn and about North Dakota landscapes and about the fact that we both liked bleak, flat places that nobody else liked to look at and we like to think about little forgotten elements of culture that nobody else liked to think about. And we decided to do a book together.

WAYNE GUDMUNDSON: OK, light's still holding.

BETH FRIEND: On a cold day in late November, photographer Wayne Gudmundson has his tripod set up in a flat potato field a few miles from Mountain.

WAYNE GUDMUNDSON: What I'm looking at is one of the two Gardar churches through the viewfinder of my camera, which is, why, at least 10 years older than I am, meaning the camera is older than I am. The church is very old. And it's been snowing lightly for the last day and a half. And it's finally just cleared. These little flakes are coming down. They're still in the air like little diamonds.

And the south side of this church in this 4:30 light is just lit up. It's just like--

BETH FRIEND: The landscape in northeastern North Dakota hasn't changed much in the 110 years since Icelandic immigrants settled in the area. Gudmundson's ancestors were among those immigrants. His grandfather grew up in Mountain and knew the poet Káinn Júlíus. Gudmundson, who teaches photography at Moorhead State University, has been photographing the North Dakota landscape for 10 years.

WAYNE GUDMUNDSON: I think it's a wonderfully exotic landscape. And when I'm out here, I can't help but think about-- well, especially like this morning, I was photographing quite close to the Canadian border. And it was incredibly cold. And I had my gloves and hat and all these things on. And you just have to think about what it was like in 1888 when my grandparents homesteaded this land.

So for me to photograph up here on this project, it's kind of a double treat. Because, one, I can think about all the immigrants that came over. But on the other hand, the marks that I'm dealing with, the human marks on this landscape were made by my great-grandparents. And that's kind of rich.

BILL HOLM: Mountain is a town like so many villages in the Midwest. It's almost dead, but not quite. It's curious to go into these towns because it's as if the ghosts in them are in some way livelier than the people who are left. And even in the conversation of the people who are left, the ghosts assume a larger share of heroism and interest than the live.

BETH FRIEND: The ghosts that Bill Holm and Wayne Gudmundson are most interested in finding in Mountain, North Dakota, is that of Káinn Júlíus, who lived in this town from the late 1800s until his death in 1936. America is not known for prizing its poets, but it's hard to imagine a great poet being more obscure than Júlíus, who lived on the edge of North Dakota and wrote in a language known by only a few hundred thousand people in the world. Bill Holm is a small-town poet of Icelandic descent who once wrote a book called The Music of Failure. So maybe it's not surprising that part of what attracts Holm to Káinn Júlíus is that, by the standards of most Americans, Júlíus was a complete failure.

BILL HOLM: He never married. He was a hired man at a poor farm. Never had a dime. Hardly owned a suit. Drank too much, was a sort of village scandal at times. Never went to church, was unrespectable. Never drove a car or presumably operated a machine. Did manual labor-- dug graves, laid bricks, cleaned barns, shacked grain. Had calluses and thick hands.

And yet he wrote poems that are alive for an entire language. Icelanders in general know Káinn's work. And maybe 100,000 people in Canada, the United States, and particularly in Iceland know substantial amounts of his work by heart.

[SPEAKING ICELANDIC]

SPEAKER: "In the Graveyard."

"Men forsake real peace for gold who trust in money reaping,

Yet I find peace a hundredfold where the dead are sleeping."

BETH FRIEND: 82-year-old Bjorn Bjornson of Minneapolis is a former journalist and public relations man who grew up in the Icelandic community of Minneota in southwestern Minnesota. As a young man in the late 1920s, Bjornson went to Mountain, North Dakota, to visit Káinn Júlíus. He says he felt honored to meet the poet. Among Icelandic immigrants at the time, the name Júlíus was a household word.

BJORN BJORNSON: I mean, in Minneota, there were probably-- I'd say 90% of the people could recite a couple of Káinn poems and probably more. And of course, in North Dakota, one would expect it. Winnipeg, likewise. I mean, wherever Icelanders were, there were some people who would familiar with Káinn and be able to repeat some of his verses.

THORFINNR JACK THORFINNSSON: This man is Káinn here. This guy here.

BETH FRIEND: Thorfinnr Jack Thorfinnsson, in his nursing home room in Cavalier, North Dakota, a few miles from Mountain, points out Káinn Júlíus in a photo from about 1915. The poet is standing on the street in Mountain with several other men. Júlíus was a tall, handsome man with a bushy mustache. Jack Thorfinnsson, who is 78, sometimes helped Káinn with his gravedigging work in the poet's last years.

THORFINNR JACK THORFINNSSON: But he always had a pipe, you know? Little mustache and that pipe. Would be working on that mustache. I don't think he had to trim it. He rubbed it a lot so that he kept it down. And I remember him always with that pipe, going back and forth.

SPEAKER: "I've learned from ups and downs in life's hard school

I should, while sleeping, let God have his rule

But when awake, I want to oversee and make decisions both for him and me."

BETH FRIEND: Káinn Júlíus's work is still well known in Iceland, where a book of his verse has been in print for 70 years and where this drinking song, set to a Júlíus poem, is known by virtually everyone.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER: [SINGING IN ICELANDIC]

BETH FRIEND: But today, in the New World, where he spent most of his life, Káinn's literary achievements are not well-known, even in his home town.

[BAR PATRON CHATTER]

Byron's Bar in Mountain does lively business on a cold weeknight. In the dim, yellow light around the bar, some 20 people sit at tables and booths, drinking and talking. In the back, two middle-aged women play pool. The wall behind the bar is covered by dozens of irreverent bumper stickers. Mountain's residents are still mostly Icelandic Americans, and that includes the group of men in their 20s and 30s who surround one table at Byron's. These younger men have heard a lot of Icelandic in their lives but can speak only snatches of it.

SPEAKER: [ICELANDIC] means go home.

SPEAKER: You must know some of these, no? Come on, jump in.

[LAUGHTER]

BETH FRIEND: And while these younger Americanized men have heard of their town's most famous son, they don't know much about him. Káinn Júlíus wrote in Icelandic. But Ben Byron, whose family's original surname was Bjornson, is old enough to have grown up speaking more Icelandic than English and to have known the poet Káinn.

BEN BYRON: My grandfather, he had the livery barn. Oh, I suppose I'd been maybe 9, 10 years old. And Grandpa, he had a horse that was sick. And we knew that when we went to school that morning that Grandpa had a horse that was sick. So at noon hour, we run over to the livery barn to see how the horse was. Well, here old Káinn was, there with Grandpa.

And that is in the book. And he made a verse up for a poem about my grandpa.

[SPEAKING ICELANDIC]

"I'll tell you, I tell you that the horse is going to die,

I tell you, I tell you, the horse is going to die."

And it wasn't an hour, then, the damn horse was dead. [LAUGHS]

BETH FRIEND: Ben Byron says a lot of Káinn's poems were never written down but are still known and recited by old people in Mountain. Many of those poems were angry or ribald and were not meant for a family audience.

BEN BYRON: See, it's so damn long ago since the old guy died that we-- some of them we forgot. Well, some of them were better if forgotten.

[LAUGHTER]

BILL HOLM: Well, Káinn wrote a poem about Minneota. He once went to Minneota, he couldn't get a drink. And it's hard to translate.

[SPEAKING ICELANDIC]

[LAUGHTER]

The last two lines are, "In Minneota, Minnesota, many are ugly." That's a pretty good translation, isn't it? [LAUGHS] Many are ugly.

BEN BYRON: And I couldn't get a drink. And that's what he was mad about.

BILL HOLM: "My Mammon is triumphant. Bacchus is dead." He's shot dead or something. And from Minneota, Minnesota, many are ugly. And then the poem goes on to describe Káinn going to Minneota and not being able to get a drink and finding everyone obsessed with greed and respectability.

BETH FRIEND: And if there were two things that Káinn Júlíus hated, says Bill Holm, they were greed and respectability. Wayne Gudmundson, the photographer, tells of a poem that Káinn wrote for Gudmundson's father, who was a boy in Mountain in the '30s.

WAYNE GUDMUNDSON: Dad would follow Káinn around town because he loved his poetry. And the gist of the poem that he wrote to my father was something about young Eddie following me around. And Káinn gave him a book and wrote this little poem, made a poem for Ed. And it was something about the little boy reads fast to get to the dirty parts.

[LAUGHTER]

HULDA DANÍELSDÓTTIR: Most people think he is-- they would compare him to Robert Burns, Bobby Burns, the Scottish poet, because of the humor and the social consciousness or conscious. They were stand up for the little guy. And I don't think that was false in any way. With regard to Káinn, I think that came from the heart.

BETH FRIEND: Hulda Daníelsdóttir is editor of Lögberg-Heimskringla, an Icelandic weekly newspaper published in Winnipeg. Júlíus's poetry has been described as accessible, playful, satirical, and philosophical. He often poked fun at the pompous and arrogant. And Daníelsdóttir says his command of the Icelandic language was brilliant. She says poets like Káinn are highly prized in Iceland, a country in which poetry and the oral tradition are extremely important.

HULDA DANÍELSDÓTTIR: It always has been, especially in the past, when the Icelanders, for many, many centuries, would get together in the farmhouse. They would sit. The knitting needles would be-- you could hear them. And they would be spinning the wool. And there would be one chosen person that either would read from the sagas or some kind of religious material or what we call chanting. It's called rímur.

And they would chant these things. And they were incredibly long with many, many, many, many stanzas. And they had to know these by heart, and they had to know it accurately. Because the people that were listening, they also knew these, these, I guess you could say, poems. But they chanted them. And when I look at Káinn's poetry, you could almost chant every single one of them. And he's born in, what, 1859, 1860.

And he must have grown up in a farmhouse where this was going on all the time. And then you internalize it, and the rhythm and the alliteration become a part of you.

SPEAKER: "Many were drunk when they went from here

From the bowls that were flowing with malt and beer,

Whiskey was easy to obtain, for both were selling, Dori and Sveinn,

The women were serving coffee swill,

Of men's foolish speeches, all had their fill,

There was song, and there was dance,

And there was I and Reverend Hans."

SPEAKER: [SPEAKING ICELANDIC]

[LAUGHTER]

BETH FRIEND: Johann Geir and his sister Christine Hall grew up in the house just outside Mountain where Káinn Júlíus lived for 46 years.

JOHANN GEIR: He had come to our place before we were born. And he passed away in 1936 on our home place. I was 24 years old.

CHRISTINE HALL: And of course, the first thing that, I guess, we say, we always remember him as coming home with a bag of candy in his pocket and pass it out to us children.

BETH FRIEND: Christine Hall and Johann Geir represent what Bill Holm calls the pickled in amber Icelandic culture around Mountain. It's a group of old people who have never been to Iceland but are fluent speakers of the 1880 Icelandic that their grandparents brought from that country. Christine and Johann are the grandchildren of Anna Geir, a widow who took on Káinn Júlíus as a boarder and hired hand when Júlíus came to Mountain as a young man in 1890.

CHRISTINE HALL: So he came into the area, and someone suggested that the widow Anna really needed help. So he went to her and volunteered his help. And that was his home from there on.

JOHANN GEIR: Káinn did a lot of work around the home. He took care of the wood for the stove and carrying water and helped with the milking of the cows and worked like that.

BILL HOLM: That seems odd to people now that someone who is a great poet and a very talented man-- because they expect that poets would be in universities or in cities or something or would be sitting in rooms resting-- that a poet would do manual labor and would do hard work.

JOHANN GEIR: But while he was at work, he was putting together his poetry.

[SPEAKING ICELANDIC]

This is really-- this is a beautiful stanza.

SPEAKER: The one to 'Stina?

JOHANN GEIR: Yeah.

SPEAKER: Little 'Stina.

JOHANN GEIR: Yeah, that's Christine.

SPEAKER: "About Little Christine Geir."

"Since the first I saw you here,

My need for sunlight dwindled,

The light from my life's path

Is by the light of your eyes kindled."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BETH FRIEND: Margaret Sampson plays an Icelandic song on the piano in her farmhouse just outside of Mountain, where three generations of Icelanders have lived. A good share of North America's Icelandic population is here in an area that stretches from Pembina County in North Dakota's northeastern corner up into the Interlakes region of Canada, around Winnipeg. Like most immigrants to the Midwest, the Icelanders came in the 1870s and '80s as homesteaders. They came to escape poverty and natural disasters back home.

North Dakota weather is much harsher than on the coasts of Iceland, where the immigrants had come from. And Bill Holm says a lot of Icelanders died here those first few winters.

BILL HOLM: When the Icelanders homesteaded this area, they were among the first settlers to get here. But they came from a place that had no topsoil and where there was nothing really like farming in any sense a Midwestern farmer would understand. So they walked across some of the richest soil on the North American continent, pure black gumbo without rocks in it, which would have made them, in any terms, millionaires as landowners. And they found this land on the edge of the escarpment, which is sandy and full of stones but much more attractive and had a slight resemblance to their homeland. So there they settled and homesteaded and bought land and set up four or five small towns.

BETH FRIEND: The poet Káinn Júlíus, who was born in 1860 in northern Iceland, was among the wave of Icelandic immigrants around 1880. After wandering from Manitoba to Duluth, Minnesota, looking unsuccessfully for work, he joined the Icelanders who'd settled the North Dakota town they inexplicably called Mountain.

THORFINNR JACK THORFINNSSON: I lived only a half a mile from his place at that time. Sometimes, we'd go into town on Saturday night. And then I'd walk home with him.

BETH FRIEND: Jack Thorfinnsson.

THORFINNR JACK THORFINNSSON: If I'd had the mind to learn as fast as he spoke his poetry, I would have been much wiser.

BILL HOLM: Did people in town in those days know that he was a poet, know his work?

THORFINNR JACK THORFINNSSON: Yes. Yeah. They knew he was a poet because he wrote poetry about many of the people in the area. Everybody seemed to enjoy seeing him because he'd have some little thing to tell them and always something to talk about. Then he might walk up, rattling off a little verse as he walked away.

SPEAKER: "That whiskey will drive a man out of his head

Abstainers are constantly lipping

But it's far more likely the craziness comes

When there's no whiskey for sipping."

SPEAKER: There are, of course, stories around town about Káinn having a drink or two now and again.

THORFINNR JACK THORFINNSSON: Oh, yes. Káinn enjoyed drinking. He enjoyed a drink. And of course, during the times that he was there, liquor was a no-no. You couldn't buy whiskey or really anything to drink unless it were made by local people. Some of them made beer, and some made what we called home brew.

And he enjoyed both. But he didn't live to drink. I think he lived for his poetry.

SPEAKER: "That half a dollar bottle held not enough for me

It's empty form I viewed with consternation

Another flask I opened and when its cork was free

I drank its contents without hesitation,

My eyes grew dim and strangely the day was changed to night,

In body I felt weak

In spirit, humble

I toppled over headlong

But with my waning might, I quickly rose and then took another tumble,

I lay there still for hours for heavy was my yoke

It did not seem my friends had missed me, really

I thought that I was dead from an apoplectic stroke

And possibly had drunk a little freely,

At last, my feet grew stronger,

My eyes began to see,

And Satan lost a sheep he wouldst devour,

And thus it has been proven on Lazarus and me

That life surpasses death in strength and power."

THORFINNR JACK THORFINNSSON: His abilities were such that people should have been informed about his ability to write poetry. There isn't everybody that's gifted with the gift that he had. I think he should be remembered as one of the great Icelanders of his time.

BETH FRIEND: That a penniless poet could be considered one of the great men of his time is a profoundly attractive notion to writer Bill Holm. He believes Icelandic culture is one of the few in which that could happen. Back in Byron's Bar in Mountain, Holm, a full-blooded Icelandic American, talks about Icelanders and their love of books and learning.

BILL HOLM: If you put an Icelander in a room with a Harvard graduate and a Yale graduate and a Princeton graduate and a Stanford graduate and they said, I'm an Icelander, the first question the Icelander would ask is, have you read enough books? Because the Icelander would, of course, have done that. Which Icelanders had none of this sense of deference to the power of America.

When they got to a country which was run by people who had money and who had gone to Eastern colleges and who had gotten degrees and who had the right credentials, what the hell did that mean to an Icelander who knew more about the United States and more about language and more about almost everything else than anybody he ever met or she ever met? My mother couldn't go to high school. She had to work as hired girl to graduate from high school. And she was the most brilliant woman in Minneota.

And she read till 3 o'clock in the morning. But it made no difference. If you were an Icelander, you were simply brought up to regard yourself as the sort of intelligentsia of the world. If you were an Icelander, you could drink all the whisky you wanted and not go to all the schools in America you wanted, and you were still superior to the president because you were an Icelander. Isn't that true?

SPEAKER: Yeah.

THORFINNR JACK THORFINNSSON: Nobody in this world can be as genuinely brilliant and educated and intelligent as the Icelanders think they are.

BETH FRIEND: But Bjorn Bjornson says that even if Icelanders overestimate their own brilliance, it is true that they have traditionally been a highly educated people, though with little regard for formal schooling. And he says most of Iceland's major literary figures have been, like Káinn Júlíus, unschooled manual laborers. Bill Holm thinks there's a lesson in that for Americans who, he says, see fame and money as the central measures of stature, even for artists and poets.

BILL HOLM: And if an American sees someone successful, they see someone who's got a house in Edina, who's got a Volvo or a Mercedes-Benz or a BMW, who's got a degree from Harvard or Yale, who's got a beautiful wife and beautiful and perfect children who make beautiful and perfect grades in high school and play beautiful and perfect football and that sort of thing, and who have others doing their manual work for them. Here you have a man who cares, presumably, nothing for this. He simply writes his poems about farmers in a small town.

And yet, somehow, Icelandic culture had a space to contain him in the old country and in the immigrant community here. And the moment he was dead, American culture had nothing to say about this, had no comment to make, had no way to embrace this man's genius or to make use of it. So it was as if the grave swallowed him up entirely. And all that's really left of him in the New World is what's underground in a small churchyard in North Dakota, hard by the border.

So I wonder what kind of a culture lets go of people like Káinn. What kind of a culture can't find a way to make use of a genius writer who doesn't conform to your own expectations of what a success or an intellectual would be?

SPEAKER: [SPEAKING ICELANDIC]

SPEAKER: "I'm feeling not too bad,

And yet I'm not too spry

Because my life is waning

And wealth has passed me by

I've never yearned for riches,

It never made me sigh,

I seek the sun as kinsmen

And not the wealthy guy,

So I'll prepare my verses

With nothing in my till

And start to write a booklet

With only will I will,

And thus for fame and honor

My future I will sell,

I'm feeling not too bad

And feeling not too well."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER: The Poet with Calloused Hands was written and produced by John Biewen with Dan Olson and narrated by Beth Friend. Assistant producer, Thorin Bjarnadottir. Technical director, Alan Strickland. Káinn Júlíus's poems were translated by Paul Sigurdsson, Magnus Olofsson, and Goodman Gislason and read by Gene Harrington. The executive producer is George Boosey. Special thanks to Bill Holm and Wayne Gudmundson.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Writer Barry Lopez is best known for his nonfiction books Arctic Dreams and Of Wolves and Men. He's the winner of the National Book Award and the Award of Literature from the American Academy of Institutes of Arts and Letters. Simply put, Lopez writes about nature. He's traveled the Canadian Arctic, the Galápagos Islands, northern Kenya, Australia's Northern Territory, and Antarctica. He says he's trying to understand the relationship between landscape and the imagination.

A slim, new book called Crow and Weasel is his latest effort. It's fiction and can be found in the children's section, as well as the best-seller stack. Barry Lopez was in the Twin Cities recently and spoke with Minnesota Public Radio reporter Tom Meersman. In Crow and Weasel, Lopez says he is still writing about his concern for our spiritual relationship to the land, respect for traditions different from our own, and our human obligations to one another.

BARRY LOPEZ: It's fiction, so it's not-- it doesn't come directly from any series of events or travels. But I think that it certainly grows out of a long period of time dealing with cultures other than my own and dealing with landscapes other than my home landscape. The story is about two young men in myth time in North America who leave their village, not really with the approval of their parents. It's kind of begrudged. And with that kind of youthful energy and enterprise, they take off on a long journey and predictably end up in difficult straits and, in the process, work their way around the discovery of friendship.

And I think the big thing that confronts them, other than starvation and the kinds of things you might expect being on the road, are issues that have to do with the recognition of and the development of respect for the other. In their case, it's an encounter with a group of people utterly unlike themselves and how they absorb that, how they learn from that. I think in terms of the kind of culture that you and I grew up in, instead of these young men meeting the dragon and killing it, they meet the dragon and learn from it.

And after that series of events with the dragon, so to speak, they work their way all the way back home-- again, a very difficult journey and facing problems with losing their way and starvation, and one of them almost drowns. And when they arrive home, of course, they're much older, spiritually and psychologically, as well as a year older physically. The story is very straightforward. There's no ironic element in the story at all. It's about the length of a novella.

And it grew over a period of years with a young man whose work I had a terrific admiration for when I first saw it and now admire even more, a man named Tom Pohrt. He has an ability to draw animals in such a way that a quality of intelligence and moral conscience comes out of their faces, although they don't-- he doesn't make-- he doesn't turn them into human beings. I don't know anyone else off the top of my head who can do that, who can make an animal's face reflect age or serenity or enthusiasm. It's

Pretty hard when you're working with the face of a bird to get surprise and enthusiasm and consternation. And Tom is able to do that.

TOM MEERSMAN: One of the things that, even though this is a fable or a fictional account as opposed to an essay, is that there is a common denominator here in that you seem to have a great respect for Indigenous cultures.

BARRY LOPEZ: Yes.

TOM MEERSMAN: And you've written about that considerably. What are some of the things that you think, especially in relationship to the natural world, that those cultures-- the Inuit cultures, the Navajo cultures and so forth-- what can they teach us? What can they tell us today?

BARRY LOPEZ: Well, I want to be very careful here because I don't really subscribe to a pancultural idea that somehow Indigenous cultures are all the same. And I don't subscribe to this idea that our culture, this postcolonial culture of ours in North America, is irredeemably bad and that somehow all Indigenous cultures are morally good and brighter in the eyes of God than we are. I think all human cultures are flawed. We dwell on our flaws now because we see that, on the scale of an ozone hole or an Exxon Valdez or a Bhopal or a political situation in the moment in the Middle East, our flaws are there for all to see and they're large scale.

When you travel with Aboriginal people or Indigenous people, you find the same qualities of pettiness and anxiety and expression of selfishness. But the scale is not anything like it is in our culture. It's also possible, though, with Aboriginal cultures to sense what I would call a kind of original wisdom. If I think about my ancestors, my ancestors, the ones that I think back to as people who had something that I don't feel I got as the centuries passed along, I didn't get enough of, were Cro-Magnon people. And there's no way I, as a writer or as an individual in the close of the 20th century, can go back and make some kind of contact with the Magdalenian phase of Cro-Magnon culture.

So I'm left, like anyone, having to extrapolate from my experiences with Inuit or Navajo people or with Aranda people in the Central Desert in Australia or with Kamba people in Kenya or any group that I've traveled with, always trying to extrapolate from what they're doing. And I feel comfortable, I think, doing that because-- we're obsessed with progress, but Indigenous peoples are not interested in what we call progress. They believe that the richness is already there. You just make it fuller.

So the question becomes, how do you discover the richness, and how do you make it full? And the richness, to me, that is still contained in Aboriginal cultures, once you push past the superficial business of skin color differences and-- which, actually, is what Crow and Weasel, I realize now, end up doing. Once you push past those things, what you discover are that among those things we might say are pancultural in terms of human desire would be the achievement of serenity, a kind of peace of one sort or another, and the achievement of wisdom.

And I think, to now answer more directly the question you asked, what we're trying-- what I would think we would be trying to do with Aboriginal peoples is discover a kind of original wisdom. And that wisdom would pertain to how should we raise our families and how should we care for our stories. That, as a writer, is one that, for all of my life as a writer, I have felt deeply and tried to address in my own life. When I began writing 25 years ago, I guess, when the first pieces began to appear, short stories and things like that, I had the same fierce devotion to language that I feel today.

But I was a young man, and I told the stories that I found. I passed along what I knew. I was writing essays. And in part, for practical reason, I had to make my living as a writer, and it wasn't really possible to do it as a fiction writer. But as the years went on and as my experience grew, I became acutely aware of the extraordinary privilege that I have as a member of my community to travel. Last year, I was camped for a long time on the Polar Plateau.

And I thought, I am the only one of my small community of friends who, by all of these gracious acts on the part of people, I am one who ended up on the Polar Plateau. So I began to think, if you get to go to these places, you have an obligation not to pass on what you think as a writer, what Barry thinks as a writer, but you're the intermediary. You're the representative of your culture. And so the obligation became for me, consciously, to pay attention on behalf of my community and come home and tell a clear and engaging story as well as I could for the benefit of other people.

What I'm saying is, this is where I went. To the best of my ability, I will tell you what I saw. And now that we see what we have, what are we going to do? So I think, over the years that have passed between the first work that I published as a young man and the work that I do now, I have a much more highly developed sense of my social responsibility, and I believe even more fiercely that the kinds of things that we need to know in order to live well-- and by that, I mean, I would say, to live well is to have these kinds of things in your own life, to have serenity and wisdom and love, to have your life informed by the love of people around you and the ability, which is also difficult, to allow yourself to be loved.

If we want those things in our lives, then we can't be distracted by what I think, in the end, are things not of great substance. And that is the refinements in our technology. Because so often, the refinement in technology comes at the expense of the destruction of social fabric. And I think in North America, one of the things we have to remind ourselves about often is that democracy is an experiment. We didn't sit down at the end of the 18th century with the French, for example, and decide that these kinds of principles we espouse now, the sacrosanct right of the individual to do whatever the individual wants, we don't-- that's not automatically a good idea.

And certainly, in North American countries and in Europe and in emerging-- what we call, condescendingly and erroneously, an emerging country, it is clear that the younger nation-states which-- groups of people we're forcing to be nation-states so that they will deal with us on our economic terms-- what you see happening in those countries is a terrific confusion over whether one should behave as an individual and say, in a sense, to hell with my family and society, or whether one should stay woven in the social fabric. So the great question to me at the close of the 20th century is, to what extent can the individual express himself or herself without endangering the fabric of society?

That's a crucial problem in law. It's certainly a major problem in economics. And it's a major spiritual and psychological problem. These are all grand ideas, you know? And I only-- I mean, I feel them as anyone else does. But I can't do anything about them except tell a story. So when I face those kinds of responsibilities as an individual in society, I'm not a mechanic. I'm not a theoretical physicist.

I'm not a philosopher. I'm not a bus driver. I have a very narrow way in which to contribute. And the way that I contribute is to write, to write an essay that I hope brings out this problem in such a way so that people who are brighter than I am and politically more effective can do something. And when I come to a book like Crow and Weasel, it's just a story about two men who went on a long journey. But I hope floating underneath it are these kinds of considerations.

TOM MEERSMAN: To broaden things just a little bit-- I don't like to group people, but there is a tendency-- I'm wondering what your observations are about-- are there more writers-- are there more people not doing exactly what you're doing but--

BARRY LOPEZ: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

TOM MEERSMAN: --are writing about these kinds of concerns?

BARRY LOPEZ: Certainly. I think that these kinds of concerns have been around for a long time. And because we are a country that deals with too much information too quickly, we're too prone to categorize. I don't think of-- I mean, you have to be willing, I think, as a writer to allow yourself to be categorized because you've just come out of the blue for many people. So someone says that you're a nature writer or that Peter Matthiessen is a nature writer. Well, I think Peter Matthiessen is struggling with questions-- I'm talking about somebody in the generation ahead of me.

He's struggling with some of the same questions that writers in my generation are struggling with. But I don't think of him as a nature writer any more than I think of somebody like Annie Dillard as a nature writer. Annie Dillard is looking at spiritual issues in society. I think if you want to take this large group of people, which would include Peter Matthiessen and Ted Hoagland and Wendell Berry and Annie or myself or any one of a dozen people, John McPhee, of course, well, I think what all of us are doing is carrying on, in one way or another, a tradition that is clearly grounded in Melville, in a book like Moby Dick, which is to address the major problems in society in terms of natural history and geography.

When people say to me, for example, Where are the women writing about natural history? as though they weren't holding up their part, which is an arrogant and misplaced question, I think, the answer to that is the same as the answer, I believe, to your question. And that is that these big problems, What is our relationship to place? are being written about by different people in different ways. And it may well be that people like me write about a place like the Arctic or that John McPhee writes a specific about a specific topic-- and we're talking about nonfiction here.

But when I look at, for example, the work of a young novelist like Barbara Kingsolver, a woman whose-- a book of hers that's out now called Animal Dreams-- what I see is a woman who is addressing political issues, the issues of family, issues of relationship-- for example, a daughter to a father-- and issues of environmental degradation, all within the context of day-to-day life. And this seems to me extraordinarily valuable because we're overwhelmed with a sense that our world is being destroyed around us and that we're at fault.

And when novelists address the big issues by making them part and parcel of everyday life, I think it does-- one of the things that it does is give people like you and me, who live day-to-day lives, a sense that our lives have context and meaning. So I don't think that the kinds of issues that you and I have spoken about here are issues that are either narrow in their-- they're not issues that are only addressed by a small group of people. I think it's the responsibility of writers in every culture to address these questions. I mean, the reason that you-- the reason for the storyteller to exist in a culture is to help inform and edify and clarify and revivify the sense of life that drives people, the sense that if you live a proper life, you will become a proper human being.

And if you become a proper human being, then you'll know how to help a child lead a good life. When I turn around and look at American literature today, the things that lift my heart are the ability of, it seems to me, particularly women writers to create novels that address the full range of human issues, not things in isolation. And that's why the question, Where are the women writers writing about nature? is somewhat irrelevant. I mean, it's a charge raised mostly by men, asking why a group of people don't respond to a social problem in the same way they have.

And the question should be, what is it that women are writing about that I've failed to see that addresses these problems that I'm concerned about as a reader? I look at the work of somebody like Wendell Berry. And here, this is a singular force in American literature at the moment, to say moral-- that language has a moral dimension, that it's not a technology. It's not a toy. It's not something to play with. It's not a VCR of some sort, that this is our living tongue.

It has a moral dimension. And as writers, we must be attentive to it and, as well as we can, make our work a reflection of that reality of language. So I'm tremendously encouraged by what I see being written, and it certainly is not just by people who are writing in the area that I am. If I have one impression as a writer, opening my mailbox and looking at the galleys of new books, is it's that there is wonderful work around-- intelligent work, much of it being written by younger people. And it addresses things that I would never in my life be able to address as a writer.

I don't have those skills. And I think part of the pleasure of being a writer is knowing that other writers are saying-- are trying to address the big questions-- prejudice, all forms of totalitarianism, for example-- that other writers are addressing these in ways that readers who would never pick up a book of mine, they're going to get the benefit of that kind of writing. So, basically, I think I'm not a person despairing at the moment about what's being written.

TOM MEERSMAN: Is your book, your fiction, Crow and Weasel-- does that signify a bend, a change in direction for you--

BARRY LOPEZ: No. I've been writing fiction all along and several collections of short stories. It's the longest piece of fiction I've ever written. And at the moment, I'm working on a large nonfiction book. My life, I've been going back and forth between those two forms. And I think Of Wolves and Men and Arctic Dreams are more widely known, so it's easy to, I think-- for someone to think that that's an area of concentration for me. But I find that I'm able to work out things that--

I don't know how articulate I could be about this, but I think I do work things out in fiction that I can't yet grasp or understand or penetrate in nonfiction. And so I go back and forth. And I'd like to continue try to work with longer pieces in fiction. But I don't know when that'd come. I think when I was working on Arctic Dreams, I was writing very little fiction. I was writing lots of essays. And there was a period of five or six or seven years.

And now, this last spring, I've been writing short stories again and stories that I drafted during those years but didn't finish. And they've begun to appear in little magazines and anthologies and whatnot. So if I look ahead and guess, I would say that I'll probably, these next few years, be writing more fiction and working very quietly on this big book.

TOM MEERSMAN: One last question on Crow and Weasel.

BARRY LOPEZ: Yes?

TOM MEERSMAN: It is a book which, I think in part because of the illustrations and the fact that it's not a long book, might cause some people to think of it as a children's book.

BARRY LOPEZ: Yes.

TOM MEERSMAN: And it certainly does have that appeal. It does, to me, seem to be the kind of story I can read to my children.

BARRY LOPEZ: Yes.

TOM MEERSMAN: And I'm wondering if, to some extent, you are aiming at a different audience, not just adults, but also at a younger generation, through the ideas that you're bringing up in this particular story.

BARRY LOPEZ: Not consciously. The surprise to me with Crow and Weasel has been the acceptance of the book or the enthusiasm, I guess I would say, of parents, people saying, I want to read this book to my children. I want my children to know these kinds of things. And I didn't-- I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking the same thing I think whenever I sit down in front of my typewriter, which is I'd like to tell a good story well.

And I think, probably, if I was honest with you, I'd tell you that I'm a little bit self-conscious now because I-- if somebody would say, Well, is this a children's book? I would have said, well, I don't have the skills to write for children. I don't think that it could be a good children's book because I've never done that before. I wouldn't know how to do that out of simple respect for children's authors. I mean, it's a skill that is, I think, not well enough understood.

It's very hard to write well for children. But now, after seeing a reaction to Crow and Weasel, I realized that the story-- that children can read and understand the story easily. And when I ask myself, I wonder why that is. I don't know that I have a good answer. My only answer at the moment is that the story doesn't turn on irony. In other words, a children reading the story-- a child reading the story or children hearing the story would-- are never going to feel lost.

They're never going to feel that something else is going on in the story that that's over their heads or that somebody else might know about. Everything that happens in the story is straightforward, and children can follow what's going on easily. But I think that when I was writing the story, I was thinking of an audience that was in the same general audience I think of whenever I sit down to write a story or an essay or a book, which are people who are, in some general way, something like me and have, in some way, my sense of passion about certain issues or ideals.

They have ideals that I share with them. And I'm very-- I'll tell you truthfully, I'm touched to the point of almost tears that someone like myself, who does not have children, can stand up in public and tell a story, to read from this book and tell this story, and have young people come up and say what they say about the story. It touches me very deeply in my heart that I have something to say or that what I have to say has meaning to a group of people I wouldn't pretend to know how to talk to.

SPEAKER: Writer Barry Lopez talking with Minnesota Public Radio reporter Tom Meersman. Lopez's new book is called Crow and Weasel.