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The Missouri Review

Interviews | September 01, 1988

An Interview with Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez ,Kay Bonetti

This interview is not currently available online.

I wanted to write, but I never thought that I could make my living that way, so like everybody else in that position, I decided to go to graduate school.  I didn’t know what else to do.  I finished a Master’s degree, and I was very briefly in an MFA program.  I never thought of myself in terms of having an occupation as a writer until I filled out my 1040 in April, where I put that down.  I just did what I thought of as “my work”.  I traveled and paid attention, and I tried to express what I saw clearly in language that I thought would leave me, personally on the periphery.  I would remind myself that if I lost a sense of naivete I’d lose the frame of mind the reader needs, which is to start with you from scratch.

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