GAMBIER — The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould wrote a radio show in the 1970s called “The Idea of North.” In it, Gould assembled a collage of interviews, sound effects, music and narration to explore what the idea of the Far North had become to humankind. He sought to simultaneously evoke the viscerally real extreme weather conditions and the otherworldly, solitary state of mind generated by the Arctic.
Less than a decade after Gould’s work, American author Barry Lopez wrote an award-winning book titled “Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape,” that wove a literary portrait of the remote north.
Not long after that, in the mid-1980s, a wildland firefighter and teacher from upstate New York who had often worked in the mountains and tundra of Alaska, noticed the Lopez book on the shelf in a store.
Mike Newell bought that book and through it, found a calling. “Arctic Dreams” crystallized thoughts and concepts Newell had developed while working in what he describes as the fabled landscape of Alaska. Newell also, as a writer of poetry, said he was delighted to find a prose author with a poet’s ear for the rhythm, shape and resonance of words.
He began collecting Lopez’s books, both fiction and non-fiction, and found himself ever more beguiled by an author who he said had enormous creative powers, and chose to deploy them with care and dignity. Or, as Newell puts it in his new book, “No Bottom: In Conversation With Barry Lopez,” “I came to appreciate how he could rub a poet’s yearning for the accuracy and the aptness of words — especially the echoes of their exquisite, internal pulses — against the philosopher’s stone.”
The book, published by XOXOX Press in Gambier, was released April 16 during a visit Newell made to the campus of Kenyon College. It assembles interviews Newell had with Lopez in Oregon in 1999, along with an appreciation of Lopez’s numerous short stories. Also on April 16, at the Brown Family Environmental Center, Newell spoke and presented a slide show about his wildland firefighting experiences. On Thursday he met with students and signed books at the Kenyon College Bookstore.
Newell said his book was originally planned for a popular series of lit-bio books from a larger publisher. But when that publisher wanted more formulaic criticism of Lopez and less in-depth celebration of the author, Newell withdrew the book and pitched it to Gerald Kelly, who runs the XOXOX Press in Gambier. Old college friends and former students of the poet Robert Creeley, Newell and Kelly have spent the last four years editing, revising and polishing the book, at the same time renewing and deepening their long-standing friendship.
In conversation Thursday with Kelly and Lucie Alig, Kenyon student and Lopez enthusiast, Newell said he tried to balance three aims in the book: To whet the appetite of those who haven’t yet delved into Lopez, to enrich the experience of Lopez fans and to document some of Lopez’s thoughts for scholars.
For the last few months, Newell said he has eaten, slept and lived the book, conferring frequently with Kelly and with Lopez himself, who helped with clarifications, suggestions and editing of the original interview transcripts.
“We had this ballet, which was lovely,” Newell said, explaining that if Kelly had pushed him too hard, or if he himself had pushed Lopez to speed up the process, it would have collapsed. Instead, he said, they took their time to make a book that is a beautiful work of art.
Alig, a poet and an associate at the Kenyon Review, was particularly interested in the intersection between Newell’s own work as a poet and his various non-poetry pursuits. Newell said that his forays into firefighting, teaching, science and environmental law were all mind-expanders that gave him insights he uses in his poetry and prose. Alig pointed out that Newell’s way seems to be an endless one of digging beneath the surface. Newell agreed, noting that two of his books of poetry are titled “uNderground Fires” (with the capital N standing for his surname) and “Aestivation,” (the process where animals burrow underground during periods of drought).
