HISTORY OF THE ARCHIVE
HOW WAS THE ARCHIVE CREATED?
In the spring of 2014, Barry Lopez, John Lane, and Kurt Caswell met for an evening meal at Taqueria Jalisco, a favorite Mexican restaurant in Lubbock, Texas. The third annual Sowell Conference would begin the next day on the campus of Texas Tech University. Fueled by this excitement, Lane inquired about how the Sowell Collection and the Environment and the Humanities degree program (EVHM) got started at Texas Tech. As Lopez told the story, and Caswell offered some of the pieces he knew, Lane said: “We have to document this, and maybe get it into ISLE. People don’t know this story.”
He was right, and so we did.
What follows then is that story.
In 1998, Barry Lopez received a call from one of the premiere fine books and manuscripts booksellers in America, Ken Lopez (no relation). And to his surprise, a long-time colleague and friend, Ken Lopez told Barry Lopez that Texas Tech University was interested in acquiring his papers.
The story goes that a small group of faculty and administrators at Texas Tech (including then dean of the graduate school, David Schmidly, a biologist) had read Edward O. Wilson’s book Consilience. Excited by the way Wilson discusses a need and a path for bringing the sciences and the humanities together, the TTU group came into conversation with Jim Sowell, a Texas Tech alum, then chairman of the Board of Regents, and a major donor to the university. Sowell was looking to invest in the academic and intellectual life of the university, and he was particularly impressed with Wilson’s ideas.
According to Ken Lopez, the group at TTU recognized that no other college or university was systematically assembling a collection quite like the one they had in mind, and so they had an opportunity to not only be the first, but also to be the best in the world. The collection might begin with a handful of writers, the TTU group decided, and additional papers might be acquired over time. The writer whose papers might most inspire and anchor the collection, the group decided, was Barry Lopez.
Initially, Barry Lopez was cautious about the interest from TTU, thinking it might be a “stray idea,” as he later called it, an idea initiated with a great deal of energy and interest, but one that might fizzle out over time. The interest did not fizzle. On behalf of the TTU group, Ken Lopez made an inquiry with William Kittredge, Annick Smith, David Quammen, and Pattiann Rogers. “As I heard it,” Barry Lopez said, “they all said that if I made the decision that this was a good idea and went in, then they would all go in too. If I would say yes, then what we now call the Sowell Collection would start like that, with the five of us.”
Barry Lopez traveled with Ken Lopez to the Texas Tech campus to discuss the matter. After a couple days of meetings, Barry Lopez was still uncertain about what he wanted to do. “I remember walking around Memorial Circle near the administration building with Ken and saying, ‘You know, I don’t know what to do. This is such a new situation for me. I’m really interested in helping develop this program in the Honors College and flattered that somebody is interested in my papers, but I just don’t know how to make a judgment here.’ We went through and looked at Tech’s state-of-the-art archival resources there in the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. It all looked great. We talked with Jim Sowell. I liked him immediately and was very impressed with his seriousness and sincerity. But I was sitting on the fence. And then Ken said, ‘You know what? I think this is a good idea, and I think you should go ahead and do it.’ And I said, ‘Well, all right. Let’s do it.’ And that’s how the Sowell Collection got started.”
The Sowell Collection came under the purview of then associate dean of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, William E. Tydeman. The combined efforts of Tydeman and Warner, along with the support of Jim Sowell and the administration at TTU, have brought the collection along to include the papers of 18 writers.* And it’s still growing. Warner’s goal is to acquire the papers of one new writer each year, and at least one additional acquisition from a writer already in the collection.
Lopez has worked hard to identify and make connections with writers whose papers might be available for the collection. “There were two things I wanted to be sure I didn’t get involved with,” said Lopez. “One is who would be approached about coming in [to the collection] or playing any role in those decisions.
The other was, I didn’t want to know about money. I didn’t want to know what anybody was paid or what the negotiations were. I wanted to be clear of all that information because I dreaded people thinking that my enthusiasm was generated by doing favors for friends, for example. I couldn’t do that. I just identified writers, forwarded that information to Jim Sowell, and said, ‘Here are some people that I think highly of and who seem to me, as it’s developing, to fit into the Sowell Collection.’ The university, of course, was going ahead on its own in selecting writers. Bill Tydeman and Diane Warner were handling all of that, bringing in a couple of writers whose work I wasn’t familiar with. That’s what I’m still doing today, suggesting people to Jim Sowell. He’s his own guy, and makes his own decisions.”
Still, one of the unique features of the Sowell Collection is that many of the writers are friends, and have been friends for many years. For the most part, their work developed and matured during the latter half of the twentieth century, a time when environmental responsibility and action were taking root in American culture. In a 1988 conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Edward Lueders at the University of Utah, Lopez notes that what has struck home for him is “this deference that is shown by ‘natural history’ [or ‘nature’] writers toward each other—their mutual support and their regard for each other’s work, which is genuine, and their affection, if you will, for each other. And I felt that sense of identification as soon as we met, that we were embarked on some similar process that was larger than the best [any] of us could do in the world, being in service to something larger than ourselves.” Those words from nearly three decades ago hold true today, and in fact serve as the foundation of the Sowell Collection, the mutual regard and even love among these writers for each other’s work, and for each other as human beings. As such, many of these writers have long been in correspondence with each other. As a scholar or writer working in the collection, you will find in the papers of Gretel Ehrlich letters from Barry Lopez. In the papers of Barry Lopez, you will find letters from John Lane. And in the papers of John Lane, you will find letters from David Quammen. In addition, many of the writers whose papers are in the Sowell Collection have been in contact with other writers, and their papers include sometimes voluminous correspondence from writers like Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, John Haines, Donald Hall, Robert Hass, John McPhee, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams, Edward O. Wilson, and others. In this way, the Sowell Collection is a web of interconnections, a glorious treasure hunt for willing scholars and writers.
This excerpt is reproduced with the permission of the author, Kurt Caswell. From “Everything is Held Together with Stories: Barry Lopez and the Sowell Collection at Texas Tech University.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring 2015), pp. 369-384.
* Since this article was published, the Collection has grown to hold the papers of 28 writers.
WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT THIS ARCHIVE?
The term “nature writer” comes with some baggage, immediately putting a frame around nature, and implicitly distancing people, including the nature writer, from it. For that reason, the writers of this collection often resist the label, and are collectively defined by their focus on the interaction between the physical environment and human cultures. In other words, they write about the community of nature, and the nature of community. They are creators of, created by, and observers of, human and natural communities.
Each of the writers has a unique angle of vision, but equally unique is the way they form a community of writers. Their mutually supporting friendships and literary dialogues are one model for a way of being in the world and appreciating what it is to be human, and to form communities, within the natural world.
Another unique feature of this community of writers is the way that they represent so many areas of enquiry, from the sciences to the humanities. They cross nearly every literary genre, that is, area of artistic endeavor and subject matter. They include popular science writers and scientists, novelists, historical fiction writers, poets, screenwriters, biologists, ecologists, documentarians, and science fiction writers.
Many have been published in Orion magazine, and many are studied by scholars in the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). Like the writers themselves, the people who read their work and papers—students, teachers, researchers, seekers and curious souls in general—represent diverse communities from around the United States and the world.
EXPLORE THE COLLECTION
Discover the world’s most prominent writers on the natural world
The Sowell collection will take you through an archive of American authors deeply engaged with the nature of community, the conjunction of scientific and spiritual values, and both the fragility and resilience of wilderness.