Author's stories offer hope for despairing activists.

Byline: Paul Denison The Register-Guard

``Stories trap us, stories free us, we live and die by stories,'' says award-winning cultural critic Rebecca Solnit, "but we can at least try to become the storytellers, not just silent listeners."

In her latest book, "Hope in the Dark," Solnit not only tells stories but also retells them, aiming to give other activists a more encouraging and uplifting way of looking at the past, current events and the future.

Political activism runs in Solnit's family. She caught it from her brother, David, who has "dedicated his life to nonviolent direct action and grass-roots organizing" and recently edited a City Lights anthology called "Globalize Liberation."

So she finds it easy to question the left as well as the mainstream, and does so in her book.

"I also come out of scholarly and critical thinking, so it's always been easy to look at the ways activists construct stories and then believe them as inevitabilities, to ask myself not just how to deconstruct those stories, but what other stories, what other ways of telling are out there, and then to try them out."

And that's what Solnit will be doing in a free talk this week at the University of Oregon.

Solnit won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism for "Rivers of Shadow: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West."

She will be introduced Thursday by Oregon writer Barry Lopez, another award-winning author who also believes strongly in the power of stories to shape and reshape culture and politics.

In "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities," Solnit walks hand in hand with what she calls the Angel of Alternate History as she focuses on contemporary events including the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the emergence of Subcommandante Marcos and the Zapatistas in 1994 on the day that NAFTA took effect in Mexico, the protests that disrupted and influenced the outcomes of World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999 and Canc<234>n in 2003, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., and the worldwide anti-war protests on Feb. 15, 2003.

In each of these events, Solnit finds something instructive, often seeing small gains or reason for hope that are not immediately obvious.

She was prompted to write "Hope in the Dark" by "the despair that followed an extraordinary season of peace activism in the spring of 2003,'' because the protests failed to prevent the invasion of Iraq.

But those protests may have deterred the Bush administration from saturation bombing of Baghdad, she writes. They also changed mainstream media perceptions of the peace movement and politicized many people as never before, creating "a vast reservoir of passion now stored up to feed the river of change."

Underlying Solnit's analyses is the view that when the future seems dark it is merely opaque, unknowable, unpredictable and consequently full of possibilities. "Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army," she writes. "It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension."

Solnit says it's her goal "to make people keep working for a better world, and that means reminding them that we've had extraordinary victories on a lot of fronts."

She wrote the book, she says, "for people who cared a lot but were burnt out or felt powerless or had been told over and over by the mainstream media and the mainstream culture that they can't make a difference.

``I wrote it for the young people to challenge the conventional stories they've been given, including the ones that say they're powerless and the world they live in is pretty much the way it's always been.''

LECTURE/READING

Rebecca Solnit

What: The author and cultural critic talks about her new book, ``Hope in the Dark''

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday

Where: Alumni Lounge of Gerlinger Hall, 1468 University St.

CAPTION(S):

Rebecca Solnit will speak at the University of Oregon this week.