He replied that hes become more careful in his use of the word hope: Jesus said, Take no thought for the morrow, which I take to mean that if we do the right things today, well have done all we really can for tomorrow. for its efforts to clean up waters polluted by toxic mining runoff. His gloves made his fingers clumsy, so he took them off, freezing his hands as he twisted the wire. Our Home Place Meat markets and sells the rest of the beef. Hardcover, 222 pages, $45. We are now reduced to one significant choice, Berry writes in the books final paragraph. He wrote to Dan that hed like to forgo an author photo, and asked that the flap copy, if there must be any at all, be kept to a description of the book, objective as possible. As for author interviews: Why, before I have come to any coherent understanding myself of what Im doing here, should I admit some journalist to render it all in the obvious clichs? He finally relented about the photo, after Dan pleaded, Perhaps absurdly, it can help to persuade people to read the book it adorns, and we do want people to read your book, and I dare say even you wont mind too much if people read your book., In those days, the best-seller lists were filled with novels by Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, and Saul Bellownot to mention Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbinsand it wasnt clear that Berry would ever find an audience. I really loved taking this for a three-week joyride in my backpack., Cartoon by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski, The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Womens Rights. An essay by Toni Morrison: The Work You Do, the Person You Are.. They are asking me to lay aside my old effort to tell the truth, as it is given to me by my own knowledge and judgment, in order to take up another art, which is that of public relations. In a letter, he told me that he didnt want to offend against truth or goodness, although the book at times certainly does offend, I think necessarily, against political correctness. Tanya crisply told him, Its too late for it to ruin your whole life.. For instance, he writes early on that slavery would have been a relationship of mutual affection between owner and owned, that an enslaved person would emerge from the abstraction of market value to become a known person, known moreover as a member of the farms community of humans and other creatures. He posits that abuse and cruelty must have been rare, because such treatment would have wasted time and that, after the days work was done, enslaved people were relatively free to venture as they wished. Wendell Berry, Urban Planning, and Gleaning. The Berry Center, with a staff of eight and a board of ten, attracts visitors from around the world who share many Americans sense of deracination. He grew up in Baltimore, surrounded by Black market owners, Morgan State graduates, mayors, murals, and Maya Angelou poems. Henry County is ninety-four per cent white. Ashland Tann, a 2021 graduate of the farming program, who is Black, is clear-eyed about the difficulties. All American Entertainment Named to Inc. Best Workplaces in 2022. (?) The headquarters of the Berry Center occupy a capacious white brick Federal-style house on South Main Street. hooks, who taught The Hidden Wound at Berea College, told Berry how moved she was by the image of a little boy intervening in a scene charged with the hidden violence of racism. Berry, though, wrote almost twenty years later that he considered it perhaps the least satisfying book hed ever writtenhed barely begun to make sense of the subject. He divides his time between writing and farmwork, continuing his vocation of championing sustainable agriculture in a country fuelled by industrial behemoths, while striving to insure that rural Americansa mocked, despised, and ever-dwindling minoritydo not perish altogether. He had made a bird feeder and fastened it to the porch railing, so he could watch the comings and goings of chickadees, titmice, juncos, and jays. But it has become such a pleasure., In the early sixties, the Berrys seemed to be launched on a very different life. Beshear agreed to visit a few particularly afflicted towns. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and . It is a geologic upheaval. Entire mountaintops were torn off and cast into the valleys, he added. In the early winter, he takes some ewes to the steep lots near the house, where they serve as lawnmowers, then brings them back to the barn for lambing. Someone took out a few panes and tried to get into my safe. They ought to keep it ready to hand, like a fire extinguisher. I no longer have the courage to write if I cant erase. He recalled that his work on A Place on Earth had been a long and awkward struggle, and so having Dans help and encouragement at that time was wondrous good fortune. After more letters and phone calls, he and Tanya invited me to visit. He set out to prove them wrong, even as he admitted, I seem to have been born with an aptitude for a way of life that was doomed., He found a kind of salvation, and a subject, in stewardship of the land. She replied, In a small community, humorous banter has to affirm energy and purpose. John Berry became an attorney, married Virginia Erdman Perry, from Port Royal, and established himself as a prominent citizen of Henry County. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Reviewed by Robert Grano. It was a subsistence farm, she said. He wanted to write an ambitious regional novel, but he was just stuck and depressed. At one point, Tanya suggested, Maybe you need to mature a bit. But his cussedness prevailed, and year by year the novel grew. The hero of the book is Nick Watkins, a Black man who worked for Wendells grandfather and lived in a two-room house on the Berry property. Berry summons writers, from Homer to Twain, who extended understanding and sympathy to enemies, sinners, and outcasts: sometimes to people who happen to be on the other side or the wrong side, sometimes to people who have done really terrible things. In this spirit, he offers an assessment of RobertE. Lee, whom he calls one of the great tragic figures of our history. He presents Lee as a white supremacist and a slaveholder, but also as a reluctant soldier who opposed secession and was forced to choose between conflicting loyalties: his country and his people. Berry observes, The deal we are being offered appears to be that we can change the world without changing ourselves. This kind of thinking enables us to continue using too much energy of whatever color, hoping that fields of solar panels and ranks of gigantic wind machines will absolve us of guilt as consumers. The impeded stream is the one that sings.". Before the advent of commercial fertilizers, hill farmers needed the highly fertile fresh-cleared soil. His latest book, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, is the culmination of a lifetime of thinking and writing, and it is by turns infuriating, brilliant, lazy, startlingly radical, deeply disappointing, and filled with love, even as it seethes with resentment. But Berry also had books on the brain, and he left the farm in Henry County, first for the University of Kentucky, where he studied English, eventually earning a masters degree, and then for Stanford, as a Wallace Stegner fellow in the creative writing program that Stegner founded and which would turn out some of the 20th centurys most important place-based writers. This was the era of recycling and wilderness preservation, when the famous crying Indian implored Americans merely to stop littering. This is all old ground for Berry, delivered in the moralistic voice that readers are either thrilled or bored by, but what gives The Need to Be Whole its freshness is that he joins this critique of modern agriculture to the analysis of racism that he began in The Hidden Wound, a comparatively lesser-known book in the Berry canon. With it, he told me, you can deliver a blow of tremendous force to a stake or a splitting wedge. Thinking about a modern sledgehammer, I asked how the handle was inserted into the head. We drove along a creek called Cane Run, through a forest of sycamores, hickories, and maples, in shades of gold and rust. For her, it completes a cycle of nearly 60 years. Send me updates about Slate special offers. Thinking that the elderly Berry might like to reacquaint himself with the young Berry, I mailed a letter to introduce myself. In the nineteen-twenties, with the original house in disrepair, Wendells bachelor great-uncle Curran Mathews painstakingly took apart what remained and used the lumber to make a camp along the Kentucky River, where he could escape the bounds of the accepted. Wendell, a melancholic and rebellious boy, found peace in the tumbledown camp, even though it flooded every time the river overflowed. Wendell wrote to Dan in June, 1969, about The Long-Legged House: Im glad you told me the book hasnt yet sold 2,000 copies. Wendell spotted her standing beside the newel post of a staircase in Miller Hall. Pouring feed for the animals, he shouted, Liz, bring em on! She quickly rounded up a flock of thirtywhite-faced, bare-legged, their torsos wrapped in shaggy fleece. Today (August 5th) marks the birthday of Kentucky farmer-poet Wendell Berry We honor the occasion with seven of our favorite Wendell Berry poems . I drove slowly along a rutted, muddy lane, to avoid hitting a party of ducks. She was also, in mechanical terms, his typist, a fact that outraged feminists when Berry mentioned it in his Harpers essay. Berrys writing, like the seasons, has a cyclical quality, returning again and again to the same ideas. Renowned author Wendell Berry has been named the winner of the 2022 Henry Hope Reed Award. My town, once celebrated for its laid-back weirdness, is now a turbocharged tech megalopolis beingshaped by exiles from places like Silicon Valley. Bayens said that everyone in the program worried about the risks: We are in a terrible situation. Perhaps the most brilliant part of The Need to Be Whole is when Berry writes that one of the longest-lasting legacies of slavery has been the degradation of manual labor. Berrys admirers call him an Isaiah-like prophet. Dan wrote to Wendell about a load of horse manure that had just been delivered for his garden. It is a domestic Vietnam. My father, responding to an essay about war and ecological degradation, asked, Hasnt civilized man almost always been out of tune with the natural world, a parasite and a destroyer of his planet? Berry replied, Thomas Merton says man went wrong when he left the Stone Age., In 1977, as my father was being ushered into retirement, Berry was told that it was time to find a new publisher. Mary and her husband, Steve Smith, own a steep, heavily wooded three-hundred-acre farm in Trimble County. On Sundays, he sometimes accompanies Tanya to the Port Royal Baptist Church (not Southern Baptist), where they worship with neighbors and four generations of Berrys. But it also offers glimpses of his next book and looks at his legacy, which includes The Berry Center, which promotes prosperous, well-tended farms serving and supporting healthy local communities and the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Vermonts Sterling College, which offers a tuition-free college degree in sustainable family farming. Another nonprofit in town provides health care to the uninsured. It is a scene from the Book of Revelation. Sometimes I dont believe I can stand it another day, but then Im working at problems I know how to deal with, to an extent., In 1960, as he embarked on A Place on Earth, he felt lost. Republican gubernatorial candidate Quarles calls for medical cannabis in Kentucky, Ky. lawmakers advance bill to keep coal on power grid, citing reliability concerns, Hopkinsville women appointed to state boards, Christian County sewing group donates quilts to foster care children, 2022 Hoptown Chronicle | All rights reserved, New farmers come closer to fulfilling their dreams at Wendell Berry program in Kentucky, New compendium of Kentucky writer Wendell Berrys essays published, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. Berry made his name with The Unsettling of America, a furious polemic published in 1977. Hed long since forgotten his prickly response to my fathers insistence that he cut those final hundred pages. We can take our stand either on the side of life or on the side of death. What he means is that each of us needs to decide if were going to live according to the rules of nurture or exploitation. In 1972, after spending two days flying over the coalfields of Kentucky, he wrote, The damage has no human scale. He writes, If two neighbors know that they may seriously disagree, but that either of them, given even a small change of circumstances, may desperately need the other, should they not keep between them a sort of pre-paid forgiveness? The Fiechters sell the duck eggs, along with pigs and mushrooms that they raise. Lesser known but remarkable, especially given that in 1970 mainstream American environmentalism was almost completely unconcerned with anything related to social justice. When the time came to harvest tobacco, Berry and his neighbors swapped work, in what he called a sort of agrarian passion.. Wendell Berry's Advice for a Cataclysmic Age Sixty years after renouncing modernity, the writer is still contemplating a better way forward. It means the mouse isnt in my pantry.. In 1977, Berry quoted Howard, his defining guide on the topic, as treating the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject., I confessed that Id never read Howard. Wendell Berry laments his "lack of simple things" in 'The Want of Peace,' asking about our collective trade-"selling the world to buy fire." . War, he suggests, begins in a failure of acceptance. I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth, he wrote in his 1968 essay A Native Hill. He saw the rapacious practices of modern agribusiness, Big Coal, the military-industrial complex, and Wall Street as the perpetuation of some intransigent destructiveness that drove the European settlers in America. The Kentucky and Ohio Rivers wind through hills dotted with sheep, cows, horses, and handsome old tobacco barns. And Berry grew up working alongside hired Black laborers on his grandparents farm, learning from them many of the pleasures and skills and responsibilities of farm work. The tobacco program launched under the Agricultural Adjustment Act collapsed in 2004, and the Burley Association soon followed, done in by sustained assaults from cigarette manufacturers, health advocates, and globalization. Smith told me that in the past half century, as coal jobs have disappeared, Appalshop has grown. Millersburg had an effect on Wendell, but not the one his parents had intended. Tanya, who grew up in a bohemian, academic family in Lexington, is the pianist for the choir. (After they departed, Tanya told me that Lucie had asked excitedly to say goodbye to Dorothy. I was charmed, until she said, Our donkey is named Dorothy.). Read more . A more judicious thinker might conclude that Krugman is getting quite the deal in return for scanty social spending, and that the bigger problem is not rural ungratefulness but urban exploitation. When the Berrys children were growing up, the family had two milk cows, two hogs, chickens, a vegetable garden, and a team of draft horses. I think what gives us the most hope is collaborating with others. February 26, 2022. The Berrys live barely a mile from the town of Port Royal, which has not prospered over the years. Previously aired October 4, 2013. " Wendell Berry's Advice for a Cataclysmic Age .". The Gishes moved the papers operations to their house and got out the next issue. The immediate villain was President Nixons Agriculture Secretary, Earl Butz, who warned small farmers to adapt or die. But Berry had a bigger target, which he came to call technological fundamentalism: If we have built towering cities, we have raised even higher the cloud of megadeath. He also helps Wendell at Lanes Landing, and grazes some of his cattle on his parents land. I sat in the passenger seat, resting my feet on a chainsaw, one of Berrys few labor-saving devices. In that unity lies Berrys despair, but also his hope. But even as the Gishes revealed the Tennessee Valley Authoritys role in strip mining and helped visiting journalists explore the regions ills, they were always careful not to publish demeaning pictures of local residents like those that typically illustrate such national stories. Get our latest headlines delivered to your inbox daily. When Laura Dunn decided to make a film about America's foremost farmer-philosopher, Wendell Berry, she ran into one . The tobacco stalks were cut down with a hatchet, pierced with a spear, then slid onto a stick, before being hung in a tobacco barn to dry. According to historian Edward Baptist, the enslaved increased their productivity by 361 percent between 1811 and 1860, not because of innovative machinery but innovations in violence, the systematized torture that caused mortality rates to skyrocket far above what was typical for white Americans. From the very beginning, Berry had farming in his blood: Both sides of his family had been cultivating the same land for generations. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and was given The National Humanities Medal. Whats curious to me is that, once started, youre interested, youre into it, youre doing your work, and youre happy, he said. OK. When Wendell was a boy, he became close to Melvin and Marvin, contemporaries of his father whom everyone called Meb and Mob. One evening in 1964, my father, Dan Wickenden, came home from his editorial office at Harcourt Brace, in midtown Manhattan, and described his new author: a lanky youth of thirty, who sat with his elbows on his knees, talking in a slow Kentucky cadence and gesturing with large, expressive hands. When the rain let up, Berry and I drove south from Port Royal toward New Castle, to see his native land, where he and his brother, John, rambled as boys. I read the exchange to him, and he listened thoughtfully. Several of Berrys friends urged him to abandon the book, anticipating Twitter eruptions and withering reviews., My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor, Berry writes. This idyll was shattered on his ninth or tenth birthday, when his grandmother threw him a party, inviting the family and some of the neighbors. Most U.S. farmers, regardless of scale, receive off-farm incomeworking other jobs to stay afloat. I recognized the story, which he included in a piece of fiction in a recent issue of The Threepenny Review. Both slavery and the industrial world can be indefensible. Now he has tried again. Equal parts The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (1977), a scathing indictment of big agribusiness and factory farms, and The Hidden Wound (1970), his pathbreaking book-length essay on farming, American culture, and racism, The Need to Be Whole once again considers the question that Berry has spent his entire life contemplating: How can we live among our fellow creatures in a way that is honorable, just, and as sustaining of our souls as of our material needs? At times, we havent felt all that optimistic. Seeking Clarity: Wendell Berry's New Book on Race By Katherine Dalton - October 5, 2022 1 Louisville, KY. Wendell Berry is 88, and age has not blurred the beauty of his prose or diminished his ability to take enormous pains on a topic on which he wants to speak clearly. Berry once defined community this way: A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each others lives. Why are you here? Ashland replied, Actually, sir, Im a member of the Wendell Berry Farming Program., In 2017, Mary started Our Home Place Meat, a beef program inspired by the Burley Association. The Rural Blog is a publication of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues based at the University of Kentucky. Bobbie Ann Mason, a Kentucky novelist who has known Berry for decades, e-mailed with me about his fictional universe of Port William. As he explained in his essay by that name, he built the cabin in the summer of 1963a place where he could write, read, and contemplate the legacies of his forebears, and what inheritance he might leave behind. Wendell said to her, It sounds like youre starting a center. Mary had no idea how to run a nonprofit, but, she told me, I had what was left of a pretty good farm culture and a well-watered landscape.. The only hope is to reclaim our willingness to work, individually and together. (Tanya looks back on the controversy with amusement: Did I tell you several women have greeted me with Oh, youre the one who types!) Berry responded that he preferred his admittedly old-fashioned view of marriagea state of mutual helpto the popular idea of two successful careerists in the same bed, and a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended.. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy . That year, Berry began writing The Hidden Wound, a book that examines racism as an emotional dynamics which has disordered both the heart of the society as a whole and of every person in the society. The title refers to an ugly story handed down through generations of Berrys, in which JohnJ. Berry sold a slave who, the story went, was too defiant and rebellious to do anything with. Although it showed the innate violence of the slave system, it was relayed as a bit of interesting history. Berry admitted, I have told it that way many times myself. Craning my neck, I could imagine how the tobacco sticks, laden with heavy leaves, were once hung on the rafters to dry. Wendell spent the party with him, bringing out ice cream and cake to share. When the cows reach weight, Home Place arranges for the meat to be butchered and sold. Michael Pollan and Alice Waters say that he changed their lives with five words: Eating is an agricultural act. Pollan became a scourge of the meat industry, genetically modified food, and factory farms; Waters launched the farm-to-table movement. For Tanya, it meant hardships she could not have expected. His gift to his bride was a new privy, which never aspired so high as to have a door, but did sport a real toilet seat. In a letter to me, Tanya dismissed the talk of hardships: We had helpful family (of Wendells) close around who offered a bathtub if necessary., She became her husbands first reader and best critic. In Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy, a book of photographs that Berrys college friend James Baker Hall took in 1973 at a neighbors farm, Berry writes about the cultivation of tobacco as a sort of agrarian passion, because of its beauty at nearly every stage of production and because of the artistry required to produce it. At harvest time, neighbors swapped work, as they did when putting up hay or killing hogs, undertakings that took days and required intense collective labor. 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