Wendell Berry - Seed Will Sprout in the Scar

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SEED WILL SPROUT IN THE SCAR:

WENDELL BERRY ON HIGHER EDUCATION

By Matt Bonzo & Michael Stevens

August 13, 2008

At some point in our lives, all of us have been students and have felt the vague malevolence of that monster we know as educational policy. Some teachers begin their careers thinking they will become the reformers of these educational forces only to realize that they not only have failed to vanquish the monster, but that they haven’t even discovered its lair. The more sophisticated critics of higher education may generate analyses of the monsters’ habits and whereabouts, but many of these critiques are predicated on shaky notions of reality. Education commentators worry that we’re falling behind economically because we haven’t shored up math and science, because our children don’t study enough compared to Chinese children, and so on, yet this line of reasoning veils the real problem with our educational system. In fact, such thinking reinforces the real problem: academia is overly concerned with what is “relevant.” Relevance has an attraction and immediacy to it that woos administrators, parents, and students. But the hard shell of relevance makes the monster so slippery that it can’t be cornered. Although the notion of a relevant education may sell seats, it comes at the price of disease and dislocation as the monster still rules the arena.

Wendell Berry has been critiquing society’s unhealthy practices for forty years, but some of his most harrowing critiques are directed at this monster of higher education. Indeed, after Berry decided to “quit” from the University of Kentucky to farm his land full-time, he insisted on that verb, emphatically asserting that he did not “retire” or “move on”—his point was that he could no longer identify himself with a large state university that, as he argues in Life is a Miracle, fosters an “academic Darwinism [that] inflicts severe penalties both upon those who survive and those who perish. Both must submit to an economic system which values their lives strictly according to their productivity.”1 Berry offers an even harsher assessment when he states in “Higher Education and Home Defense” that the purpose of higher education has now devolved into training for “entrance into a class of professional vandals.”2 Ouch!

For those of us who love Berry’s ideas but make our living in higher education, his essays are a bit uncomfortable. But all is not lost, even under the stern gaze of Berry’s sharp farmer’s eyes; his work provides hope for what could happen to higher education if colleges and universities became true to their original purposes (that’s a huge “if” for Berry, but an “if” is better than a never). So in his essay “The Loss of the University”—that title really sets the mood—Berry fights through the clouds to glimpse a far-away goal: “If the proper work of the university is only to equip people to fulfill private ambitions, then how do we justify public support? If it is only to prepare citizens to fulfill public responsibilities, then how do we justify the teaching of arts and sciences? The common denominator has to be larger than either career preparation or preparation for citizenship. Underlying the idea of a university—the bringing together, the combining into one, of all the disciplines—is the idea that good work and good citizenship are the inevitable by-products of the making of a good—that is, a fully developed—human being. This, as I understand it, is the definition of the name university.”3

In some ways this is an old idea (Cardinal Newman was already beginning to lament the undermining of such purposes 150 years ago in his The Idea of the University), but Berry’s sharp questions indicate just how novel and even fantastical it seems in our current milieu. Indeed, the broader message of “The Loss of the University” is that until the fiercely guarded boundaries of academic specialization are broken down, until each department, division, and discipline ceases to create its own narrow silos of knowledge over against the others, there will be no possibility of wholeness for the student. And anyone who has endured the rancor of a faculty meeting understands how distant such a goal now seems.

Berry hasn’t left us without direction, and we have his granddaughter to thank for that. Indeed, it was a surprise to hear that a man who is much more likely to speak at a cattleman’s convention or a protest against strip-mining than in an academic context agreed to do a commencement address as he has did recently at Bellarmine University and Duke Divinity School. We admit a brief flush of envy—the one time we dared to write Berry and ask him to come to Cornerstone University, he wrote back telling us he was trying to stay home more. The Bellarmine University address was given in Louisville, which is pretty close to home for him, both geographically and in the case of the class of 2007,4 familially, with his granddaughter among the graduates. And perhaps some heartstring was tugged, because Berry’s tone, if not glowing with optimism, was at least open to the thought that students at small colleges might still have a chance: “A school the size of this one still can function as a community of teachers and students, with responsible community life as its unifying aim.”

Yet the strong current, the unceasing riptide of the unholy quadrumvirate that Berry identifies as “STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics,” will pull each student to become “an unconscious expert with Jesus Christ Munitions Incorporated, or Cleanstream Water Polluters, or the Henry Thoreau Noise Factory, or the John Muir Forest Reduction Corporation, or the Promised Land Mountain Removal Service.” According to Berry’s assessment, this path of death and ruin is masked as a glowing opportunity, or perhaps as our only means of retaining primacy in the global marketplace. The universities are buying it, parents are buying it, students are buying it, economists are buying it—but ultimately, Berry tells us that we need not shop for a tasteless education sold in six packs. There is a path out, a path of resistance and recovery that will lead us to fresh waters.

Thus, Berry calls the Bellarmine graduates to resist—to resist “technological determinism,” to resist “conventional greed and thoughtless individualism,” to resist “the global corporate empire and its economic totalitarianism.” In so doing, Berry suggests that graduates will enter into an alternate stream in our culture, a stream of people “who are already resisting—those who believe, in spite of the obstacles and the odds, that a reasonable measure of self-determination, for persons and communities, is both desirable and necessary.” To ask the hard questions and make the hard decisions involved in such resistance will be the work of a lifetime—Berry notes for the graduates that it will “involve you endlessly in out-of-school learning”—but it will be a lifetime of richness beyond the bounds of earning capacity and financial acuity. Ultimately, Berry calls for a set of choices, a constant reasserting of the basic choice that the right sort of college curriculum will have initiated; in his winsome terms, he affirms that “You will have to avoid thinking of yourselves as employable minds equipped with a few digits useful for pushing buttons. You will have to recover for yourselves the old understanding that you are whole beings inextricably and mysteriously compounded of minds and bodies.”

Whole beings—not fragmented, not dislocated, not splintering into a thousand pieces and directions based on social and economic necessity, not dying slowly under a facade of activity and prosperity. How might we be agents of this wholeness? How might we be teachers of the Berryian modes of resistance?5 We have determined at least three layers of mentoring wherein we can instill patterns of wholeness to help students learn what it means to be placed and at home.

At the first level, we seek to show dislocated and distressed students the nature of their condition (of our whole cultural condition!) in the context of an invitational learning community. OK, OK, easier said than done. Students coming from broken homes, troubled and troubling churches, hypersexualized high schools, and the mass chaos of a popular-culture-as-guide-to-life philosophy do not need to be convinced something has gone awry. Guiding students into worldview crises, shaking up their idolatries, revealing ourselves as co-strugglers yet hopeful models—these are grueling labors. But the learning community at a Christian liberal arts college could be one of the healthiest settings for such struggles, because these questions can be ruminated upon with faculty who most likely experience similar struggles and who seek not to demolish or demean students’ ill-formed notions so much as to redirect, to relocate them near life-giving waters.

We have found Berry’s essays, poems, and especially his fiction to be a key component in this tenuous work. For instance, in the finale to our Introduction to Philosophy course, we have used Berry’s volume of essays The Way of Ignorance to suggest that in modernity’s failed wake, in the midst of the postmodern grappling for hope, Berry’s vision of local communities as places of healing offers an alternative that is both disorienting and hopeful for the miasma they have (hopefully) encountered during the semester. We’ve also forged strong connections with students in teaching a course called Home Economics that is based around Berry’s book of the same name; the class is also inspired by his short stories from That Distant Land, which offer a sort of anecdotal vision for local community that is embodied in the people and place of Port William, Kentucky (Berry’s fictive doppelganger for his own hometown of Port Royal). The students in this class not only voiced the dislocation in which they found themselves, but they also hashed out possible remedies, or at least, in the terms of Berry’s Bellarmine University address, modes of resistance.

We got a glimpse that semester of what a Christian university could be if students learned to imagine the contours of a “fully-orbed community.”6 Matt also saw something like this during his time as a graduate student at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto when, in the middle of philosophical and theological wrestling, a daily three o’clock teatime allowed senior and junior members, administration, staff, and visitors to convene for genial conversation, for a reassertion of the human element that is present in all higher learning endeavors. That repeated sense of invitation and hospitality, in the midst of and, indeed, as a part of the fray, hits just the right note in the sort of harmony we seek for our students.

At the second level is the intentionality of the university in weaving into its own broader geographical proximity, which is crucial in transforming the university from a tool of dislocation to a workshop in relocation. Indeed, town-versus-gown tensions are fairly common—the massive state school that domineers and coerces the locals with its corporate presence, the small school that condescends to the local yokels and seeks to keep aloof—and a few years ago, The Chronicle of Higher Education had a back-page article suggesting that universities and colleges ought to seek healthier, more integrative relationships with their surrounding municipalities. The article’s reasons were those of mutualism: economic partnerships, a better disseminating of theoretical notions into practical situations. But we see a much sharper imperative for the faith-based school, because of the call to hospitality and being at home.

Our own school has dwelt on the fringe of its home city for sixty plus years, but much of its time has been spent in a fortress mentality, one of suspicion toward the vices of the city (and a commensurate public image of snootiness and perhaps fanaticism). Hence, students learned little about being located while at college—indeed, if anything, the work of dislocation was furthered. A more recent ethos of service to the underprivileged of the community has created a few more connections, but it has perhaps continued to emphasize the sort of self and other duality that bears rootless fruit.

We’ve begun to ask ourselves, and the administration of our school, what it might mean to be fully located here in Grand Rapids. How might the impulse toward sustainability, which is a hallmark of our city (we have a full-time Sustainability Director in the mayor’s office and the most green buildings per capita in the United States, including a brand new art museum), be complemented by programs, majors, facilities, and other embodiments of our university? How might the notion of students living in deliberate minicommunities in various areas of need throughout the city—a practice that has already been embraced by our goodly neighbor, Calvin College—create more of a sense of wholeness, both for our students in their experience and for the community in which they live? What sorts of interstices and confluences might be discovered if our school asked the city what we might do for the people and place in which we live, if we asked how we might best use our tremendous resources of thinkers and energetic students to serve (and not just incidentally or episodically, but in sustained, clear-eyed engagement)?

We imagine, ultimately, that both teachers and students (and, OK, I guess we can toss the administrators in there too!) will be refreshingly challenged to think about practicing what we preach. One creative possibility would be to allow students the opportunity to work off some tuition or housing costs through their commitments in the community—being at home in difficult settings to provide service, but more than service, something more like co-dwelling with those struggling and marginalized. The great cost increases that now perpetually plague higher education must be addressed by universities in ways that are morally meaningful, and this might be a way to do good to students while they are also able to practice the good themselves.

The third layer is one that is more or less forgotten in faculty and learning circles, one that is usually left to the development and fundraising folk: the alumni. As crass as the training for income production might be in many of our undergraduate and graduate settings, it’s probably the treatment of alumni that most clearly reinforces the apothegm: “Show me the money.” But what if that impulse were resisted, and the university community showed interest in the thinking and thriving of alumni minds? We have long aspired to create deep connections wherein our alumni, given a glimpse of the “fully-orbed community” while under our tutelage, then go out to locate and foster communities wherever they find themselves: knowing what questions to ask, knowing how to listen well, knowing how to stay put, and, crucially, knowing that their teachers want to hear back from them, want to communicate with them, want to play a role in all of the different home economies being formed.

Matt has tried to do this with his Philosophy alumni by means of wide-open communication lines and deliberate events, such as the yearly Philosophy Canoe Trip. This provides what homecomings of old might have provided: substantive human contact and conversation about the outworking of the vision gained in the college years—nothing like the elaborate depersonalized affairs that have evolved under the collective aegis of a thousand development offices.

If we could continuously ask our alumni to come back and tell current students how it is going, how the home-making is proceeding, what the pitfalls are, and what the wonderful bounty might be, perhaps the students wouldn’t feel so adrift, so betrayed upon graduation. Certainly a vigorous engagement of alumni with the student body—and conversely, getting students out to see the work that could await them when they join the resistance—would deepen the sense of why we educate in the first place.

“JOIN THE RESISTANCE!” It sounds a little melodramatic, a little Che Gueverean (if that can be an adjective), that is, until you walk into a classroom, or click into a cyberclassroom, or read an alumni fundraising letter, or sit in a Dilbertian cubicle, or work the tenth seventy-hour week in a row, or see another (and another and another) marriage break apart, another teenager plugged in behind a locked door, another eight-week-old infant tossed into a loving daycare. Suddenly, resistance is the only gesture that seems to point toward health, toward life.

We recall one of our favorite etymologies, that the word radical means not wild-eyed idealism or flipping the bird to authority, but instead rootedness (from the Latin radix, also the source of radish). We can be a part of that, we in higher education, in our own imperfect ways, as we teach what the Christian world and life vision means in all its obvious and subtle outworkings, as we give our push and then show the students where to push to try and overturn the idols of the age. And as we aspire to be a grounded and rooted school that embodies collectively the spirit of home-making we want each graduate to own. And as we try to keep the lines alive and buzzing between the campus and the multitudinous little communities of alumni, whose lives we want to hear and who we want to keep hearing from us. And so we return to Berry, our teacher of resistance, and hear him again as, at the end of the Bellarmine address, he asserts:

The logic of success insinuates that self-enlargement is your only responsibility, and that any job, any career will be satisfying if you succeed in it. But we can tell you, on the authority of much evidence, that a lot of people highly successful by that logic are painfully dissatisfied. We can tell you further that you cannot live in a career, and that satisfaction can come only from your life. To give satisfaction, your life will have to be lived in a family, a neighborhood, a community, an ecosystem, a watershed, a place, meeting your responsibilities to all those things to which you belong.

Let’s get that somewhere in our next set of learning objectives—put it on the syllabus and get to work!

Notes

1. Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle (Washington DC: Counterpoint, 2000), 62.

2. Wendell Berry, Home Economics (San Francisco: Northpoint, 1987), 51.

3. Ibid, 77.

4. All of our quotes from this address are based on the text that is found at www.bellarmine. edu/studentaffairs/Graduation/berry_address.asp. Unless otherwise noted, the remaining quotes in this essay are from this address.

5. Many of these observations are based on the ruminations in Chapter 10 of our forthcoming book Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader’s Guide (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008).

6. Douglas Henry of Baylor University used these words when he spoke on our campus a few years ago.

About the Authors

Matt Bonzo

Matt Bonzo was born and raised in southeastern Ohio and graduated from Liberty University (BS), Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (MA), and the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto/Free University of Amsterdam (PhD). He has taught Philosophy at Cornerstone for ten years, and he is also the proprieter of Small Wonders Farm, a community-supported agriculture experiment that he runs with his wife Dorothe and his son Matthias on his land in Newaygo County. Unlike Wendell Berry, who still farms with draught horses, Bonzo has recently gone over to the dark side and purchased his first tractor.

Michael Stevens

Michael Stevens grew up in the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York and graduated from Baptist Bible College of Pennsylvania (BS), St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland (MA), and the University of Dallas (PhD). He has taught English classes at Cornerstone for eleven years and lives on the northeast side of Grand Rapids, where he is often seen walking to campus with his nose stuck in a book. Stevens is interested in T. S. Eliot, the Civil War, and baseball.

Wendell Berry by Michael Stevens, "Knowing Your Place"

Author, Professor Michael Stevens

What can commitment to place and community mean for those not living in an agrarian countryside? Are there institutions that can serve as substitutes? The authors think so: "the flourishing of placed and peopled churches within local cultures." 

Amazon Link

Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life:

A Reader's Guide Paperback – December 1, 2008

by J. Matthew Bonzo (Author), Michael R. Stevens (Contributor)

 

Wendell Berry's poetry, fiction, and essays persistently ask the question: How can we live meaningful lives in a consumer-driven, fragmented age? His honest search for health in the midst of disease has garnered attention and discussion in both conservative and progressive circles. Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life thoroughly examines Berry's main themes of community, place, and conservation. It offers an apology for the power of Berry's vision and the ways in which his account of the world resonates with the biblical narrative. Pastors, students, professors, and laity will discover in this book how to flesh out Berry's worldview and foster a culture of life in their neighborhoods, churches, and schools.

Dr. Michael Stevens believes Wendell Berry is a crucial voice for the world today, and more particularly, for Christians. His book, written with co-author Dr. Matthew Bonzo, “Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life” evaluates Wendell Berry’s writings theologically, addressing themes congruent with contemporary theological concerns while acknowledging ways Berry’s vision can be adopted and lived. It’s no secret that Bonzo and Stevens find Berry to be a profound writer who provides the church with a new vision of life. While Berry’s writing is unlike traditional theological writing, the authors affirm Hauerwas’ statement at the end of the Gifford Lectures in “The Necessity of Witness” when he “offers John Paul II, John Howard Yoder, and Wendell Berry as crucial voices exhorting the church to a properly countercultural vision of life.” Though Berry seems like a “surprising inclusion” in this list, Bonzo and Stevens argue it is because Berry “represents the fullest embodiment of telling ‘the Story’ through stories… Berry’s work is precisely the sort of ‘renarration’ that can bring healing and make visible the call to ‘practice resurrection’” (35).

*This lecture is co-sponsored by the Au Sable Fellows & Graduate Christian Fellowship.

 

Michael Stevens (Ph.D. in Literature, Institute of Philosophic Studies, University of Dallas) is an English professor at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he has taught since 1997. His original graduate work on T.S. Eliot’s socio-political ideas led him on a circuitous route to the fiction, poetry, and essays of the Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry, about whom he and colleague Matt Bonzo wrote Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life for Brazos Press in 2008. [Stevens] has also published articles and chapters on Berry’s critique of higher education, his pacifism, and his fictional universe.

A native of Harford, in rural Cortland County, New York, Stevens attended high school in Dryden and often visited his grandparents on Ellis Hollow Road in Ithaca. After college, he even worked a brief but eventful stint at Cornell University Catering! He and his wife Linda (a native of Long Island) have raised their three kids in Michigan, amidst maple trees and apple orchards that betoken the strong link to New York State of Michigan’s early settlers (yes, there is an Ithaca, Michigan, and a Dryden, etc.). Ethan (20), Julia (17), and Gabe (15) are still waiting for Dad to take them to the Moosewood Restaurant on one of these Grandma visits.

* * * * * * * *

What a Poem Looks Like | Wendell Berry's "Sycamore"

Apr 25, 2020

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Book Review by Josh Sweeden, Ph.D.

Review Link

Student in Practical Theology

Matthew Bonzo and Michael Stevens believe Wendell Berry is a crucial voice for the world today, and more particularly, for Christians today. Their project is simple: to analyze and evaluate Wendell Berry’s writings theologically, addressing themes congruent with contemporary theological concerns while acknowledging ways Berry’s vision can be adopted and lived. It’s no secret that Bonzo and Stevens find Berry to be a profound writer who provides the church with a new vision of life. While Berry’s writing is unlike traditional theological writing, Bonzo and Stevens affirm Hauerwas’ statement at the end of the Gifford Lectures in “The Necessity of Witness” when he “offers John Paul II, John Howard Yoder, and Wendell Berry as crucial voices exhorting the church to a properly countercultural vision of life.” Though Berry seems like a “surprising inclusion” in this list, Bonzo and Stevens argue it is because Berry “represents the fullest embodiment of telling ‘the Story’ through stories…Berry’s work is precisely the sort of ‘renarration’ that can bring healing and make visible the call to ‘practice resurrection’” (35).

Three significant themes evident in the writings of Wendell Berry constitute the heart of this text. Bonzo and Stevens first engage Berry’s notion of healing, a constant theme in Berry’s writings referring to individuals, communities, land, home, education, and society as a whole. Berry believes that all of these suffer from disease and are in need healing. Berry maintains a “creation-centric” vision which upholds the good of God’s created order while also maintaining its ‘fallen-ness’ and need for redemption. The disease needing to be addressed is partly due of the reality of a fallen creation. More important for Berry, however, is modernity’s proliferation of disease. Against the specific ills of modernity Berry provides a new vision for life which he finds rooted in the good of creation, community, and cultivation.

A second significant theme Bonzo and Stevens engage is hospitality. Berry’s descriptions of the community and household consistently establish hospitality as its center. Permeability of boundaries is how Bonzo and Stevens describe Berry’s hospitality. While communities and households maintain certain boundaries necessary for life together, the practice of hospitality makes these boundaries fluid and flexible. Hospitality involves “temporary or provisional entry into the membership of place and relationships.” It is a form of risk. Continuing the theme of health, Bonzo and Stevens note that communities “must already have a measure of health…[and] proof of willingness to be vulnerable” (141). Exploring Berry’s various writings, Bonzo and Stevens note six categories of hospitality integrally tied to community life. Ultimately hospitality is the practice of offering healing; it “has room for the wounded (and for being wounded).” In hospitality there must “be room for everyone, with the only caveat being that love must be accepted as given; it must be received as gift” (163). When hospitality becomes understood primarily as a practice of households and communities questions regarding the true inclusivity of women and marginalized peoples must be raised. Bonzo and Stevens address this briefly by stating the importance of such questions, noting that rural communities historically have not offered sufficient “quality of life and status to women.” Furthermore, they wonder how “marginalized groups of all sorts fit Berry’s notion of local, healing community” (116). In the midst of these questions, Bonzo and Stevens are explicit in acknowledging the varied possibilities for community and household. Working a farm in rural Kentucky is not, and should not be, the only option for all, what matters is making community and home in the place where we find ourselves, to “start where we are, and we’re all somewhere” (123). This does not negate some of the unjust and oppressive patterns present in rural communities and households, but it does show that Berry’s vision is not tied to a fixed understanding of rural America, but can (and should) be dynamic and embodied differently in varying contexts.

A final significant theme of Berry’s that Bonzo and Stevens consistently note is household. “Households are not utopias, nor are the communities they ideally help to build” (113). Households carry certain structures of authority, maintain various traditions and norms, and form specific virtues and character traits. It’s not uncommon for these to be problematic; as capable as households are for establishing ‘good,’ they can be equally destructive and ill-ordered. Nevertheless, a revival of household economics is needed according to Berry. One fundamental way this is accomplished is by countering the modern ideal of separation of work and home. Berry argues that “healthy households cannot be fostered when work is utterly external to the home.” Today work is something we “just attempt to escape,” and as a result, “our home becomes merely a place of recreation.” What “Berry calls for is a return of work to the home, because this is the place where character and communal virtues are formed” (112).

In addition to the significant attention given to the three themes discussed above, Bonzo and Stevens engage Berry’s theological contributions on topics of creation, gift, place, education, and redemption. This text is undoubtedly a needed complement to Berry’s prolific writing for all who wish to engage him theologically. The writings of Wendell Berry have, and will continue to have, a widespread influence. Reading Berry with a theological lens greatly assists the church to embody the alternative and redemptive forms of life presented by Berry—arguably forms of life necessary for Christian witness.

Bonzo and Stevens’ exploration of Berry does fall short of providing in-depth critical theological evaluation. Though the text intentionally avoids placing Berry under the microscope of a theological discipline and audience to which his writings were never directly written, critical theological evaluation remains necessary before the church and theology can assert and appropriate Berry’s contributions. Bonzo and Stevens are exceptional at displaying the strengths of Berry and possible ways the church’s life and theology can be enhanced. Some issues, however, require more critical evaluation. Berry’s creation-centrism, as one example, should not be presented without significant theological discussion regarding its interplay and distinction from Christocentrism. How might Berry’s thesis shift in light of the person of Jesus Christ? How might the church adapt Berry’s contributions, but necessarily challenge his theological foundation, to more appropriately reflect the Christian emphasis on Christ as the starting point for theology?

Ultimately, Bonzo and Stevens themselves make a substantial contribution to the church and theology by exploring the implications and possibilities for the church and Christian life evident in the writings of Wendell Berry. As the authors appropriately display, Wendell Berry is “a necessary voice.” Without a text as comprehensive and articulate as this one, Berry’s voice could not be as far-reaching or as sensibly understood.

Wendell Berry's Biography

 

Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry
Berry in December 2011
Born	August 5, 1934 (age 87) Henry County, Kentucky, U.S.
Occupation	Poet farmer writer activist academic
Nationality	American
Education	University of Kentucky (B.A, 1956; M.A., 1957)
Genre	Fiction, poetry, essays
Subject	Agriculture, rural life, community

Wendell Erdman Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer.^[1] He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.^[2] On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.^[3]

Life

Berry was the first of four children to be born to John Marshall Berry, a lawyer and tobacco farmer in Henry County, Kentucky, and Virginia Erdman Berry. The families of both parents had farmed in Henry County for at least five generations. Berry attended secondary school at Millersburg Military Institute and then earned a B.A. (1956) and M.A. (1957) in English at the University of Kentucky.^{[4]: 990–991} In 1956, at the University of Kentucky he met another Kentucky writer-to-be, Gurney Norman.^[5] He completed his M.A. and married Tanya Amyx in 1957. In 1958, he attended Stanford University's creative writing program as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, studying under Stegner in a seminar that included Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ernest Gaines, Tillie Olsen, and Ken Kesey.^{[6][7]: 139} Berry's first novel, Nathan Coulter, was published in April 1960.

A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship took Berry and his family to Italy and France in 1961, where he came to know Wallace Fowlie, critic and translator of French literature. From 1962 to 1964, he taught English at New York University's University Heights campus in the Bronx. In 1964, he began teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky, from which he resigned in 1977.^[7] During this time in Lexington, Kentucky, he came to know author Guy Davenport, as well as author and monk Thomas Merton and photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard.^[8]

On July 4, 1965, Berry, his wife, and his two children moved to a farm that he had purchased, Lane's Landing, and began growing corn and small grains on what eventually became a homestead of about 117 acres (0.47 km²).^[4]: 994 They bought their first flock of seven Border Cheviot sheep in 1978.^[4]: 998 Lane's Landing is in Henry County, Kentucky in north central Kentucky near Port Royal, and his parents' birthplaces, and is on the western bank of the Kentucky River, not far from where it flows into the Ohio River. Berry has farmed, resided, and written at Lane's Landing ever since. He has written about his early experiences on the land and about his decision to return to it in essays such as "The Long-Legged House" and "A Native Hill".^[9]

From 1977 until 1980, he edited and wrote for the Rodale Press, including its publications Organic Gardening and Farming and The New Farm.^[4]: 998 From 1987 to 1993, he returned to the English Department of the University of Kentucky.^[7][10] Berry has written at least twenty-five books (or chapbooks) of poems, sixteen volumes of essays, and eleven novels and short story collections. His writing is grounded in the notion that one's work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one's place.

Berry, who describes himself as "a person who takes the Gospel seriously,"^[11] has criticized Christian organizations for failing to challenge cultural complacency about environmental degradation,^[12][13] and has shown a willingness to criticize what he perceives as the arrogance of some Christians.^[14] He is an advocate of Christian pacifism, as shown in his book Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Christ's Teachings About Love, Compassion and Forgiveness (2005).

Berry is a fellow of Britain's Temenos Academy, a learned society devoted to the study of all faiths and spiritual pursuits; Berry has published in the annual Temenos Academy Review, funded by the Prince of Wales.^[15]

Activism

On February 10, 1968, Berry delivered "A Statement Against the War in Vietnam" during the Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft at the University of Kentucky in Lexington:^[16]

We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to 'win the hearts and minds of the people' by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the 'truth' of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. . . . I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.^[17]

On June 3, 1979, Berry engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience against the construction of a nuclear power plant at Marble Hill, Indiana. He describes "this nearly eventless event" and expands upon his reasons for it in the essay "The Reactor and the Garden."^[18]

On February 9, 2003, Berry's essay titled "A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States" was published as a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. Berry opened the essay—a critique of the G. W. Bush administration's post-9/11 international strategy^[19]—by asserting that "The new National Security Strategy published by the White House in September 2002, if carried out, would amount to a radical revision of the political character of our nation."^[20]

On January 4, 2009, Berry and Wes Jackson, president of The Land Institute, published an op-ed article in The New York Times titled "A 50-Year Farm Bill."^[21] In July 2009 Berry, Jackson and Fred Kirschenmann, of The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, gathered in Washington DC to promote this idea.^[22] Berry and Jackson wrote, "We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities."^[21]

Also in January 2009, Berry released a statement against the death penalty, which began, "As I am made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life before birth, I am also made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life after birth."^[23] And in November 2009, Berry and 38 other writers from Kentucky wrote to Gov. Steve Beshear and Attorney General Jack Conway asking them to impose a moratorium on the death penalty in that state.^[24]

On March 2, 2009, Berry joined over 2,000 others in non-violently blocking the gates to a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C. No one was arrested.^[25]

On May 22, 2009, Berry, at a listening session in Louisville, spoke against the National Animal Identification System (NAIS).^[26] He said, "If you impose this program on the small farmers, who are already overburdened, you're going to have to send the police for me. I'm 75 years old. I've about completed my responsibilities to my family. I'll lose very little in going to jail in opposition to your program – and I'll have to do it. Because I will be, in every way that I can conceive of, a non-cooperator."^[27]

In October 2009, Berry combined with "the Berea-based Kentucky Environmental Foundation (KEF), along with several other non-profit organizations and rural electric co-op members" to petition against and protest the construction of a coal-burning power plant in Clark County, Kentucky.^[28] On February 28, 2011, the Kentucky Public Service Commission approved the cancellation of this power plant.^[29]

On December 20, 2009, due to the University of Kentucky's close association with coal interests in the state, Berry removed his papers from the university. He explained to the Lexington Herald-Leader, "I don't think the University of Kentucky can be so ostentatiously friendly to the coal industry … and still be a friend to me and the interests for which I have stood for the last 45 years. … If they love the coal industry that much, I have to cancel my friendship."^[30] In August 2012, the papers were donated to The Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort, KY.^[31]

On September 28, 2010, Berry participated in a rally in Louisville during an EPA hearing on how to manage coal ash. Berry said, "The EPA knows that coal ash is poison. We ask it only to believe in its own findings on this issue, and do its duty."^[32]

Berry, with 14 other protesters, spent the weekend of February 12, 2011 locked in the Kentucky governor's office to demand an end to mountaintop removal coal mining. He was part of the environmental group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth that began their sit-in on Friday and left at midday Monday to join about 1,000 others in a mass outdoor rally.^[33][34]

In 2011, The Berry Center was established at New Castle, Kentucky, "for the purpose of bringing focus, knowledge and cohesiveness to the work of changing our ruinous industrial agriculture system into a system and culture that uses nature as the standard, accepts no permanent damage to the ecosphere, and takes into consideration human health in local communities."^[35]

In July 2020, Wendell Berry and his wife Tanya Amyx Berry sued the University of Kentucky to prevent the removal of a mural that has been criticized for being "racially offensive."^[36] The mural was commissioned in the 1930s and was done by Ann Rice O'Hanlon, a relative of Tanya Amyx Berry.^[37]

Ideas

Berry's nonfiction serves as an extended conversation about the life he values. According to him, the good life includes sustainable agriculture,^[38] appropriate technologies,^[39] healthy rural communities,^[40] connection to place,^[41] the pleasures of good food,^[42] husbandry,^[43] good work,^[44] local economics,^[45] the miracle of life,^[46] fidelity,^[47] frugality,^[48] reverence,^[49] and the interconnectedness of life.^[50] The threats Berry finds to this good simple life include: industrial farming and the industrialization of life,^[51] ignorance,^[52] hubris,^[53] greed,^[54] violence against others and against the natural world,^[55] the eroding topsoil in the United States,^[56] global economics,^[57] and environmental destruction.^[58] As a prominent defender of agrarian values, Berry's appreciation for traditional farming techniques,^[59] such as those of the Amish, grew in the 1970s, due in part to exchanges with Draft Horse Journal publisher Maurice Telleen.^[60] Berry has long been friendly to and supportive of Wes Jackson, believing that Jackson's agricultural research at The Land Institute lives out the promise of "solving for pattern" and using "nature as model."

Jedediah Britton-Purdy has considered many of Berry's major themes and concerns:

Over the years, he has called himself an agrarian, a pacifist, and a Christian—albeit of an eccentric kind. He has written against all forms of violence and destruction—of land, communities, and human beings—and argued that the modern American way of life is a skein of violence. He is an anti-capitalist moralist and a writer of praise for what he admires: the quiet, mostly uncelebrated labor and affection that keep the world whole and might still redeem it. He is also an acerbic critic of what he dislikes, particularly modern individualism, and his emphasis on family and marriage and his ambivalence toward abortion mark him as an outsider to the left.^[61]

The concept of "Solving for pattern", coined by Berry in his essay of the same title, is the process of finding solutions that solve multiple problems, while minimizing the creation of new problems.^[62] The essay was originally published in the Rodale Press periodical The New Farm. Though Mr. Berry's use of the phrase was in direct reference to agriculture, it has since come to enjoy broader use throughout the design community.^[63][64]

Berry's core ideas, and in particular his poem "Sabbaths III, 1989 (Santa Clara Valley)," guided the 2007 documentary feature film The Unforeseen, produced by Terrence Malick and Robert Redford.^[65][66] In the film Berry narrates his own poem.^[67] Director Laura Dunn went on to make the 2016 documentary feature Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry, again produced by Malick and Redford.^[68]

Poetry

Berry's lyric poetry often appears as a contemporary eclogue, pastoral, or elegy; but he also composes dramatic and historical narratives (such as "Bringer of Water"^[69] and "July, 1773",^[70] respectively) and occasional and discursive poems ("Against the War in Vietnam"^[71] and "Some Further Words",^[72] respectively).

Berry's first published poetry book consisted of a single poem, the elegiac November Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three (1964), initiated and illustrated by Ben Shahn, commemorating the death of John F. Kennedy. It begins,

We know
The winter earth
Upon the body
Of the young
   President,
   And the early dark
   Falling;

and continues through ten more stanzas (each propelled by the anaphora of "We know"). The elegiac here and elsewhere, according to Triggs, enables Berry to characterize the connections "that link past and future generations through their common working of the land."^[73]

The first full-length collection, The Broken Ground (1964), develops many of Berry's fundamental concerns: "the cycle of life and death, responsiveness to place, pastoral subject matter, and recurring images of the Kentucky River and the hill farms of north-central Kentucky"^[7]: 119

According to Angyal, "There is little modernist formalism or postmodernist experimentation in [Berry's] verse."^[7]: 116 A commitment to the reality and primacy of the actual world stands behind these two rejections. In "Notes: Unspecializing Poetry," Berry writes, "Devotion to order that is not poetical prevents the specialization of poetry."^[74] He goes on to note, "Nothing exists for its own sake, but for a harmony greater than itself which includes it. A work of art, which accepts this condition, and exists upon its terms, honors the Creation, and so becomes a part of it" ^[75]

Lionel Basney placed Berry's poetry within a tradition of didactic poetry that stretches back to Horace: "To say that Berry's poetry can be didactic, then, means that it envisions a specific wisdom, and also the traditional sense of art and culture that gives art the task of teaching this wisdom"^[76]

For Berry, poetry exists "at the center of a complex reminding"^[77] Both the poet and the reader are reminded of the poem's crafted language, of the poem's formal literary antecedents, of "what is remembered or ought to be remembered," and of "the formal integrity of other works, creatures and structures of the world.".^[78]

The Sabbath Poems

From 1979 to the present Berry has been writing what he calls "Sabbath poems." They were first collected in A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997. This was followed by Sabbaths from 1998 to 2004 in Given: New Poems; and those from 2005 to 2008 are in Leavings. All Sabbath poems through 2012 are published in This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems 1979 - 2012. Sabbaths 2013 has been published by Larkspur Press. A Small Porch contains nine Sabbath poems from 2014 and sixteen from 2015. One Sabbath poem, "What Passes, What Remains" (VIII from 2016), is published as the epilogue in The Art of Loading Brush. That poem, along with fourteen others, can also be found in Sabbaths 2016, published by Larkspur Press.

The poems are motivated by Berry's longtime habit of walking out onto the land on Sunday mornings. As he puts it, "I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration."^[79] He writes in a poem from 1979,

The bell calls in the town
Where forebears cleared the shaded land
And brought high daylight down
To shine on field and trodden road.
I hear, but understand
Contrarily, and walk into the woods.
I leave labor and load,
Take up a different story.
I keep an inventory
Of wonders and of uncommercial goods.^[80]

The Sabbath poems have been described as "written from a particular place and on particular Sabbaths, and so should be read as part of a spiritual practice and as poems, in some sense, devoted to dwelling, to living thoughtfully in one place."^[81] Oehlschlaeger links Berry's project to a key observation by Henry David Thoreau,

As Thoreau continues in 'Life Without Principle,' he notes the constant busyness of Americans, so engaged in 'infinite bustle' that 'there is no sabbath.' And he notes later that 'there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.' The logic is clear: destruction of the Sabbath is contrary to 'life itself.' That, I suggest, is the context in which we should read the Sabbath poems that Berry has been writing for nearly the last thirty years.^[82]

Fiction

Berry's fiction to date consists of eight novels and fifty-one short stories (forty-three of which are collected in That Distant Land, 2004 and A Place in Time, 2012) which, when read as a whole, form a chronicle of the fictional small Kentucky town of Port William. Because of his long-term, ongoing exploration of the life of an imagined place, Berry has been compared to William Faulkner.^[83] Yet, although Port William is no stranger to murder, suicide, alcoholism, marital discord, and the full range of losses that touch human lives, it lacks the extremes of characterization and plot development that are found in much of Faulkner. Hence Berry is sometimes described as working in an idealized, pastoral, or nostalgic mode, a characterization of his work which he resists: "If your work includes a criticism of history, which mine certainly does, you can't be accused of wanting to go back to something, because you're saying that what we were wasn't good enough."^[84]

The effect of profound shifts in the agricultural practices of the United States, and the disappearance of traditional agrarian life,^[85] are some of the major concerns of the Port William fiction, though the theme is often only a background or subtext to the stories themselves. The Port William fiction attempts to portray, on a local scale, what "a human economy … conducted with reverence"^[86] looked like in the past—and what civic, domestic, and personal virtues might be evoked by such an economy were it pursued today. Social as well as seasonal changes mark the passage of time. The Port William stories allow Berry to explore the human dimensions of the decline of the family farm and farm community, under the influence of expanding post-World War II agribusiness. But these works rarely fall into simple didacticism, and are never merely tales of decline. Each is grounded in a realistic depiction of character and community. In A Place on Earth (1967), for example, farmer Mat Feltner comes to terms with the loss of his only son, Virgil. In the course of the novel, we see how not only Mat but the entire community wrestles with the acute costs of World War II.

Berry's fiction also allows him to explore the literal and metaphorical implications of marriage as that which binds individuals, families, and communities to each other and to Nature itself—yet not all of Port William is happily or conventionally married. "Old Jack" Beechum struggles with significant incompatibilities with his wife, and with a brief yet fulfilling extramarital affair. The barber Jayber Crow lives with a forlorn, secret, and unrequited love for a woman, believing himself "mentally" married to her even though she knows nothing about it. Burley Coulter never formalizes his bond with Kate Helen Branch, the mother of his son. Yet, each of these men find themselves firmly bound up in the community, the "membership," of Port William.

Of his fictional project, Berry has written: "I have made the imagined town of Port William, its neighborhood and membership, in an attempt to honor the actual place where I have lived. By means of the imagined place, over the last fifty years, I have learned to see my native landscape and neighborhood as a place unique in the world, a work of God, possessed of an inherent sanctity that mocks any human valuation that can be put upon it."^[87] Elsewhere, Berry has said, "The only thing I try to accomplish in fiction is to show how people act when they love each other."^[88] The novels and stories can be read in any order.

In January, 2018, the Library of America published a volume of Berry's fiction—the first of a projected four volumes of his writing. Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories (The Civil War to World War II) contains four novels and twenty-three short stories in chronological order according to the stories' events.^[89] Berry and Joan Didion are the only living writers currently featured in the Library of America catalog.^[90]

Nathan Coulter (1960)

In Berry's first novel, young Nathan "comes of age" through dealing with the death of his mother, the depression of his father, Jarrat, the rugged companionship of his brother Tom, and the mischief of his uncle Burley. Kirkus Review concludes, "A sensitive adolescent theme is handled rather poetically, but so uniform in tone that no drama is generated and no sense of time passing is felt."^[91] John Ditsky finds William Faulkner's influence in Nathan Coulter, but notes, "Not only does the work avoid the pitfalls encountered by Faulkner's initial attempts to escape his postage stamp of native soil, but Nathan Coulter also seems a wise attempt to get that autobiographical first novel out of one's system, and to do so [with] honesty."^[92]

A Place on Earth (1967/1983)

Set in the critical year of 1945, this novel focuses on farmer Mat Feltner's struggle over the news that his son Virgil has been listed as missing in action while also telling multiple tales of the lives of other Port William residents, such as Burley Coulter, Jack Beechum, Ernest Finley, Ida and Gideon Crop. Reprinting by North Point Press in 1983 allowed Berry to radically revise the novel,^[93] removing almost a third of its original length. Jeffrey Bilbro believes that these substantial changes marked growth in Berry's approach. "In Berry's revised edition, his technique caught up with his subject. He allows us, as readers, to participate in the ignorance of his characters, and in doing so, we may be able to understand more fully the painful difficulty of choosing fidelity to the natural order while living in the midst of mystery."^[94]

The Memory of Old Jack (1974)

This third novel of Port William begins with Jack Beechum as a very old man in 1952 and continues back into his youth and maturity to uncover his life and work as a dedicated farmer, conflicted husband, and living link to past generations. The story ranges from the Civil War to just past World War II. Josh Hurst comments on Berry's ability to avoid certain narrative pitfalls, "Jack's story could be presented us either as heroic ballad or as cautionary [tale]—and there is much in his life to support both admiration and gentle tisk-tisking—but the gift of this book is how it allows a man's memories to wash over us as though unshaped by narrative or conscious editorializing."^[95]

Remembering (1988)

In Berry's fourth novel, an adult Andy Catlett wanders through San Francisco remembering, but feeling alienated from, his native Port William. He struggles to come to terms with himself, his marriage, his farm, and the distorted values of American society. Of Berry's vision here, Charles Solomon writes, "Wendell Berry contrasts modern American agribusiness--which he depicts as an artificial conglomeration of sterile flow charts, debts and mechanization--with the older ideal of farming as a nurturing way of life."^[96] But along these lines, Bruce Bawer finds a problem with the novel, "Here, for the first time in a Port William novel, Berry seems more interested in communicating opinions than in portraying sympathetic characters in plausible situations; the opening episode, set at a conference on agricultural policy, paints the ideological conflict between Andy and his adversaries in broad, unsubtle strokes."^[97]

A World Lost (1996)

Young Andy Catlett's uncle Andrew had been murdered back in 1944, and now an adult Andy is reconstructing the event and its aftermath. "Looking back with a mixture of a young boy's incomprehension and an older man's nostalgia, Andy evokes the past not as a narrative but as a series of disembodied fragments in the flow of time."^[98] In this fifth novel of Port William, Berry considers the violence of men and its impact on the family and community that must come to terms with it. "Berry shows us the psychic costs of misplaced family pride and social rigidity, and yet he also celebrates the benevolent blessing of familial love. This is simple, soul-satisfying storytelling, augmented by understated humor and quiet insight."^[99]

Jayber Crow (2000)

Port William's barber recounts his life's journey in Berry's sixth novel. Jayber's early life as an orphan near Port William is followed by studies towards a possible vocation to Church ministry. A questioning mind, however, sends him in other directions until he finds himself back in Port William with an ever-growing commitment to that place and its people. As Publisher's Weekly notes, "Crow's life, which begins as WWI is about to erupt, is emblematic of a century of upheaval, and Berry's anecdotal and episodic tale sounds a challenge to contemporary notions of progress. It is to Berry's credit that a novel so freighted with ideas and ideology manages to project such warmth and luminosity."^[100]

Hannah Coulter (2004)

Berry's seventh novel presents a concise vision of Port William's "membership." The story encompasses Hannah's life, including the Great Depression, World War II, the postwar industrialization of agriculture, the flight of youth to urban employment, and the consequent remoteness of grandchildren. The tale is told in the voice of an old woman twice widowed, who has experienced much loss yet has never been defeated. Somehow, lying at the center of her strength is the "membership"—the fact that people care for each other and, even in absence, hold each other in a kind of presence. All in all, Hannah Coulter embodies many of the themes of Berry's Port William saga.

Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2006)

Andy Catlett, age nine, makes his first solo journey to visit with both sets of grandparents in Port William. The New York Times reviewer notes, "What the grown-up Andy recalls of that experience is transformed into 'a sort of homage' to a now-vanished world. Title characters from Berry's earlier Port William volumes — Jayber Crow, Old Jack, Hannah Coulter — appear here in affectionate cameos as the adult Andy, echoing Wordsworth, observes that 'in my memory, all who were there ... seem now to be gathered into a love that is at once a boy's and an aging man's.'"^[101]

Awards

Award	Year	Granting Institution	Notes
Wallace Stegner Fellowship	1958	Stanford University	[7]: 13
Guggenheim Fellowship	1961	John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation	[7]: 16
Rockefeller Fellowship	1965	The Rockefeller Foundation	[7]: 22
Arts and Letters Award	1971	American Academy of Arts and Letters	[102]
UK Libraries Medallion for Intellectual Achievement	1993	University of Kentucky Libraries	[103]
Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry	1994	The Sewanee Review and the University of the South	[104]
Thomas Merton Award	1999	Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Social Justice	[105]
Poets' Prize	2000	Nicholas Roerich Museum
Lifetime Achievement Award	2003	Festival of Faiths in Louisville Kentucky
Kentuckian of the Year	2005	Kentucky Monthly	[106]
Art of Fact Award	2006	SUNY Brockport Writers Forum and M&T Bank	[107]
Premio Artusi	2008	La Città di Forlimpopoli	[108]
The Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement	2009	Fellowship of Southern Writers	[109]
The Louis Bromfield Society Award	2009	Malabar Farm Foundation and Ohio Department of Natural Resources	[110]
The National Humanities Medal	2010	National Endowment for the Humanities	[111]
The 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities	2012	National Endowment for the Humanities	[112]
The Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award	2012	Tulsa Library Trust	[113]
Russell Kirk Paideia Prize	2012	Circe Institute	[114]
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences	2013	American Academy of Arts and Sciences	[115]
The Roosevelt Institute's Freedom Medal	2013	The Roosevelt Institute	[116]
The Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award	2013	Dayton Literary Peace Prize	[117]
The Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion	2013	American Academy of Religion	[118]
The Allen Tate Poetry Prize	2014	The Sewanee Review	[119]
The Dean's Cross for Servant Leadership in Church and Society	2014	Virginia Theological Seminary	[120]
Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame	2015	The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning	[121]
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award	2016	National Book Critics Circle	[122]
The Sidney Lanier Prize (now The Thomas Robinson Prize)	2016	Center for Southern Studies at Mercer University	[123]
IACP Trailblazer	2017	International Association of Culinary Professionals	[124]
Kentucky Humanities Carl West Literary Award	2019	Kentucky Humanities Council	[125]

Works

Fiction

Title	Year	Publisher	Reprinted/Revised	ISBN	Notes
Nathan Coulter	1960	Houghton Mifflin, Boston	North Point (1985), Counterpoint (2008)	1582434093	Also in Three Short Novels, 2002 Heavily revised in 1985, including the removal of the last four chapters.
A Place on Earth	1967	Harcourt, Brace & World, New York	Avon (1969), North Point (1983), Counterpoint (2001)	1582431248	Heavily revised in 1983
The Memory of Old Jack	1974	Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, New York	Counterpoint (1999)	1582430438
The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership	1986	North Point, San Francisco	Counterpoint (2019)	0865472165	Also in That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004
Remembering	1988	North Point, San Francisco	Counterpoint (2008)	1582434158	Also in Three Short Novels, 2002
Fidelity: Five Stories	1992	Pantheon, New York	Counterpoint (2018)	0679748318	Also in That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004
Watch With Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch	1994	Pantheon, New York	Counterpoint (2018)	0679758542	Also in That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004
A World Lost	1996	Counterpoint, Washington, DC		1582434182	Also in Three Short Novels, 2002
Jayber Crow	2000	Counterpoint, Washington, DC		1582431604
Three Short Novels (Nathan Coulter, Remembering, A World Lost)	2002	Counterpoint, Washington, DC		1582431787
Hannah Coulter	2004	Shoemaker & Hoard, Washington, DC	Counterpoint, Berkeley (2007)	1593760361	In 2007 Shoemaker & Hoard became part of Counterpoint LLC, Berkeley, CA
That Distant Land: The Collected Stories	2004	Shoemaker & Hoard, Washington, DC	Counterpoint, Berkeley (2007)	159376054X	In 2007 Shoemaker & Hoard became part of Counterpoint LLC, Berkeley, CA
Andy Catlett: Early Travels	2006	Shoemaker & Hoard, Washington, DC	Counterpoint, Berkeley (2007)	1593761643	In 2007 Shoemaker & Hoard became part of Counterpoint LLC, Berkeley, CA
Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World	2009	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1582436401	Available online as "Whitefoot", Orion Magazine. January/February 2007
A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership	2012	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1619021889
The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings	2017	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1619020386	Preface by Maurice Telleen; three essays (plus a substantial introduction); four short stories; one poem
Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories, The Civil War to World War II	2018	Library of America, New York		1598535544	Edited by Jack Shoemaker; twenty-three stories and four novels
Stand By Me	2019	Allen Lane/Penguin		0241388619	aka Down in the Valley Where the Green Grass Grows, collected short stories as published in the UK

Uncollected short stories

• "Nothing Living Lives Alone". The Threepenny Review. Spring 2011. PEN/O. Henry Prize Story, 2012 ^[126]
• "Dismemberment". The Threepenny Review. Summer 2015.
• "One Nearly Perfect Day" Sewanee Review. Summer 2015.
• "How It Went" Sewanee Review. Summer 2016.
• "A Clearing" The Hudson Review. Autumn 2018.
• "The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How It Ceased to be Told (1935-1978)" The Threepenny Review. Fall 2018. (A discussion of this story can be found on Front Porch Republic.)
• "A Conversation". The Threepenny Review. Winter 2020.
• "One of Us (1949)" Larkspur Press, Monterey, KY 2020; and The Threepenny Review. Fall 2020.
• "A Time and Times and the Dividing of Time". The Threepenny Review. Fall 2021.

Nonfiction

Title	Year	Publisher	Reprinted/Revised	ISBN	Notes
The Long-Legged House	1969	Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; New York	Shoemaker & Hoard (2004), Counterpoint (2012)	1619020017 (2012)
The Hidden Wound	1970	Houghton Mifflin	Counterpoint (2010)	1582434867
The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge	1971	University Press of Kentucky; Lexington	North Point (1991), Shoemaker & Hoard (2006)	1593760922	Photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard
A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural	1972	Harcourt, Brace; New York	Shoemaker & Hoard (2004), Counterpoint (2012)	1593760922
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture	1977	Sierra Club, San Francisco	Avon Books (1978), Sierra Club/Counterpoint (third edition, 1996)	0871568772
The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural	1981	North Point, San Francisco	Counterpoint (2009)	1582434840
Recollected Essays: 1965–1980	1981	North Point, San Francisco		086547026X
Standing by Words	1983	North Point, San Francisco	Shoemaker & Hoard (2005), Counterpoint (2011)	1582437459
Meeting the Expectations of the Land: Essays in Sustainable Agriculture and Stewardship	1986	North Point, San Francisco		086547172X	Editor with Wes Jackson and Bruce Colman
Home Economics: Fourteen Essays	1987	North Point, San Francisco	Counterpoint (2009)	1582434859
Descendants and Ancestors of Captain James W. Berry	1990	Hub, Bowling Green, KY			With Laura Berry
Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work	1990	University Press of Kentucky		0813109426
What Are People For?	1990	North Point, San Francisco	Counterpoint (2010)	1582434875
Standing on Earth: Selected Essays	1991	Golgonooza Press, UK		0903880466
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community	1992	Pantheon, New York		0679756515
The Farm	1995	Gray Zeitz (Larkspur Press, Monterey, Kentucky)	Counterpoint (2018)	9781640090958 (2018)
Another Turn of the Crank	1996	Counterpoint, Washington, DC		1887178287
Grace: Photographs of Rural America	2000	Safe Harbor Books, New London, NH		0966579836	Photographs by Gregory Spaid, essay by Gene Logsdon, story by Wendell Berry
Life Is a Miracle	2000	Counterpoint, Washington, DC		1582431418
In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World	2001	Orion, Great Barrington, MA		0913098604
The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry	2002	Counterpoint, Washington, DC		1582431469
Citizens Dissent: Security, Morality, and Leadership in an Age of Terror	2003	Orion, Great Barrington, MA		0913098620	With David James Duncan. Foreword by Laurie Lane-Zucker
Citizenship Papers	2003	Shoemaker & Hoard, Washington, DC	Counterpoint (2014)	1619024470
Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy	2004	University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY		0813123275	Photographs by James Baker Hall
Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Christ's Teachings about Love, Compassion & Forgiveness	2005	Shoemaker & Hoard, Washington, DC		1593761007
The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays	2005	Shoemaker & Hoard	Counterpoint (2006)	1593761198
Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food	2009	Counterpoint, Berkeley		158243543X
Imagination in Place	2010	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1582437068
What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth	2010	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1582436061
The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford	2011	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1582437149
It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays	2012	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1619021145
Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder	2014	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1619023059
Our Only World: Ten Essays	2015	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1619024888
The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings	2017	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1619020386	Preface by Maurice Telleen; three essays (plus a substantial introduction); four short stories; one poem
The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry	2018	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1640090282	Thirty-one essays selected and introduced by Paul Kingsnorth; first published in 2017 in the UK by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books
Wendell Berry: Essays 1969-1990	2019	Library of America, New York		1598536060	The Unsettling of America and thirty-two essays selected by Jack Shoemaker
Wendell Berry: Essays 1993-2017	2019	Library of America, New York		1598536087	Life Is A Miracle and forty-two essays selected by Jack Shoemaker

Uncollected essays

• "Against the Death Penalty" on YouTube "KCADP's YouTube Channel." April 24, 2009.
• Berry, Wendell (February 22, 2010). "The Cost of Displacement". The Progressive.
• "To Break The Silence" Appalachian Heritage Vol 41 (3), Summer 2013, pp 78–84.

Poetry

Title	Year	Publisher	Reprinted/Revised	ISBN	Notes
The Broken Ground	1964	Harcourt Brace & World, New York
November twenty six nineteen hundred sixty three	1964	Braziller, New York			Art by Ben Shahn
Openings	1968	Harcourt Brace & World, New York		0156700123
Farming: A Hand Book	1970	Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York	Counterpoint, Berkeley (2011)	1582437637
The Country of Marriage	1973	Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York	Counterpoint, Berkeley (2013)	1619021080
An Eastward Look	1974	Sand Dollar, Berkeley
Sayings and Doings	1974	Gnomon, Lexington, KY		0917788036
Clearing	1977	Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York		0151181500
A Part	1980	North Point, San Francisco		0865470081
The Wheel	1982	North Point, San Francisco		0865470782
The Collected Poems: 1957–1982	1985	North Point, San Francisco		0865471975
Sabbaths: Poems	1987	North Point, San Francisco		0865472904
Traveling at Home	1988	The Press of Appletree Alley, Lewisburg PA	North Point (1989)	1582437645
Entries	1994	Pantheon, New York	Counterpoint, Washington DC (1997)	1887178376
The Farm	1995	Larkspur, Monterey KY	Counterpoint, Berkeley (2018)		Illustrations by Carolyn Whitesel
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997	1998	Counterpoint, Washington DC		1582430063	Later included in This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected and New 1979–2013
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry	1999	Counterpoint, Washington DC		1582430373
The Gift of Gravity, Selected Poems, 1968–2000	2002	Golgonooza Press, UK
Sabbaths 2002	2004	Larkspur, Monterey KY			Later included in This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected and New 1979–2013
Given: New Poems	2005	Shoemaker & Hoard, Washington DC	Counterpoint, Berkeley (2006)	1593760612	Partially included in This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected and New 1979–2013
Window Poems	2007	Shoemaker & Hoard, Washington DC		1582436231	Originally published in Openings (1968)
The Mad Farmer Poems	2008	Counterpoint, Berkeley		161902277X	Originally published in Farming: A Handbook, The Country of Marriage, A Part, and Entries
Sabbaths 2006	2008	Larkspur, Monterey KY			Later included in This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected and New 1979–2013
Leavings	2010	Counterpoint, Berkeley		158243624X	Partially included in This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected and New 1979–2013
Sabbaths 2009	2011	Sewanee Review, Spring 2011			Later included in This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected and New 1979–2013
New Collected Poems	2012	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1582438153
This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected and New 1979–2013	2013	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1619021986
Terrapin and Other Poems	2014	Counterpoint, Berkeley		161902425X	Illustrated by Tom Pohrt
Sabbaths 2013	2015	Larkspur, Monterey, KY			Wood engravings by Wesley Bates
A Small Porch	2016	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1619026162	Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with "The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation" (also later included in The Art of Loading Brush)
Roots To The Earth	2016	Counterpoint, Berkeley		1619027800	Eight previously published poems and one uncollected short story ("The Branch Way of Doing"), accompanied by wood engravings by Wesley Bates. This is the trade edition (with the added short story and engravings) of the 2014 Larkspur Press edition, based on the 1995 West Meadow Press portfolio.
Sabbaths 2016	2018	Larkspur, Monterey, KY			"What Passes, What Remans" (2016, VIII) is also to be found in The Art of Loading Brush. Wood engravings by Wesley Bates.

Interviews

• Weinreb, Mindy. "A Question a Day: A Written Conversation with Wendell Berry" in Merchant, 1991^[127]
• Beattie, L. Elisabeth (Editor). "Wendell Berry" in Conversations With Kentucky Writers, University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
• Minick, Jim. "A Citizen and a Native: An Interview with Wendell Berry" Appalachian Journal, Vol. 31, Nos 3–4, (Spring-Summer, 2004)^[128]
• Berger, Rose Marie. "Wendell Berry interview complete text," Sojourner's Magazine, July 2004 ^[129]
• Brockman, Holly. "How can a family 'live at the center of its own attention?' Wendell Berry's thoughts on the good life", January/February 2006 ^[130]
• Grubbs, Morris Allen (Editor). Conversations with Wendell Berry, University Press of Mississippi, 2007. ISBN 1578069920
• Hooks, Bell. "Healing Talk: A Conversation" in "Belonging: A Culture of Place", 2009, Routledge.
• Smith, Peter. "Wendell Berry's still unsettled in his ways." The Courier-Journal, September 30, 2007, A1.
• "Wendell Berry: A conversation," The Diane Rehm Show. WAMU 88.5 American University Radio, November 30, 2009.^[131]
• Leonard, Sarah. "Nature as an Ally" Dissent, Vol. 59, No. 2, Spring, 2012
• "Wendell Berry: Poet & Prophet," Moyers & Company. PBS. October 4, 2013.^[132]
• Lehrer, Brian. The Brian Lehrer Show WYNC, October 17, 2013 ^[133]
• "Distant Neighbors: Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder", part of 2014 Festival of Faiths: Sacred Earth / Sacred Self ^[134]
• "Wendell Berry, Burkean" Interview with Gracy Olmstead. The American Conservative, February 17, 2015.^[135]
• Fisher-Smith, Jordan. "Field Observations: An Interview with Wendell Berry'" ^[136]
• DeChristopher, Tim. "To Live and Love with a Dying World: A conversation between Tim DeCristopher and Wendell Berry". Orion, Spring 2020.

Forewords, introductions, prefaces, and afterwords

Title	Author	Year	Publisher	ISBN
Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work	Meine, Curt D.	2010	University of Wisconsin Press	9780299249045
At Nature's Pace: Farming and the American Dream	Logsdon, Gene	1994	Pantheon	9780679427414
Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place	Baker, Jack R. and Jeffrey Bilbro	2017	University Press of Kentucky	978081316902
The Caudills of the Cumberlands: Anne's Story of Life with Harry	Cummins, Terry	2013	Butler Books	9781935497684
Driftwood Valley: A Woman Naturalist in the Northern Wilderness	Stanwell-Fletcher, Theodora C.	1999	Oregon State University Press	9780870715242
Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation	Nabhan, Gary Paul	2002	University of Arizona Press	9780816522590
God and Work: Aspects of Art and Tradition	Keeble, Brian	2009	World Wisdom Books	9781933316680
Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal	Kline, David	2001	The Wooster Book Company	9781888683226
A Holy Tradition of Working: Passages From the Writings of Eric Gill	Gill, Eric	2021	Angelico Press	9781621386827
The Holy Earth	Bailey, Liberty Hyde	2015	Counterpoint	9781619025875
Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World	Keogh, Martin (ed.)	2010	North Atlantic Books	9781556439193
James Archambeault's Historic Kentucky	Archambeault, James	2006	University Press of Kentucky	9780813124209
Kentucky's Natural Heritage: An Illustrated Guide to Biodiversity	Abernathy, Greg (ed.)	2010	University Press of Kentucky	9780813125756
Letter to a Young Farmer: How to Live Richly without Wealth on the New Garden Farm	Logsdon, Gene	2017	Chelsea Green Pub.	9781603587259
Letters from Larksong: An Amish Naturalist Explores His Organic Farm	Kline, David	2010	Wooster Book Co.	9781590982013
Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight	Wirzba, Norman	2006	Brazos Press	9781587431654
Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness	Reece, Erik	2006	Riverbed	9781594482366
The Man Who Created Paradise	Logsdon, Gene	2001	Ohio University Press	9780821414071
The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America's Food Supply	Midriff, Ken	2005	St. Martin's Griffin	9780312325367
Missing Mountains	Johansen, Kristin (ed.)	2005	Wind Publications	9781893239494
My Mercy Encompasses All: The Koran's Teachings on Compassion, Peace and Love	Shah-Kazemi, Reza	2007	Counterpoint	9781593761448
Nature as Measure: The Selected Essays of Wes Jackson	Jackson, Wes	2011	Counterpoint	9781582437002
NO FOOL NO FUN	Zeitz, Gray	2012	Larkspur Press
The One-Straw Revolution	Fukuoka, Masanobu	2009	NYRB Classics	9781590173138
The Pattern of a Man & Other Stories	Still, James	2001	Gnomon Press	9780917788758
Pedestrian Photographs	Merrill, Larry	2008	University of Rochester Press	9781580462907
The Prince's Speech: On the Future of Food	HRH The Prince of Wales	2012	Rodale Press	9781609614713
Ralph Eugene Meatyard	Gassan, Arnold	1970	Gnomon Press	ASIN: B001GECZNY
Round of a Country Year: A Farmer's Day Book	Kline, David	2017	Counterpoint	9781619029248
Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible	Davis, Ellen F.	2008	Cambridge University Press	9780521732239
Soil And Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture	Howard, Albert	2007	University Press of Kentucky	9780813191713
Stone Walls: Personal Boundaries	Cook, Mariana	2011	Damiani	9788862081696
That Wondrous Pattern: Essays on Poetry and Poets	Raine, Kathleen	2017	Counterpoint	9781619029231
The Embattled Wilderness: The Natural and Human History of the Robinson Forest and the Fight for Its Future	Reece, Erik and James J. Krupka	2013	University of Georgia Press	9780820341231
The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water	Van der Ryn, Sim	1978	Ecological Design Press	9781890132583
To a Young Writer	Stegner, Wallace	2009	Red Butte Press	9780874809985
Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture	Smith, J. Russell	1987	Island Press	9780933280441
Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape	Hanson, David T.	1997	Aperture	9780893817268
We All Live Downstream: Writings About Mountaintop Removal	Howard, Jason	2009	MotesBooks	9781934894071
The Woodcuts of Harlan Hubbard	Hubbard, Harlan	1994	University Press of Kentucky	9780813118796

See also

• Poetry portal

• Agrarianism
• Fellowship of Southern Writers
• Front Porch Republic
• The Land Institute
• John Seymour (author)
• Local food
• Localism (politics)
• Southern Agrarians
• Sustainability
• Subsidiarity
• Wallace Stegner
• Wes Jackson

References

1. ^ "Wendell E. Berry biography". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved April 26, 2015.
2. ^ "Dayton Literary Peace Prize names distinguished achievement award recipient". Dayton Daily News. August 12, 2013. Retrieved August 12,2013.
3. ^ Eblen, Tom (January 31, 2015). "At Hall of Fame ceremony, Wendell Berry laments 'public silence' on Ky. writers' work". Lexington Herald-Leader. Retrieved March 24, 2015.
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Further reading

• Baker, Jack and Jeffrey Bilbro, ed. Telling the Stories Right: Wendell Berry's Imagination of Port William. Eugene, OR: Front Porch Republic Books, 2018.
• Baker, Jack and Jeffrey Bilbro. Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017.
• Bilbro, Jeffrey. Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry's Sustainable Forms. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2019.
• Bilbro, Jeffrey. "The Way of Love: Berry's Vision of Work in the Kingdom of God," in Loving God's Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. 138-178.
• Bonzo, J. Matthew and Michael R. Stevens. Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008.
• Goodrich, Janet. The Unforeseen Self in the Works of Wendell Berry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.
• Heinzelman, Kurt (1980), Indigenous Art: The Poetry of Wendell Berry, in Bold, Christine, (ed.), Cencrastus No. 2, Spring 1980, pp. 34 – 37, ISSN 0264-0856
• Merchant, Paul, ed. Wendell Berry (American Authors Series). Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence, 1991.
• Mitchell, Mark and Nathan Schlueter. The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011.
• Oehlschlaeger, Fritz. The Achievement of Wendell Berry: The Hard History of Love. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011.
• Peters, Jason, ed. Wendell Berry: Life and Work. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
• Shuman, Joel James and Owens, L. Roger (eds). Wendell Berry and Religion: Heaven's Earthly Life. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009.
• Smith, Kimberly K. Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
• Sutterfield, Ragan. Wendell Berry and the Given Life. Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2017.
• Wiebe, Joseph R. The Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017

External links

Wendell Berryat Wikipedia's sister projects

• Quotations from Wikiquote
• Data from Wikidata

• The Wendell Berry Catalogue from Counterpoint Press
• Internet Resources
• The Membership: A Wendell Berry Podcast
• The Berry Center