Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky

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In the sidebar to your left under Content, you will find pages with links and lists related to Mr. Berry's work.

This website is not owned, operated or sanctioned by Mr. Berry, whose disapproval of computer technology is well-documented.

The one person responsible for all of this is me, Br. Tom Murphy (btwb@brtom.org). All opinions expressed within posts— outside of quoted content—are also only mine. I am not a personal friend or employee of Mr. Berry and am thus not able to arrange interviews or appearances by him.

Consider joining the conversation at Wendell Berry's Work, an email discussion group.

Blog Watch: WB's face/voice congruence

berry, wendell « milk and music.

Maybe I’d seen a photo of Wendell Berry before, but I don’t think so. I looked up his picture after listening to this interview on the Dianne Rehm show. Usually the faces I conjure for radio voices are way off (take Garrison Keillor, didn’t expect that scowl) but Mr. Berry looks to me exactly as he sounds. Kind, wise, feeling. Deliberate yet unassuming. READ MORE ...

Blog Watch: Reading 'Think Little'

Wendell Berry: Think Little and Start a Garden For Real Change - yearofplenty.

I continue to work my way through Wendell Berry's wonderful little collection of essays, "A Continuous Harmony." I just finished the chapter titled, "Think Little," and his comments are very helpful to the ongoing conversation here on the blog about how real change in food systems and the environment are actualized among real people in real places. READ MORE ...

'Leavings' among best-selling contemporary poetry books

Travis Nichols: Poetry Best Sellers Of 2009.

7. Leavings by Wendell Berry
The latest collection of wise words and back-to-the-land hectoring from Berry, the Kentucky author of fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays, includes this short gem, called "And I Beg Your Pardon": "The first mosquito: / come here, and I will kill thee, / holy though thou art." READ MORE ...

Blog Watch: Epigraphical WB on 'scale'

the front porch: Hope-enhagen? I don't think so.....

"Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence-- that is, to the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods." -Mr. Wendell Berry

This week in Copenhagen, world leaders are talking, talking, and talking, presumably about how to preserve the planet. The U.S. and other rich nations are coming to the table to discuss preserving the planet, but only if the decisions in Copenhagen also work toward preserving our way of life, our standard of living. Poor nations come to the table hoping to be heard, to bear witness to the ecological effects that our way of living has on the lives of households and neighborhoods throughout the world. READ MORE ...

WB on lighting the tree

Season’s lights take on new meaning with time | citizen-times.com | Asheville Citizen-Times.

Our Christmas lights, whether or not they’re the new LED variety, use unnecessary and damaging amounts of electricity. That electricity is produced violently by destroying entire mountains and the forest communities that thrived on them for millennia. Argue all you want for the continued use of coal but you cannot deny the truth. We can do much better and we should.

Author Wendell Berry stopped lighting his tree when he saw a billboard in Kentucky that said “Coal Lights Your Christmas Tree.” From that year on he has allowed the ambient light of the room to light his tree. READ MORE ...

Blog Watch: Reading "Citizenship Papers"

Borderland › Reading Wendell Berry.

Reading Wendell Berry’s Citizenship Papers, I see that Berry’s “agrarian argument” might also serve to counter the corporate ethos which has dominated the rhetoric of education reform for several decades, and which is now being carried forward by the Obama administration. The agrarian argument asserts the responsibility everyone has to care for that which everyone depends on, including the responsibility to care for human culture. Berry reminds us, “Poverty and starvation also can be cultural products – if the culture is wrong.”

Having spent the past 30 years nurturing the social, emotional, and intellectual capacities of human beings, I want to echo this argument. I want to offer it in opposition to toxic side effects which come from ill-advised efforts to “fix” our schools without also attending to economic injustices afflicting students who are routinely referred to as “disadvantaged.” If people stopped for half a moment to think about what the phrase “disadvantaged students” means, there would be no allowance for further discussions about using test scores to rationalize false notions of equality, since equality without justice is nothing more than an empty promise. READ MORE ...

WB essay among "The Best"

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009; ISBN-13: 9780547002590.

Mr. Berry's essay "Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits" (first published in Harper's Magazine) has been included in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's annual gathering of science and nature writing.

WB cited on the future

Is God Green?.

In a work that I discovered in the early 1980s, Berry invites us to consider that the demise of small-scale agri-culture is simply an echo of the crumbling of culture itself. He addresses our fascination with the future as an obtainable paradise:

All our implements—automobiles, tractors, kitchen utensils, etc.—have always been conceived by the modern mind as in a kind of progress or pilgrimage toward their future forms. The automobile-of-the-future, the kitchen-of-the-future, the classroom-of-the-future have long figured more actively in our imaginations, plans, and desires than whatever versions of these things we may currently have. READ MORE ...

WB cited in Safran Foer review

In ’Eating Animals,’ author makes case for giving it up - STLtoday.com.

It is our refusal to know, according to Safran Foer, that makes us all complicit. As farmer and man of letters Wendell Berry said, we are all farming by proxy. It doesn’t matter what the author has chosen for himself (for now, vegetarianism, not veganism), or which discovery tipped him toward this decision. Through reporting, interviews and guest essays, "Eating Animals" explores four basic reasons we should rethink how often, or whether, we eat animals. READ MORE ...

Another report on WB at UVA, 12.3

Berry Urges Need for Local Economies of Farming and Forestry.

December 7, 2009 — Speaking at the University of Virginia on Dec. 3, Wendell Berry, a poet and writer with a small farm in Kentucky, decried the industrialization of farming, forestry and mining that he said has damaged land and forest ecosystems and destroyed communities. He warned the present industrial systems cannot last.

An overflow crowd of more than 200 filled the auditorium of the Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature and Culture/Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library to hear Berry's lecture, "Simple Solutions, Package Deals and a 50-Year Farm Bill." An estimated 200 more outside the library had to be turned away.

"Land, water and air cannot be healthful apart from a healthful human economy," said Berry, the author of more than 40 books, from poetry to essays on environmental topics such as the local food movement. READ MORE ...