The one good thing about teaching (I’ve heard there are others–vicious rumors, I contend) is I get to introduce my students to the work of Wendell Berry. Berry is an academic, but he is also a farmer. He is a cultural critic, yet also an agriculturalist who creates rather than just deconstructs. He is neither a liberal nor a conservative (though he is often misread as being one or the other by, well, one or the other), and he is the author of numerous novels, poems, essays and children’s books. I didn’t discover Berry until I was in my first year of graduate school, but I quickly made up for it. While I was at Duke it seemed as if I averaged reading one Wendell Berry book per class. It didn’t matter if the class was on Kant or Kierkegaard, those professors found a way to sneak in a Berry text.
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