Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky

Mary Berry writes about Wendell Berry

My father’s name is Wendell Berry and I have been crazy about him for 54 years now. Wendell is married to my mother, Tanya. It is nearly impossible for me to think of one without the other.

It is hard to imagine now that until coming back to live permanently in Henry County in 1964 we had lived in Europe, California and New York City, with stays in Kentucky between those moves. We moved to Lanes Landing, where my parents live now, when I was 7 and my brother, Den, was 3. I can remember seeing the place for the first time but I can only imagine what a great satisfaction it must have been for Daddy to buy a place that he had known all his life and that his mother had loved all of her life.

Read more (and see some sweet old photos) at ediblecommunities.com

Wendell Berry among new members of American Academy of Arts and Sciences

In the Humanities and the Arts, new members include: novelist Martin Amis; novelist and essayist Wendell Berry; philosopher David Chalmers; director and actor Robert De Niro; Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Annie Dillard and U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey; actor Sally Field; Michael Fishbane, a scholar of Jewish studies; operatic soprano Renee Fleming; jazz musician Herbie Hancock; documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles; French history scholar Sarah Maza; linguist David Perlmutter; artist Judy Pfaff; Stuart Schwartz, a leading historian of colonial slavery; artist Yoshiaki Shimizu; and singer-songwriters Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen.

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The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 12, 2013, at the Academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

via abc12.com

Mary Berry reflects on her mother's agrarian vision

I believe I missed this wonderful article when it first became available.

My mother’s name is Tanya Amyx Berry and she is not from the farm in Henry County, Kentucky, where she has lived for over 50 years. She was born in Berkeley, California, in 1936 into a family with deep Kentucky/California ties, which I guess were never fully reconciled. Because of this my mother and her parents went back and forth between Lexington and Mill Valley many times.

My mother-to-be married Wendell Berry in May 1957. They traveled quite a bit during the early years of their marriage. In 1964, they bought a little hillside farm called Lanes Landing on the Kentucky River. Daddy was teaching at the University of Kentucky and Lanes Landing was going to be a weekend place for us. It quickly became the place they would live, raise my brother and me, and share in the work that they do there still.

READ MORE at ediblecommunities.com

Blog Watch: A Wendell Berry Portrait

I am almost finished now with the Wendell Berry painting for which I showed the sketch a couple of weeks back. The wide shot is a little cropped, so there is actually a bit more on each side. It felt like a bit of a challenge creating a younger portrait of someone I have never met.

Go HERE to view the portrait.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Wendell Berry!

Today we mark and celebrate Wendell Berry's 78th birthday.

And this is a year that will see the publication of at least one new volume, A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership. Do you know of any others?

Ad Multos Annos!!

from "Why Left and Right like Wendell Berry "

In 1977, Berry put out The Unsettling of America, which may be his most influential book. As an attack on large-scale agriculture, it is very much in keeping with the themes of his Jefferson Lecture. Yet it’s more than an anti-corporate screed. Berry also defends the virtues of the smallholder farm, not as a unit of efficient production but rather as an essential component of a thriving culture that values strong communities and ecological stewardship. “The healthy farm sustains itself in the same way that a healthy tree does,” he wrote, “by belonging where it is, by maintaining a proper relationship to the ground.” Russell Kirk — a longtime NATIONAL REVIEW contributor who, like Berry, fled the academy for a rural homestead — discovered the Kentuckian around this time. “Berry is possessed of an intellect at once philosophic and poetic, and he writes most movingly,” wrote Kirk in a 1978 newspaper column. “Humane culture has no better friend today than he.” Kirk was probably the first prominent conservative to detect an undercurrent of conservatism in Berry’s work: suspicion of progress, support for local autonomy, and a preference for the old ways of doing things.

Berry certainly doesn’t view himself as a conservative, and he seems both puzzled and amused that his work would find favor with conservatives. “Mostly I’m a Democrat,” he says. “I’m a child of the New Deal. My family have always been Democrats.” Berry says he voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and plans to vote for him again this November. He has met Obama once, when the president awarded him the National Humanities Medal two years ago. Michael Pollan, the liberal foodie activist, thinks the connection may go deeper, citing Obama’s criticism of mainstream agriculture and its dependence on cheap oil: “I have no idea if Barack Obama has ever read Wendell Berry, but Berry’s thinking had found its ways to his lips,” Pollan wrote in the introduction to Berry’s 2009 book, Bringing It to the Table.

via www.heymiller.com

Be sure to read the whole article HERE.

Wendell E. Berry named 41st Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities

WASHINGTON (February 6, 2012) — Wendell E. Berry, noted poet, essayist, novelist, farmer, and conservationist, will deliver the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. The annual lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.

“Wendell Berry is an American treasure whose prose and poetry have— with subtlety, intelligence, and conviction—helped open our eyes to the importance of respecting and living with nature,” said NEH Chairman Jim Leach. “Tilling the land of his Kentucky forebears, he is a 21st-century Henry David Thoreau.”

Berry will present the 41^st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Monday, April 23, 2012 at 7:30 PM at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. In the lecture, “It All Turns on Affection,” Berry will discuss man’s interaction with nature, as depicted in history, philosophy, and literature.

via www.neh.gov

 

Request tickets HERE.

Washington Post article HERE.

"Wendell Berry Is Still Alive and Well"

Wendell Berry is still alive.   Back in June of 2009, a blogger apparently pulled a “Twain” on the former professor at University of Kentucky and ‘exaggerated’ his death.  It turns out (although Thomas Berry passed away) the man who bought some land in Henry County (Wendell) has survived and continues to thrive.  Here’s a Youtube clip of the poet being introduced by Bill McKibben.

via thebarking.com

Jim Powell on Wendell Berry in 3P Review

Wendell and Tanya Berry set apart an area of land on the periphery of their Kentucky hillside property, when they settled there in 1964, as a wild preserve permanently removed from cultivation. It was a usage stemming from the agricultural tradition Berry was born into—self-sufficient domestic diversified farming, as practiced in Henry County by five generations of Berrys. Because the industrialized monocrop agriculture that replaced it prefers large uniform fields, progress came late to this intricate terrain. By the time Berry returned there to settle, Henry County’s economically marginalized status in the new scheme of things made it a likely place to find a pocket of land to reclaim for the practice of a new-style old-style agriculture.

via www.threepennyreview.com

Happy Birthday, Mr. Wendell Berry!!

(Photo: Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post)

"There is joy for a man in his utterance; a word in season, how good it is!" (Proverbs 15.23)