Nick Offerman reflects on Wendell Berry

In about 1995 I was doing a production of Sam Shepherd’s play “Buried Child” at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago; specifically I was hired to understudy Ethan Hawke. And I was also working as a makeup artist on the show, putting old age makeup on the venerated late American actor named James Gammon. Another actor in the show, guy by the name of Leo Burmester, handed me a book of Wendell Berry short stories and said, ‘I think you’re going to get a kick out of these.’ And, boy, it kind of turned my whole life upside-down. I was really moved by Wendell Berry’s creation, in his body of fiction, of a community that reminded me of the great farming family that I grew up in in Illinois. And then, just devouring all of his writing, then his essays and his poetry further cemented him as, in my opinion, the living writer with the most common sense and the most hard-hitting pathos for the human race. He’s my John Lennon or my Gandhi. I think if everybody would read Wendell Berry we’d have a lot less people shooting at each other.

Read more at Los Angeles Times

On Wendell Berry and "The Seer"

I first came across Wendell Berry a couple of years ago when I started reading The American Conservative and Front Porch Republic on a regular basis. After spending a night or two digging around in the ‘bowels’ of each website, I soon realised that the octogenarian Berry is a figure of great importance to Burkeans and counter-cultural conservatives in North America, and I could see why.

Berry is a rare-breed; a person who actually practices what he preaches. Yes, he’s written and continues to write novels, novellas, short-stories, poems, and essays, all dealing in their own way with the toxic impact of the industrial revolution on community, agriculture, and work. But he’s also spent the best part of fifty years running the family farm with his wife, Tanya, in Henry County, Kentucky. That lends a certain authenticity to his words; an authenticity that’s often lacking when the pen is in the soft hands of an academy-bound intellectual.

Read more at Atlantic Bulletin.

On Wendell Berry's "Way of Ignorance"

Novelist, poet, farmer, and environmental activist Wendell Berry (b. August 5, 1934) is the closest thing our era has to Thoreau — a magnificent writer whose poems and essays remind us, over and over, what it means to be awake to the world, inner and outer. Whether he is contemplating solitude and the two great enemies of creative work or examining how poetic form illuminates the secret of marriage, Berry breaks through even our most hardened ego-shells and beams into the cracks enormous warmth and wisdom.

That’s precisely what he does in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays (public library) — a masterwork of luminous lucidity on our civilizational shortcomings, delivered with the intelligent hope necessary for doing better.

Read it all at Maria Popova's BrainPickings.