Nick Offerman reflects on Wendell Berry
08 July 2016
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.
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