That’s the home Tanya Berry has made, in a rural community that endures — at least for now — because of people like her. Over those years, she has honed skills in farm work and the domestic arts, while serving as perhaps the most important fiction editor almost no one has heard of, married to one of the most important American writers almost everyone knows.
All this started more than a half-century ago with her leap of faith that an artsy city kid could learn, from scratch, what was needed to make a farm home. She grew up mostly in California, moving around often, and the early years of their marriage took them from Kentucky back to California, then to Europe and New York — part of what she once assumed would be a cosmopolitan life with a writer and academic.
But Wendell wanted to go home, and Tanya wanted to put down roots somewhere.
“He needed to be home, and I was flexible because I didn’t belong anywhere in particular. So, I took this on with him,” she says. “It’s not always been perfect. None of it has been perfect. But it’s been right. It’s been the right thing.”
Read the complete essay by Robert Jensen at Yes! Magazine.