A review of Wendell Berry's collected fiction in progress

The long shelf of fiction by Wendell Berry—overshadowed by the colossal green canopy of his poetry and agrarian essays—has been brought into the light by the Library of America. Wendell Berry: Port William Novels and Stories, the first of two volumes that will enshrine the whole of Berry’s fiction, was released early this year and collects four early novels and 23 short stories.

It includes a detailed chronology of Berry’s life and career, including notes on his to-thine-own-self-be-true decision to leave New York in 1965, the year he won a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, to farm back in his home state of Kentucky. Editor Jack Shoemaker has also provided a map of Berry’s fictional yet very real town of Port William, a 120-year family tree of the four families that live out his stories, and eight pages of notes.

One of the book’s subtitles is The Civil War to World War II, and accordingly, the narrative begins with a story set in 1864, “The Girl in the Window” (2010), and ends with one set in 1945, “Not a Tear,” which originally appeared in 2012 in The Threepenny Review.

Read all of  "The Bard of Kentucky" by Rafael Alvarez at Law and Liberty. 

Wendell Berry in conversation at The Kentucky Book Fair, November 2018

At the Kentucky Book Fair on November 17, 2018, Wendell “I don’t take what I write all that seriously” Berry spoke with Jon Parrish Peede, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The event was moderated by Dr. Morris Grubbs of The University of Kentucky. HERE IS A LINK to an audio recording of that conversation.

On Wendell Berry's Fiction

Berry’s dreams do emerge in his essays, and of course they inform them. His poems, appearing in dozens of publications across these decades, make his hope more vivid, more musical. But to see Berry’s dreaming vision of our world fully laid out, one must go to his fiction. In the early 1960s he began to publish an entwined series of stories centered on the fictional town of Port William in northern Kentucky, a town “without pretense or ambition,” as one of his narrators recalls, “for it was the sort of place that pretentious or ambitious people were inclined to leave.” To date Berry has produced eight novels and more than fifty short stories (along with some poems and at least one play) about this place, magical in its lowliness and mythical in its ordinariness—a fantasia of democratic, republican proportions. If it’s a profoundly flawed world, it is yet, in Berry’s telling, a good one. And therein lies his hope.

Read all of "Reign of Love: The Fiction of Wendell Berry" by Eric Miller at Commonweal Magazine.

Composer Gavin Bryars uses Wendell Berry prose in choral piece

English composer Gavin Bryars grounds his latest a cappella work, A Native Hill, on text by Mr. Berry from his 1968 essay. The work will be performed on December 14th and 16th by Philadelphia's well-known chamber choir, The Crossing.

A note at Mr. Bryars' site says,

Following from the huge success of The Fifth Century, written for The Crossing and Prism Saxophone Quartet, which won a Grammy for Best Choral performance in January 2018, Gavin has written a substantial new a capella, work that builds on the considerable experience that he has of working with the choir, and the many close personal friendships within it. For this he has set text from the American writer Wendell Berry's early essay A Native Hill (1968). Berry, now in his eighties, has written a great deal - poetry, essays, novels - from the perspective of his life as a farmer in rural Kentucky, where he has lived and worked for over 50 years. He is one of the world's finest writers, and perhaps because of his apparent isolation has been called a "modern-day Thoreau" and certainly his work is as politically charged as that of his 19th century predecessor. Gavin decided to set prose texts rather than the poetry, although, like Thomas Traherne who was the writer used for The Fifth Century, this "prose" has great poetic beauty.

Philadelphia's public radio station, WRTI, will present live highlights of the work on WRTI's Facebook page on Monday, December 10th at 4:30 PM [Eastern time, I presume], and also on WRTI 90.1 and streaming at WRTI.org on Thursday, December 13th at 12:10 PM. See more information HERE.

Wendell Berry in conversation with Crystal Wilkinson

This year's KY Arts and Letters Day [November 10, 2018] at The Berry Center featured a very special keynote for our NEA Big Read: Agrarian Literary League of Henry County. Kentucky authors Wendell Berry and Crystal Wilkinson joined in conversation with moderator Debbie Barker to talk about their work, Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying, growing up in and writing about rural places, and the legacy of black agrarianism in the South. Visit berrycenter.org to subscribe to our newsletter and find us on Facebook and Instagram for more information about events and goings-on at the center. Filmed live on location in New Castle, Kentucky.