British collection of Wendell Berry Short Fiction reviewed

Berry’s lifelong ruminations on the theme of human community and its ties to the soil culminate in Stand By Me. This collection of 18 short stories, published individually between 1984 and 2015, traces the decline of the fictional, adjoining Kentucky towns of Port William and Hargrave and the lives of the people within them over the course of a century. Berry’s stories follow a “membership” of connected families, from Port William’s early days in 1888 as a rural outpost on the fringes of civilization up to 1981, by which time real estate companies have bought the farms so meticulously and lovingly maintained by generations of Port Williamites and transformed them into purely functional suburban housing. A deep melancholy pervades Berry’s tales of Port William’s later days, as beloved point-of-view characters die off and, unlike in previous generations, are not replaced in the membership by offspring interested in taking up the hard work of maintaining the land. Instead, the young of Port William flock to cities and universities, where they are made either too rich or too smart to ever consider the life of a farmer. Despite being written decades apart, the last few stories in Berry’s collection consistently portray Port William’s future as dire. These stories, the shared culture of generations of centuries-old families like the Feltners, Coulters, Rowanberrys, Catletts, Proudfoots, and Branches, will soon have no one to remember them. Port William’s bucket is being overturned.

Read all of "The Wealth of Intimate History: On Wendell Berry's 'Stand By Me'" by John-Paul Heil in Los Angeles Review of Books.

Commencement Ceremony of The Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College

The Wendell Berry Farming Program, a tuition-free college degree program that started in 2019 graduated its inaugural cohort of 12 students on May 15, 2021 at the Henry County Fairgrounds in Eminence, Kentucky. Wendell Berry delivered the keynote address.

 

 

A Critique of Wendell Berry's "The Pleasures of Eating"

At the end of the essay, Berry juxtaposes the emptiness of industrial eating with what he calls “extensive pleasure.” This is the pleasure that is not wedded to the sensual, tactile, or gustatory—what Berry terms the pleasure of the “mere gourmet”—but emerges from “one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.” The pleasure of eating for Berry is not intrinsic to the experience of eating, but extrinsic to it, deriving instead from the knowledge of the food’s journey from life to plate. Which is to say that, he is not, in fact, talking about the pleasure of eating in any sort of conventional, literal, or phenomenological sense. Rather what we have here is a repackaging of the pleasure of work: you can only take real satisfaction from the memory of the labor and care you invested in whatever it is you are munching on. This becomes all the more apparent when we read Berry’s program for how the “industrial eater” can obtain extensive pleasure, which Berry dubiously asserts “is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.” Want pleasure? Get to work! Berry’s suggestions are a familiar list of foodie chores: 1) “Participate in food production to the extent that you can.” 2) “Prepare your own food.” 3) “Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home.” 4) “Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist.” 5) “Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production.” 6) “Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.” 7) “Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.”

Read all of "Sexuality Studies for Foodies" by Gabriel Rosenberg at The Strong Paw of Reason.

On Wendell Berry, Good Work, and Hope

The Kentucky farmer and essayist Wendell Berry seeks a third way, the way of hope. For Berry, good work is worth doing regardless of whether it will fix our global problems. By grounding ultimate hope in a given redemption, he is freed to do good work without having the impossible pressure of fixing global problems. So while some of the many technological and political ideas bandied about are worth pursuing, such solutions are a poor foundation for hope because they will inevitably disappoint us: no technology can make us live forever, and no political system can make us live in harmony with one another. If global efficacy is the standard of our work, then most of us have no good work to do. As Berry writes in regard to environmental challenges, “If we think the future damage of climate change to the environment is a big problem only solvable by a big solution, then thinking or doing something in particular becomes more difficult, perhaps impossible.”

Read all of  "Labours of Love" by Jeffrey Bilbro at Comment Magazine.

 

A city pastor finds common ground with Wendell Berry

While it may seem that a city lover and return to rural advocate have little in common, Berry has many themes that apply across many locations. A central theme for Berry is commitment to place and specifically commitment to places the modern economy says are not worth much. For Berry himself this is rural Kentucky. So, whether it be in poetry, essay, or short story form Berry is a tireless advocate for the place of the small farm in rural lands. The rural family farm is not only worth something, but in a strange way capable of providing a better life than the one our modern economy offers.

Read all of "Wendell Berry and a City Pastor" by David Kamphuis at The Fire Escape.

Italy meets Wendell Berry

Italy is famous for the excellence of its local products. It is renowned for wines that express the specificities of its territories, whose area sometimes covers only a few acres, and for microclimates that permit the production of widely different cured meats. Italy is famous for styles of painting and architecture, dialects and foods that change every few miles as one travels through the countryside. Why did Italy develop so many varieties, with such a deep intuition for the hidden possibilities in every territory? There is an American poet who can help us rediscover the roots of Italy’s greatness, and perhaps also help us find a good road for our common future. That poet is Wendell Berry. He is not yet well known in Italy. However, his works resonate so deeply with the spirit of Italy that it is probable that Berry will not only become well known, but even celebrated, as he has become over the last few decades in North America.

Read "From a Lookout in the Woods" by Jonah Lynch in L'Osservatore Romano.