A reflection on Wendell Berry's new book

It’s no accident that the book’s opening and concluding chapters focus on the failures of public speech. Such discourse perpetuates the abstractions of prejudice and stereotypes and inevitably authorizes violence toward its objects. At one point, near the end of a lengthy passage exploring Ernest Gaines’s novel A Gathering of Old Men, Berry voices a question that many readers will surely have: “What is the use, in a book about race relations, of paying so much attention to language? . . . I think it is necessary, because the usefulness of our conversation about this subject, if ever we are to have an authentic one, will depend on the kind and quality of the language we use.” Practicing authentic conversation and finding healthy language have long been at the heart of Berry’s work. In the introduction to The Art of Loading Brush, Berry sums up his many years of writing as his “struggle to find or recover the language necessary to speak, in the same breath, of work and love.” That struggle continues in this new book, and what unites the many strands that run through its nearly 500 pages is his effort to imagine a public conversation rooted in love rather than fear and oriented toward good work rather than abstract or merely symbolic victories.

Read all of "Practicing Authentic Conversation" by Jeffrey Bilbro at Front Porch Republic.

A Review of Wendell Berry's "The Need to Be Whole"

Over a half century ago and in reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a young Wendell Berry penned a very personal essay on race relations in American history entitled The Hidden Wound. His central argument was that the institution of black slavery had fractured and distorted American whites as well as blacks, if in different ways. Berry has now returned to the question of America’s racial past in the much larger and more ambitious volume The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice.

As expected, Berry cuts his own path of historical interpretation. On the one hand, he accepts in a way the key premise of The New York Times’s “1619 Project” which places black slavery and its consequences at the very center of American consciousness and history. However, he gives this focus a twist, locating the primal American sin in a somewhat different place. On the other hand, he agrees in a manner with the report of the presidential “1776 Commission,” released in the waning days of the Donald Trump administration, holding that white racism is not the major source of national woes. All the same, he condemns the American project for another sort of systemic subversion of its ideals of both liberty and equality.

Read all of "Patriotic Work: Wendell Berry’s The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice" by Allan Carlson at Front Porch Republic.

A Review of Wendell Berry's "The Need to Be Whole"

For Berry, there are no autonomous people and no isolated social problems. Thus, while acknowledging that “it is obvious that race prejudice or white supremacy is the original and fundamental mistake in the European conquest of this country,” he sees questions of structural racial discrimination as part of a larger discussion about an economy founded on the abuse of the land and its inhabitants: displacing Native people, depleting the soil, destroying landscapes with extractive industries, and targeting the small family farm for extinction. “We need to remember,” Berry writes, “that we solved the one great problem of slavery while ignoring every issue raised by our manner of doing so, and that when the slaves were ‘freed,’ we resorted to an industrial system that exploits and enslaves people in other ways for other purposes, leaving them stranded and hopeless.”

Read all of "Labor, land, and racism" by Brian Volck at The Christian Century.

Interview with Jack Shoemaker, Wendell Berry's publisher

FF: One of your correspondents, Wendell Berry, famously wrote that he would never buy a computer. What do you think he got right, and what wrong, in that stance?

JS: Well, I just re-published Why I Won’t Buy a Computer, I just republished that little book in a pamphlet form. Wendell and I—we spoke this morning!—Wendell and I are working on a very big book, a very big book about racism and forgiveness and a lot of stuff. A five-hundred-page book. It’s going to be a book that a lot of people will look at as a kind of bookend to Unsettling of America, I think. And during the process, we’ve been doing this for about five years, we’ve been doing this really often, likely weekly, for two years—the editing. ...

You know, he writes on a long yellow tablet, by hand. And his wife Tanya types the first draft of the manuscript. And he is devoted to her and to her work and extremely responsive to it. After all these years, she becomes, really, in the process, his first editor. And then they make a typescript, and they used to make carbon copies. Now she goes into town and gets a xerox made and sends it to me. So that initial part of the process is all handwork. If he makes changes, I get substitute pages—in hard copy. I don’t get electronic things. I think we both have just so learned to deal at this pace, and when I’m dealing with my other writers, who are all electronic and they’re all hurry-up-and-wait kind of people, it can seem weird to me, compared to what Wendell and I do with each other, which is to take our time. And to be patient with one another. But it does elongate the process, there’s no question. We spend a long time in this work.

Read the whole Fare Forward interview HERE.

Tanya Berry photos, Wendell Berry essay in new publication

In 1979, Tanya Amyx Berry was given a camera by New Farm magazine to capture images of Kentucky farmers at work. Over two days at the farm of Owen and Loyce Flood in Henry County, she recorded the culmination of a year’s labor raising livestock. These photographs have recently been published for the first time in a new book by University Press of Kentucky.

In Tanya Amyx Berry’s “For the Hog Killing, 1979,” these compelling photographs, accompanied by an essay and poem from Wendell Berry, illustrate the American agrarian practice of neighbors gathering to perform one of the most ceremonious jobs of farm life and the communal effort toward a common wealth.

Read all of "Tanya Berry Captures Kentucky Tradition in New UPK Release" by Katie Cross Gibson and Danielle Donham at UK News.

NY Times reviews Wendell Berry essay collection

Now this estimable nonprofit publisher returns with two slablike volumes of his nonfiction in a boxed set, “What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry 1969-2017.” Together the books weigh in at a forest-pulping 1,674 pages. It’s a lot of Wendell Berry.

It’s vastly too much Wendell Berry, a determined reader soon discovers. Counterpoint Press delivered a saltier introduction to this writer’s work last year with “The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry.” It’s one-fifth the size and, in paperback, about one-fifth the price.

The numbing length of these two new collections do Berry no favors. From the start, he bangs the same themes so relentlessly — the perils of industrial agriculture, the decimation of rural life, America’s blind faith in technology — that one’s eyes begin to cross.

It’s not that Berry isn’t correct to be desperately concerned about these issues, and about the loss of old ways and fine workmanship in general. You can be right there alongside him, at least on the big points, while still being driven to madness by repetition. It’s as if someone has put a bag over your head.

Read all of  "In Wendell Berry’s Essays, a Little Earnestness Goes a Long Way" by Dwight Garner at The New York Times.

Wendell Berry on "Wild and Domestic"

Orion Magazine has recently published Mr. Berry's reflections on the troubled and troubling relations between the terms "wild" and "domestic." Orion has also made this brief essay available online. It begins:

I. GARY SNYDER SAID that we know our minds are wild because of the difficulty of making ourselves think what we think we ought to think.

II. That is the fundamental sense of “wild” or of “wilderness”: undomesticated, unrestrained, out of control, disorderly.

III. There are two ways to value this, as exemplified by the sense of “wild party”: from the point of view of the participants and that of the neighbors.

IV. To our people, as pioneers, “the wilderness” looked disorderly, undomestic, out of control.

V. According to that judgment, it needed to be brought under control, put in order by domestication.

VI. But our word “domestic” comes from the Latin domus, meaning “house” or “home.” To domesticate a place is to make a home of it. To be domesticated is to be at home.

VII. It is a sort of betrayal, then, that our version of domestication has imposed ruination, not only upon “wilderness,” as we are inclined to think, but upon the natural or given world, the basis of our economy, our health, in short our existence.

Read the complete article HERE. And subscribe to this great magazine if you can.

 

Wendell Berry's "The Farm" republished and reviewed

The newly released book The Farm by Wendell Berry is a worthwhile purchase simply for its beauty. A trade reprint of the hard-to-find letterpress edition by Kentucky’s Larkspur Press, this new book retains the elegance of the original in both its design and its monochrome drawings by Carolyn Whitesel.

The sole content of the book is the long poem that gives the book its title, which is at once a depiction of a farm and its workings (presumably based on Berry’s own farm), and rich wisdom on how to run a farm sustainably – from maintaining woodlands to cultivating cornfields to keeping a garden.

The intermingling of biodiverse relationships between humans, land, plants, and animals in this poem, is reminiscent of what I experienced on my grandparents’ small-to-medium-sized Iowa farm a generation ago. Berry’s vision of the farm, while frank about the intensive labor it requires (“There is no end to work — /… / One job completed shows / Another to be done.”), is compelling in the image of farm life that it conjures.

Read the complete review by C. Christopher Smith at The Englewood Review of Books.

A review of "The Essential Wendell Berry"

Agrarianism is the theme he returns to with great regularity and is also the subject of his best-known book, the 1977 classic The Unsettling of America, a compressed version of which is included in this collection. A good part of Berry’s career has involved excoriating mechanized, chemicalized mega-farming as a brutal, life-threatening assault that kills the soil and sends it down the river, guts farming communities, renders moot our relationship to animals and sky and other people, and widens a dualism between us and the earth that is ruining our health, our minds, our ability to live satisfying lives, and the American (and global) culture.

These works are mostly about small-town America, and mostly set on Berry’s farm at Lane’s Landing, once a riverboat stop on the Kentucky River near Port Royal, Kentucky. But not one word stoops to smug nostalgia. He is instead trying to prove that science and economics happen in a place: he draws endlessly and non-repetitively on the deep well of the lived truth of farm life, which delivers up sweet, clear lines of poetry and local lore and a kind of immediate authenticity.

That authority is the reason we read Wendell Berry. When he tells us precisely what ails us as a nation, that a “Faustian economics” of “corporate fundamentalism” fuels a “world-ending fire” of limitless consumerism that is our ruin, we believe him. We want to scream it from the rooftops. But he goes a step further. He doesn’t leave the question begged, but answers it:

Small solutions, unrelentingly practical, that will be made by individuals in relation to small parcels of land.

Read all of "How to Fight the Fire" by Dean Kuipers at Los Angeles Review of Books.

Library of America will publish Wendell Berry essays in April 2019

Wendell Berry
What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry 1969–2017 (two volumes)
Jack Shoemaker, editor
Volume 1: Essays 1969–1990
Library of America Series #316 / ISBN 978-159853-606-5
Volume 2: Essays 1993–2017
Library of America Series #317 / ISBN 978-159853-608-9
Boxed set: ISBN 978-159853-610-2
April 2019

See the complete Spring roster of Library of America titles HERE.