For 35-plus years, freelance writing has earned me enough of a living that I’m still working behind that shingle and plan to continue until I go toes up. This particular pleasure has brought untold opportunities to my doorstep, including international travel, a broad world view, and the chance to meet a raft of fascinating people from whom I’ve learned lessons that continue to round out my life nicely.
Thanks to a recent essay in the New York Times Review of Books, I became aware that one of the latter had left the earth in August at the age of 92. A fellow native Kentuckian, Wendell Berry was praised and grieved in this beautifully penned article by none other than brilliant writer and Pulitzer Prize winner, Barbara Kingsolver, who counted him among her most significant literary mentors.
“I’ve felt Wendell Berry’s literary hand between my shoulder blades for such a majority of my life that…it’s a shock to wake up in a day without him in this world,” she wrote.
The date of this “post mortem” is October 4, 2020, and is titled “Appraisal” by Kingsolver. If you’re interested in reading more about this legendary writer, Google this, because the article can be a great intro to begin your quest with pure reverence, as her words paint an idea of exactly what the world has lost and why it grieves that loss. Especially now.
For many years, Berry was so dedicated to spreading the word of the importance of sustainability and actively pursuing it himself in his writings and on his farm in Northern Kentucky that I assumed – foolishly, hoped – he’d somehow be “allowed” to inhabit this sphere for eons to come. This honorable man lived what he preached, using a horse for breaking ground to be planted and eschewing the latest technology by writing in longhand, which his wife, Tanya, typed and edited. He addressed this particular issue in one of his most preeminent essays, “Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer.”
Read it and see if you might agree, especially on days that technology gets your goat.
Another of Kingsolver’s observations speaks to one of his basic principles: “He saw danger in the conviction that new things are always better than old things.”
Perhaps this example is naïve, but my Uncle Mac, a retired Navy Captain that taught high school chemistry and physics until he turned 80, crafted a sturdy, easy-to-carry toolbox out of wood from his farm for my 8th birthday. That collection of tools still serves me well to this day. I like to think Mr. Berry would approve!
As director of promotions at Lexington’s Joseph-Beth Booksellers, I had the honor of hosting several of his book launches and writing a story on him in an upscale, local magazine that focused on social events and topics of appeal to the area’s rich and famous. He agreed to the piece only because its readership was unlikely to have heard his focused views on sustainable farming, the health of rural communities, and race relations anywhere else. At the time, I’d no idea of the volume of his work, but for the three months prior to the interview – my first as a writer – I spent hours daily pouring over his essays, poems, and novels, devising questions that might allow readers to open their minds to his messages. All are worthy ones in my book.
In an article on his appreciation of Berry in the October 2026 edition of Kentucky Monthly Magazine, accomplished Kentucky poet, writer, and state Poet Laureate (1999-2001) Richard Taylor has penned a wonderful, concise discourse on this beloved icon. Following is an excerpt.
“Doing justice to Wendell Berry’s long and distinguished career is like trying to lasso a slippery fish in wide water,” Taylor begins. “Few would dispute that he is perhaps the most influential writer to emerge from Kentucky, not only as a literary artist but as a shaper of ideas that too many of us ignore – the health of the earth and the communities it supports, the history of agriculture and the impact of industrialization on rural communities, and the accompanying dissolution of our moral center…He often described himself as a poet and farmer, but his long career was much broader. Poet, essayist, novelist, social activist, and critic, he has been likened to a contemporary Henry David Thoreau.”
Honors bestowed on Berry are far too numerous to mention here. But search them out and read in awe.
Long before my beloved country and the world slid into their present state of turmoil, I began keeping up with the news – in particular, hard news – less and less, not to make any sort of statement in particular, but because I simply felt better when I focused on upbeat pronouncements, on my own life, and on things that brought joy to my heart. Growing up in a small, agrarian West Kentucky town, I was instilled with values that included using one’s God-given talents for good, helping those that needed it, and perhaps most of all, being a caring steward of the planet.
In the last few years, I – and at least a chunk of social media – have been turning to Wendell Berry’s wise words more and more, finding a camaraderie and even a peace within them. One of his poems that has been my favorite since first hearing it is The Peace of Wild Things. Read it carefully, watch its movie in your mind, and allow yourself a measure of its magic.
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
All is not lost. Keep the faith.
