Wendell Berry

Last updated on: June 19, 2004 at 6:07 pm by Fred Clark

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Wendell Berry 2004-06-19T18:07:10-04:00 Fred Clark

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Sojourners' Rose Marie Berger interviews the great mad farmer, poet and prophet of Kentucky, Wendell Berry. The complete interview is online at Sojonet (along with a fine picture of Berry from photographer Ryan Beiler — who was always grossly underpaid when I published his work in PRISM).

Berry is a national treasure and an all-too-well-kept secret.

His poetry is not as widely read or anthologized as it should be, but then no poets these days are as widely read as they should be.

His essays are brilliant, lucid and profound, but I can also understand why these are not more widely read. One realizes, reading them, that if Berry is right, then a great deal of the rest of our world and the rest of our lives are wrong. And since it rather seems he is right, the resulting sense of uneasiness is quite troubling and it's no surprise that such disturbing works haven't become popular.

(It's depressing to see that a book as vital and vibrant as Standing by Words has gone out of print. I know a few students of literature who, preferring the study of Dante to the study of Derrida, clung to this book as a lodestone during their graduate studies.)

But Wendell Berry is also a novelist and a writer of short stories. All of his fiction is set in the town of Port William, Ky., and concerns the same families, the generations of Catletts, Coulters and Crows who make up what he calls that community's "membership." Each new story, each new chapter set in this fictional world adds depth and meaning to the chapters that went before. It is a beautiful body of work.

But — and here is my point, following on the earlier discussion of "Christian-themed entertainments" — it is also an accessible body of work.

My mother loved these stories. Mom was an avid reader and a builder of libraries whose children logged many hours gluing the little envelopes for circulation slips into the back of books for the township, church and school libraries.

Yet she was not a fan of most high-brow, "literary" fiction. She read, and enjoyed, Agatha Christie and Janette Oke. She was also a devout evangelical Christian who preferred fiction that was in keeping with her religious values.

Mom was, in other words, an exemplary one-woman focus group for the kind of "Christian fiction" that evangelical readers were craving. And she loved the novels and stories of Wendell Berry.

There are many reasons why Berry's books have not caught on among most readers of "Christian fiction." But none of those reasons are good ones.

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