Letter from Wendell: How a poet and farmer and a guitarist and teacher connected across time and space
Carrie Dietz Brown didn’t have a lot of hope her plan would work. But crazy longshots, along with wild things surviving in unlikely places, are among the revered ideals handed down to her by her father, the late, great Pat Dietz. So she hatched the plan anyway. She hoped to reach Wendell Berry, the poet, novelist, and essayist whose work had meant so much to her father and family. Berry is a seminal figure in the American cultural landscape of the last century, a man who, as a promising young writer in the mid-‘60s, left the East Coast literary establishment behind and returned to his native Kentucky to become a farmer. He has written nine novels and dozens of short stories, all about one small place, Port William, each told from the perspective of a different member of that community. He’s also been one of the most prolific essayists in recent American history, most famously for his collection, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Further, he has published over a dozen books of poems, a body of work that — even if he’d never written anything else — would have established him as a giant of American letters. The poet Donald Hall called him “a prophet of our healing…
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