It was a snowy day, not the best weather for a festival but from the first sign on Main Street in New Castle, I knew the Kentucky Arts and Letters festival would not be exactly what I expected. The Longshot Lobsta Food Truck, parked outside in the snowy street for lunch, seemed out of character for inland Kentucky. (The lobster rolls reportedly were delicious.) Being that everything is local as can be in Wendell Berry’s world, I kind of expected BBQ or beef from the Berry Center. As Wendell’s famous quote goes, “Eating is an agricultural act.”
But never mind the snow and food offerings; the big draw for my friend Cynnie, me and others was Wendell Berry reading.
In the small town of Newcastle (population c.900) at the Berry Center, the spirit of Wendell infuses the place like wine in a long-brewing beef stew. While you can see the romantic intellectual side of Berry through all his 50 books collected in the log cabin bookstore down the street, you get the hard-working, practical side, at Our Homeplace Meat, a shop which sells meat and local produce from the Berry project that supports small farmers a block down from the bookstore.
True to Wendell’s aversion to the over commercialization of our world, no neon or big billboards blight the townscape. The town itself looks kind of depressed, if not for the Berry buildings freshly renovated and inviting us in. I counted five Berry buildings on Main Street, including the Berry Center in a fine 1820s home, the meat shop, the bookstore, the Heritage House and the Locker, a small auditorium-like space where the readings took place.
The bookstore is cozy and well-supplied with the books of Berry and other Kentucky writers. Located in a double log cabin beautifully renovated, the Agrarian Culture Center and Bookstore features all Berry’s work including the most recent two: The Need to be Whole; where he delves into the need to face the consequences of our exploitation of Native peoples, African Americans and many others, and How it Went, more fictional stories based on his Kentucky farm life. He published these two books this year at age 88.
There are some lovely little hand-crafted books with beautiful paper imprinted with woodcut pictures, published by Larkspur Press, along with collections of poetry, essays and short stories. I had a hard time deciding what volume to buy and settled on This Day, recommended by Cynnie for meditation, a thick book full of short poems. He wrote the poems on Sunday, the Sabbath, when he takes his worship into the woods and fields of Henry County. I also bought The Unsettling of America. Culture and Agriculture, published in 1977. His words ring truer than ever:
“And surely there has never been a people more ominously and painfully divided than we are—both against each other and within ourselves.”
This quote at the end of chapter one in Unsettling sums it up for me “the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.”
For the festival reading, I was expecting some observations on nature or the continued divide, with political animosities still raging. Berry does not endorse one political candidate over another, even though his learnings are decidedly progressive, pro-environment and pro-small farm. His reading was nonpolitical, hilarious and refreshing—memories of his friend and former Merry Prankster-the late Ed McClanahan, author of the memoir,Famous People I have Known. I didn’t realize that Berry, as well as Mcclanahan were friends with counter-culture icon Ken Kesey as well as writers Larry McMurty, Robert Stone and Ernest Gaines — all together in the Creative Writing seminars at Stanford University in 1958.
As related in his talk, Berry got some grief from members of his literary circle, based in New York and Palo Alto, for retreating back to his home-farm in Kentucky after he received fellowships at Stanford, an agent and a job teaching writing in New York.
To try to explain his decision to his skeptical friends, he detailed milking a cow and the wonders of that to which McClanahan countered that he got the same pleasure from cocktail hour. (This doesn’t sound half as funny as when Berry told it in his soft, deadpan drawl.)
After Stanford, McClanahan and Berry continued a close relationship, farming, writing and talking together. As Berry remarked when McClanahan died in November of last year:”Ed and I started talking in the spring of 1957 and we haven’t stopped til now.”
Kentucky writers
Berry was clearly the most anticipated, applauded writer of the group, but the others, mostly steeped in the rural culture and oral tradition of storytelling like Berry, were a joy to listen to. All low-key, each writer simply approached the microphone on a tiny stage and read from his or her work. Cynnie and I just sat and listened and were entertained. Bobbie Ann Mason, whose short stories I love, read excerpts from Feathers about a country woman over-pregnant which had us laughing out loud.
Eric Reece, whose Lost Mountain won the Sierra Club award for environmental writing, was intense as he read “Gethsemane,” inspired by his relationship with Thomas Merton, once a Kentucky resident. Morris Manning’s Railsplitter is written in the voice of Abe Lincoln; he entertained with music played on a dulcimer made of a cigar box and stick.
All had some relationship to Wendell, through writing, farming and Kentucky, of course.
It all comes back to Wendell, as one writer commented. Or, as Berry has written, “It all turns on affection.”
