E121 Week 5 – Discussion 2
Go to the Library and search for an essay that either advances the topic in the essay that was interesting to you or provides another point of view that is different from the original authors.
Reflect: Using the critical reading methods, consider the main differences between the source you find and the text we read in class. How is the perspective different? How might the audience be different? How much time has passed and what events have happened between the two writings?
Write: Upon reflection, write at least three paragraphs (200-300 words for each paragraph) where you accomplish the following:
Summarize the library essay you chose from the class and the essay you found in your library search.
Make connections between the two pieces, explaining how you see the essay from your search communicating with the essay we read in class.
Articulate any questions/curiosities/predictions/challenges you have based on the reading and use examples from the essay to explain those.
Incorporate a quote and/or paraphrase where appropriate with proper APA citation, including full citations at the end of your post.
Your initial post must be at least 600 words in length and posted by Day 3. Support your claims with examples from the required material(s) and/or other scholarly sources, and properly cite any references as outlined in the Universitys Writing Centers.
Kentucky Writers in Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Appalachian Heritage, Volume 43, Number 1, Winter 2015, pp. 36-42 (Article)
Published by The University of North Carolina Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
[ Access provided at 27 Jul 2020 06:08 GMT from Ashford University ]
https://doi.org/10.1353/aph.2015.0048
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/596008
36
kENTuCky
wRITERS IN kENTuCky
WeNDell beRRy
On December 2, 2014, Carnegie Center Director Neil Chethik and Literary Liaison Bianca
Spriggs paid a visit to Wendell Berry at his
farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. The occasion
was Berrys selection as the first living
writer to be inducted into the Kentucky
Writers Hall of Fame, which is run by the
Carnegie Center in Lexington. Tanya Berry,
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Wendells wife of fifty-eight years, invited Chethik and Spriggs
inside, where they admired the Berry library while waiting
for Wendell to arrive from his writing camp nearby. Then,
over tea, a conversation ensued among the four of them about
Kentucky writers: Why are there so many good ones? What
are their typical characteristics? What impact do they have
on Kentucky politics? After a few minutes, Wendell took out a
small notebook from his shirt pocket and began to jot down
notes. The resulting remarks, published below, were delivered
to a crowd of more than 400 people at the Carnegie Center on
January 28, 2015, as part of the third annual Kentucky Writers
Hall of Fame induction ceremony.1
n n n
In the spring of 1964, Tanya and I and our children had
been living in New York for two years. When my work in the
city ended that spring, we loaded ourselves and our belongings
into a Volkswagen Beetle with a luggage rack on top and
took the New Jersey Turnpike south. We were returning to
Kentuckyto settle, as it turned out, permanently in my home
country in Henry County. On my part, this homecoming
cost a good deal of worry. Just about every one of my literary
friends had told me that I was ruining myself, and I was unable
entirely to disbelieve them. Why would a young writer leave a
good job in New York, where all the best artistic life and talent
had gathered, to go to Kentucky?
There are no control plots in a persons life. I have
no proof that I would not have done better to stay in New
York. But I see that in retrospect my story has gained the
brightening of a certain comedy. When I turned my back
supposedly on the best of artistic life and talent in New York
and came to Kentucky, half believing in my predicted ruin,
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who was here? Well, among many dear and indispensable
others: James Still, Harlan Hubbard, Harry Caudill, Guy
Davenport, and Gene Meatyard. All of them I came to know
and, I hope, to be influenced by. In 1964 also Thomas Merton
was living in Kentucky. I cant say that I knew him as I knew
the others, but I had read The Sign of Jonas when it was
published in 1953, Tanya and I by courtesy of Gene Meatyard
visited Merton twice at Gethsemani, and to live here was to
feel his presence and his influence. I met Harriette Arnow in,
I think, 1955 when I first encountered Mr. Still, at the only
writers conference I ever attended. Many years later I met her
again, spoke to her and shook her hand, remembering from
then on her eyes and the testing look she gave me. No book
more confirms my native agrarianism than The Dollmaker.
My point is that in 1964, for a young writer in Kentucky
and in need of sustenance, sustenance was here. In the
fifty years that have followed, the gathering in Kentucky of
Kentucky writers has grown much larger. It would take me a
while just to call their names: old friends, allies, influences,
members, permitting me to be a member, of an unending,
enlightening, entertaining, comforting, indispensable
conversation. My further point is that in 2015, for an old
writer in Kentucky and in need of sustenance, sustenance is
here.
n n n
Of literary or writerly life in Kentucky I have no worries. It
seems lively, various, and dispersed enough to continue, which
is all I can presume to ask.
My worries begin when I think of the literary life
of Kentucky in the context of the state of Kentucky: a
commonwealth enriched by a diversity of regions, but gravely
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and lastingly fragmented by divisions that are economic,
social, cultural, and institutional. These divisions have given
us a burdening history of abuseof land abuse but also and
inevitably of the abuse of people, for people and land cannot
be destroyed or conserved except together. We all know our
history of social and cultural division, from the Indian wars
of the eighteenth century to legal discrimination against
homosexuals in the twenty-first. And we know how our many
divisions, beginning in the lives of persons, become fixed in
public and institutional life.
Some public entities that ought to be divided are tightly
meshed together. I mean, above all, the intimacy between state
government and wealthy industries. Otherwise, the states
institutions and organizations appear to be islands divided,
and often in themselves further divided, by specialties,
departments, interests, and sides. Where and when might
one find a political-industrial-academic-conservationist
dialogue on any issue of land use? When aggrieved citizens
gather on the pavement in front of the Capitol to express their
grievances, who knows it? Who listens? Who replies?
So far as I can tell, those are rhetorical questions,
useless except to suggest the extent and seriousness of the
fragmentation of our commonwealth. This fragmentation
is made possible, and continually made worse, by a cloud of
silence that hovers over us. We have in this state no instituted
public dialogue, no forum in which a public dialogue could
take place.
This public silence ought to be a worry especially to
writers. What is the effect or fate, Kentucky writers may ask,
of Kentucky books devoted to urgent public issuesNight
Comes to the Cumberlands or Lost Mountain or Missing
Mountains or The Embattled Wilderness? That is not quite
a rhetorical question, but the answer is not obvious or easy.
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Kentucky writers write books of several kinds, and they
publish them, sometimes in Kentucky, but none of their books
contributes to a public conversation in Kentucky about books
or anything elsein spite of our need for it, and in spite of the
schools and other institutions that would benefit from it and
could also contribute to it.
We have, besides several private presses, the University
Press of Kentucky, which publishes sixty books every
year, many of them of interest or concern specifically to
Kentuckians. According to Steve Wrinn, editor of the Press,
many of these books are bought, read, and appreciated by
the people of Kentucky. And yet of those books, very few will
be reviewed here. The Courier-Journal, to name one case in
point, is suffering near-fatal typophobia , and publishes no
book reviews not piped in from USA Today.
And so we can say that we have in Kentucky a sufficiency
at least of writers of books, publishers of books, and readers
of books. And yet when a Kentucky book is published it enters
into a public silence, similar of course to such silences in other
states, but in origin and character peculiarly our own. This is a
problem that relates immediately to the hope for a sustainable
and sustaining human culture in Kentucky. Such a culture,
which we must hope for and work for, will depend and thrive
upon our diversity of regions, and upon conversation among
them. In my long conversation with Gurney Norman, he and
I have often spoken as from opposite ends of the Kentucky
River watershed. My long conversation with Ed McClanahan
Writers now, as never before, must keep aware
that literacy is their trade, until now a trade of
supreme importance.
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has gone back and forth across the hump of northern
Kentucky, from two different countries. For me, these
dialogues of friendship transcending regional differences have
been indispensable sources of instruction and delight. I cant
imagine myself without them. Kentucky writers who see their
placement here as a shared opportunity and a shared burden
may still shape among themselves sustaining friendships and
alliances. I hope they do.
n n n
These are thoughts that have come to me as a writer in
Kentucky, in the United States, in the middle of the second
decade of the twenty-first century, perhaps at the end of
the age of literacy. What might be the use of the role of
writers in such a place in such a time? I will say that writers
now, as never before, must keep aware that literacy is their
trade, until now a trade of supreme importance. Much that
we now have that is of greatest value has come to us from
books. Our Constitution and Bill of Rightsjust to hint at
an immeasurable abundancehave come to us from books
and from readers of books. To keep our heritage viable and
transmissible will require capable writers of books, capable
readers of books, and a capable culture of literacy, however
small it may have to be.
The survival of literacy in an age of illiteracy may require
us to remember how physical, how much of the senses, the life
of literacy is. By putting down letters in substantial ink onto a
substantial surface for many centuries, we have been making
words and then sentences. Putting down the letters, we have
felt in our fingers and hands and forearms their shapes and the
shapes of the words they make and their flowing together into
sentences. We have watched as our hands have done this. We
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have read by seeing what we have written. As we have written,
we have been hearing, at least in our minds, the sounds of
our words and sentences. We have been making what Ivan
Illich called sounding pages. If we read aloud what we have
written, our breath carries our words into the air. We feel and
almost taste the sounds as we shape them with our tongues,
teeth, and lips. Writing may be the most completely sensuous
of all the arts. How far it can be removed from bodily presence
and from the bodily presence of people together, speakers and
hearers in a settled community, and still function as language
is a lively question.
Insofar as it involves language, literacy is communal.
Insofar as it depends upon reading, Ivan Illich was right in
seeing that it depends also upon private space, which is to
say solitude, and periods of silence. I have been depending
on and quoting from Illichs book, In the Vineyard of the Text,
in which he made a beautiful analogy: for a reader to face
a book, preparing to read, is like sitting in a Gothic church
in the dark, looking at a window that seems only a part of a
wall. And then the dawn comes. The light passes through the
window, brightening the colors and the forms of a story. n
1 More information about the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning and the
Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame can be found at www.carnegiecenterlex.org.
