Why Wendell Berry mattered
Like most adults who write their thoughts down regularly, I was raised in a home by a mother who maintained piles of books strewn around the house. There were more books than anyone in our home could read combined, but you could find our favorites open on tabletops and dressers with a pencil, or another book, pinned in them to hold a page. Most of these books that were propped open were my mother’s and they included dozens of Wendell Berry’s works. I slowly absorbed a version of Berry’s way of thinking: through reading, through my mom’s infatuation with his work, through osmosis as I watched Cartoon Network next to open copies of Hannah Coulter and What are People For? Berry has begun to suffer the same literary fate as C.S.
