Notebook: (2) Days of Arts and Letters, Two Southern Festivals
Fruits of literature-in-place
Hanging with Lisa Uhrik and friends in the Plenty Bookshop booth at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville
Read Part One of this post here!
Education and culture, for many of the writers I heard from during my days at Kentucky Arts and Letters Day and the Southern Festival of Books, opened the door to another way to be. Current Kentucky poet laureate Kathleen Driskell told the audience at Kentucky Arts and Letters Day that it took her ten years to get a BA because no one in her family could imagine that a poet was something one could become. The poet Wesley Houp said of his thrill at receiving the James Baker Hall award for his 2025 book Strung Out Along The Endless Branch that it was encountering James Baker Hall’s own work that taught him, a tobacco farmer, that it was possible to find art in tobacco farming. (James Baker Hall shared a Stegner fellowship with Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey.) Meredith McCarroll in Untelling writes of an older brother who had gone to Appalachian State University, “his kindness had found room to stretch out. His curiosity was developed. I never asked him about it, but it seemed to me that college had done for him what it was meant to do.”
The other day I was talking with some people about whether war was inevitable, and we got to thinking about the wars that don’t happen. Do we remember the people who keep wars from happening? Do we ever even know who they are? Gurney Norman was in large part responsible for many of the people in the room on Saturday becoming writers; one person did that. I was talking after the readings with Shannon Boyd from the Wendell Berry Center about its Farm and Forest Institute. The Institute’s low-impact forestry courses are active now; they are working on building up the facilities for courses in livestock on grass production. But she emphasized that the agrarian thought and leadership curriculum, which can be joined both in person and virtually, is vital to the whole Institute: even the most hands-on courses consider agriculture as civilizational endeavor, a component of life on earth rather than an isolated means of extracting from it. (In The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry faults the land-grant universities for sponsoring the mechanization and corporatization of agriculture and calls for a form of agricultural education that will “bring the small disciplines of each man’s work within the purview of those larger disciplines implied by the conditions of our life in the world.”) In the Berry Center’s tiny bookstore there are four shelves of nonfiction by Bill McKibben, E. F. Schumacher, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bryan Stevenson, Rachel Carson (considered for us by Kentucky writer Erik Reece), William Cronon, Annie Dillard, Neil Postman, Robert Macfarlane, Paul Kingsnorth, Willa Cather, Jane Jacobs, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Merton, Michael Pollan, and Sarah Smarsh. Clearly a lifetime of reading, or several, is behind the center’s vision, even its classes in Woodland Tools and Horse Teamster Skills.
In her introduction to Kentucky Arts and Letters Day, Mary Berry, Wendell Berry’s daughter and executive director of the Berry Center, said that the disastrous 1906 tobacco harvest that is at the heart of Wendell Berry’s new novel, Marce Catlett, from which he read on Saturday, is the force behind all the work the Center does. In the novel, echoing Wendell Berry’s own family’s story, farmer Marce (Marcellus) Catlett returns from market where he found a single buyer pricing the entire 1906 tobacco harvest below cost. He, like all his neighbors, “came home broke, and in the dark before the daylight the next morning went back to work.” This “living and ongoing story of his family’s endurance in their place” found expression in Marce’s son Wheeler’s (John Berry’s) founding of the Burley Tobacco-Growers Cooperative Association (whose real-life archives are housed at the Berry Center) to set fair prices and manage tobacco production and preserve livable incomes for small farmers, and the story prompted Wheeler’s son Andy to become, like Wendell, a writer, and now Mary’s work to continue the Burley Tobacco Cooperative as a cooperative of livestock farmers and and Wendell’s vision as a center for “agrarian thought and practice” in the Farm and Forest Institute. The story has retained “its formative power”; it “has had a future. It has been joined to the story of its own survival and influence.”
Read Wendell Berry in Book Post on his decision to return to his native Kentucky
Behind the writers speaking at Kentucky Arts and Letters Day hung four banners, one for the livestock cooperative, one for the Farm and Forest Institute, one for the whole Berry Center, and one for the Agrarian Cultural Center and Bookstore that was sponsoring the day. It struck me that culture, the work of the Cultural Center and the Bookstore, like the Hindman Settlement School and the Southern Festival of Books, was a necessary leg of the stool, drawing our eyes to the practical farm work and the advocacy for a more grounded way of living that might otherwise be behind the scenes. It is through culture that a society not only is seen but sees itself. Encountering the work of James Baker Hall taught Wesley Houp that there was poetry in his life as a farmer, reading that poetry aloud creates solidarity (from within) and empathy (from without) to labor for a way of life, to see its richness and the breadth of its contribution to human experience. I was reminded of Betsy Teter, the founder of the pioneering nonprofit Hub City Press and Bookshop in Spartanberg, North Carolina, who said of the anthology about Spartanberg that kicked of their project: “I think people had a deep longing for some way to celebrate their community and understand it and bring people together around the idea” of the town. She believed Spartanburg was “a place of consequence.” Her co-founder and future husband (and Mercer University Press author) John Lane said that the soul of a town is not in its tax base or economic development but “in its stories. We wanted to show the community it had a soul.” Their bookstore went on to spark a revival of the faded former textile town and railroad hub.
The concentration of ever more consolidated financial interests that crushed family farming is also crushing human-made writing and reading, feeding it into a thresher that threatens to sever language from what Wendell Berry calls the “creaturely.” The labors of the Agrarian Culture Center and the Southern Festival of Books, the local work of university presses, the Hindman Settlement School, Hub City Press, preserve a literature of being-in-place, the literary expression of what John Berry considered the democratizing power of land ownership. Mandi Fugate Sheffel, in her memoir set amidst mountain-top-removal mining, wrote of damaged men like her father “working hard to make other people rich.” Martha Park, speaking of her Hub City Press book World Without End at the Southern Festival of Books, described her discovery that natural conservation in the South unifies people across political differences. In her studies of organizing, new MacArthur Fellow Hahrie Han has learned that emplaced small gathering stimulates social change and allegiance that has been inaccessible to nationalized movements. At Kentucky Arts and Letters Day and the Southern Festival of Books, I saw stubborn people, pressing against forces of dissolution, coming together to maintain and articulate an irreducible human experience through emplaced art, returning, as Marce Catlett says, “to work still unfinished at home.” Home, face to human face, is where the long work of renewal begins.
More southern writing in Book Post—
Jesse Donaldson on Foxfire’s Appalachia
Padgett Powell on Peter Taylor and Flannery O’Connor
Sean Hill on generations of southern Black landowning
John Moran on literary Florida man
Patricia Storace on cooking with Lillian Smith and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Idella Parker
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