marching orders

This week, legendary Kentucky writer Wendell Berry died. I have seen myriad Kentuckians mourning Berry on social media, of course, but I have also seen how far the Kentuckian’s reach truly was. I particularly liked this video by Austin Kleon, and many people shared his poem, “The Peace of Wild Things.”

I didn’t have the relationship with Berry that I had as a student of Gurney Norman (read my 2025 elegy for Gurney here). In fact, I have read relatively little of Berry’s writing, which means there is much I can still read. But I did meet Berry once, and this week I found my account of meeting him in my journal.

At the Kentucky Book Festival in 2022, I attended a discussion between Berry and Crystal Wilkinson, one of my favorite Kentucky writers and another of my great English professors at UK. Later in the day, I joined the long line to get Berry’s signature — I knew he was aging, and I didn’t want to miss my chance to meet a Kentucky legend.

In a Kentucky literature class in 2017, I read work by some of the “Fab Five,” a group of Kentucky writers who attended UK together: Berry, Gurney, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ed McClanahan, and James Baker Hall. I was fascinated by the talent of that group and the lifelong relationships they had maintained. So I had a question ready to ask Berry as he signed my copy of The World-Ending Fire: How do we keep cultivating fellowship among Kentucky authors?

Berry’s answer: “Read read read, write write write.”

He didn’t even need to tell me twice.