Wendell Berry (1934-2026): An advocate for Appalachia
by Ted Olson
Residing for many decades on a Henry County, Kentucky, farm, Wendell Berry lived what he wrote and wrote what he lived. He may no longer be among us in this world (he died on Aug. 31, 2026), but his writings — nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, published in over 50 books — will endure because they were created with unrivaled craft and wisdom out of Berry’s profound and prolonged relationship with his beloved place.
Berry knew that place from birth, and he and his family depended upon his farm’s continued health and productivity for their survival. While technically not an Appalachian (Henry County sits several counties away from the Appalachian Regional Commission’s western boundary), Berry for most of his life was an advocate for the region and its people. Literally and figuratively taking stands against the exploitation of the region by governmental and corporate interests, Berry joined forces with various Appalachian natives in protesting strip and mountaintop removal coal mining, and he authored some of the most trenchant jeremiads against officially sanctioned environmental exploitation within the region. Notoriously reluctant to participate in media interviews, Berry, when assessing the lasting consequences of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes on the USA, chose to talk with an Appalachia-based media outlet — Eastern Kentucky’s Appalshop (for the memorable documentary film Thoughts in the Presence of Fear, which was based on his essay bearing that same name). Certainly, Berry had many friends across Appalachia, including such Appalachian authors as James Still, Wilma Dykeman, Gurney Norman, Barbara Kingsolver, Robert Morgan, Thomas Rain Crowe, and Silas House.
Shortly after Berry’s death I reflected upon my own experience as a student in one of his graduate classes at the University of Kentucky. My reminiscence — published on Sept. 13 in the online magazine Vox Populi — was simply one student’s belated statement of appreciation for a former teacher. I have often thought over the years about lessons learned long ago (in the late 1980s) from this particular teacher, whose in-class persona — granted his international renown — was markedly humble and honest. I mentioned in my piece that Berry, though he questioned the formal edifice of higher education in public statements, demanded much from his students. He challenged us to take our assignments — and by extension our lives — seriously. Ever since, I have been of the mindset that taking Berry’s class was not only time well spent, it was transformative in deepening my commitment to writing prose and poetry. My confidence, initially deflated by Berry’s exacting standards, eventually grew as I realized that writing involves, as Berry’s work demonstrated, a balancing of craft and creativity.
To me, Berry’s prose writing illustrated the importance of clarity of thought and language, whereas his poetry offered an engaging blending of direct statement and philosophical reach. The power and relevance of Berry’s writing, evident in his earliest publications, never waned — in large part because his works, regardless of genre, remained connected to a specific place and maintained a conversation between quotidian and universal realities. Comparatively few of his works, however, specifically responded to Appalachian places. One book expressly focused on the region was The Unforeseen Wilderness, 1971, written in defense of the effort to save Eastern Kentucky’s Red River Gorge from dam development. Many of Berry’s poems — such as the ever-popular poem “The Peace of Wild Things” (1968) — were rooted in his Henry County farm or were situated in the kind of imagined, universal realm often associated with serious poetry. But a few of his poems either responded to an Appalachian landscape or commented upon Appalachian values. Berry’s 1999 poem “A Vision” accomplished both. That poem not only commented on the need for sustainability within a given Appalachian place but also evoked Appalachian archetypes.
If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow-growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it, if we will make our seasons welcome here, asking not too much of earth or heaven, then a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live here, their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides, fields and gardens rich in the windows. The river will run clear, as we never know it, and over it, birdsong like a canopy. On the levels of the hills will be green meadows, stock bells in noon shade. On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down the old forest, an old forest will stand, its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots. The veins of forgotten springs will have opened. Families will be singing in the fields. In their voices they will hear a music risen out of the ground. They will take nothing from the ground they will not return, whatever the grief at parting. Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it like a grove, and memory will grow into legend, legend into song, song into sacrament. The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light. This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibility.
(Poem reprinted from New Collected Poems, Counterpoint, 2012.)
Berry also composed more socially conscious poetry. In the 2012 poem “Vacation,” he plied a scathing critique of contemporary American attitudes toward the natural world — the tragic separation of people from nature — while also cautioning readers regarding the solipsistic role of technology in modern life. Perhaps it is irrelevant the exact locale of “Vacation” (whether in Appalachia or elsewhere in the Upland South). Berry may have composed this poem based on an observation near his farm, but one can easily imagine the poem’s action on a dammed TVA river.
Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat
with his video camera to his eye, making
a moving picture of the moving river
upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly
toward the end of his vacation. He showed
his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,
preserving it forever: the river, the trees,
the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat
behind which he stood with his camera
preserving his vacation even as he was having it
so that after he had had it he would still
have it. It would be there. With a flick
of a switch, there it would be. But he
would not be in it. He would never be in it.
(Poem reprinted from New Collected Poems, Counterpoint, 2012.)
There is astounding interplay in “Vacation” between simplicity of phrasing and complexity of cultural critique. Berry’s view of contemporary society was always critical, but here he expressed empathy for people who have inadvertently become prisoners of technological “progress” — people no longer consciously aware of the natural world upon which humanity is entirely dependent for survival.
While he lived outside the region, Berry made essential contributions to the literature of Appalachia. Having incorporated some of his writings in my Appalachian Studies courses at East Tennessee State University, I have witnessed nuanced yet enthusiastic responses to his work from a spectrum of students, and some students have claimed Berry as their newfound favorite author. It is entirely appropriate that his writings — at least some of them — are taught in Appalachian Studies courses far into the future. If we forget about Berry and his work, it will be to our peril.
Ted Olson is a professor of Appalachian Studies and Bluegrass, Old-Time and Roots Music at East Tennessee State University.
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