Tuesday, September 1, 2026–

Death, to Wendell Berry, was an old familiar—if not exactly a friend, a constant, comforting companion. In his wonderful novel Jayber Crow, the narrator describes a friend coming up a path to the riverside cabin he fitted to end his days, beckoning him to join a sociable group on a front porch. This friend though, was long gone. Following him, the narrator comes to a genially seated line of his closest friends from the life he had built for himself as a barber and friend to all in Port William, the lightly fictionalized version of Berry’s native Port Royal, now all gone. “I knew where I was,” he tells the reader.

And so Berry, who died last Monday at 92, knew where he would find himself: in his home place, as the family called its farm, with the people who had come to him in his dreams during a health scare in mid-March. He had summoned his daughter, Mary, and son, Den, to say goodbye and tell them how hugely proud he was of them.

In mid-July, six weeks before Berry’s death, I visited the family on their farm. Around the kitchen table with Wendell, Tanya, and Mary, where I had spent many happy hours over the past decades, I asked him about that firm, calm vision of who would be with him in the afterlife. Oh, he said with a wave of his hand. “The people who were coming to me when I was crazy. That was all crazy talk.” “I don’t think you were crazy,” Mary said with loving indignance.

Companionship, community, and being with the people he most loved were always his vision. Churchly heaven had no interest. “Why would I want to, to go to someplace that these religious people have thought of as heaven when I’ve liked it here so much?” he said, laughing. “I’ve really liked living here. It’s been a good place.” He looked across the table to his wife. “And, well, everything has depended on Tanya,” his helpmeet of 69 years, who not only typed his manuscripts but commented on them with her hallmark loving tartness.

Loving familial and marital bonds played all through the afternoon. Most especially bonds to place–the subject of Wendell’s life’s work, the spine of all 50 of his books. Mary Berry is carrying on that work and that life, as I saw that day while touring and talking with the impressive team that runs the Berry Center. The center helps new and experienced farmers put into practice the ideals of small-scale, community-rooted farming Wendell wrote about in his enormously influential essays, poems, and novels.

Two books in particular summarize the indissoluble connections Berry draws between respect for yourself, for your work, your community, the land you walk on, and the air you breathe. The best-known is the compact, commanding The Unsettling of America, which was first published in 1977; at the end of August, Counterpoint Press released a 50th-anniversary edition with a new introduction by Wendell. More recent, and my new you-must-read-this book, is the 2022 The Need to be Whole, which takes racial injustice as an opening theme and returns again and again to the interlinking enslavement of land, air, water, and people and the to the relentless, corrupting drive for ever-expanding profits. The book feels up to the minute, referring to what Berry sees as the current administration’s equal disregard for human lives and the life of agriculture and the land. (The actor Nick Offerman, who has established a bond with the Berrys, narrates The Need to be Whole in an excellent audiobook version. “I have often asserted,” he said in 2020, “that if my job were simply to broadcast the works of Wendell Berry to the world, I’d die a happy man.”)

In 2011 Mary began The Berry Center in New Castle, near Port Royal. The Center is now a national destination, particularly for its Agrarian Culture Center and Bookstore, overseen by Mary’s daughter Virginia Berry Aguilar, a former elementary-school principal. Virginia and her husband, Ben, recently converted a 1790s log-and-lath cabin right on Main Street into an extremely appealing bookstore and with a reading center upstairs where you want to settle into a chair and stay for hours. The bookstore itself is superb, with an extensive children’s selection that will now be my go-to for gifts (much of its business is mail order). Virginia and the Berry Center also oversee the annual Kentucky Arts & Letters Day, which sells out tickets within minutes; the next will be November 14.

This weekend, as long planned, the Center’s Agrarian Literary League Fall Festival will hold its version of a country fair—ice cream and a bake-off, reason enough to get on a plane to Louisville, under an hour’s drive away—where the choice of a book over 60 reading groups will focus on for the year is announced. Of course, this year the ALL Festival, as it’s known, will be largely devoted to loving remembrances of Wendell.

Mary herself grew up farming. In 2021 she raised the funds to buy a 200-acre family-owned livestock and woodland farm in Port Royal that is now a teaching and research center for Our Home Place Meat, a cooperative to set and obtain fair prices for meat that has brought together dozens of farms.

Home Place Meat is modeled on the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative, which Mary’s grandfather, John M. Berry Sr., began after being forced to sell his 1906 tobacco crop at a loss. Wendell has often celebrated his father’s agreement as the way small-scale growers could free themselves of the ruthless misery of having no control over the prices Big Tobacco would pay for their crops. Mary is trying to help farmers use meat in the way her grandfather’s generation used tobacco—as a way to make small-scale farming, and the communities they foster, thrive.

Mary drove me from New Castle through Port Royal, where the one operating business, a feed store and all-day cafe run by a young couple, had burned to the ground the week before. Even if the Burley Coop had ended when tobacco growing greatly diminished, farming and the need to preserve the community that is left in Port Royal did not. The whole town and surrounding area were mobilizing to rebuild and house the business; when we arrived at her parents’ house Mary told her father that a local family had just donated $10,000.

The Berry Center Farm and Forest Institute hire interns every summer to learn farm practices and teaches a “Low-Impact” series of classes on how to preserve interconnected woodland and pastures through selective tree-felling and logging techniques. To get to the farm, we passed the rolling fields of stunning blue grass now mostly used to feed horses and parked at a long, low building where Rick Thomas, a teacher of logging, was hammering and adjusting an exotic-looking drawknife to teach with. On a dark and damp day the workshop felt dry and cool and smelled appealingly of sawdust.

Thomas took off his goggles, looked up at us, and pointed to the collection of specialized, mostly manual tools that are a kind of wonder cabinet for anyone interested in woodworking. Just outside the door was a long machine that would saw a tree into lumber—as big and long as a small woodland would need. With the rolling and beautiful farm behind him, we watched and listened to him indicate where a tree would enter the machine. Mary beamed. He loved what he was doing and where he was doing it.

Mary has done something remarkable: turned her family’s and her love of the land they lived on and farmed for generations into a resource available to a much wider world. As we listened to Thomas describe his tools, she stood by a plywood wall where someone had hand-written a Mary Oliver poem in black marker. She and her family have added another indissoluble connection to how anyone should think about work, justice, and tending community and land: the connection to poetry, fiction, and essays that are all different ways of revealing the same sustaining soul. The future of Wendell Berry’s vision is now in her hands.