Advice from Wendell Berry

on writing while being badly scared

Photo by Guy Mendes.

Wendell Berry is a modern-day prophet and the author of 54 books. Born in 1934, he is well-known for his poetry, essays, novels, and environmental activism, especially around the rights of small farmers in America.

In a way, Berry and I couldn’t lead more different lives. There are parts of his basic beliefs about living that I certainly do not embody. (I write on a computer, I use Instagram, I live away from my home place, and I identify more as a traveler than as a settled person.) And there are others that I do follow. (I plant food almost everywhere I live and go out in the mornings to pick some greens and eat them. I believe in planting trees even if I never get any fruit from them. I’m passionate about compost.)

Berry believes what he believes and holds a great amount of grace for humans, despite mourning our atrocities and our violence. Whatever you think about Wendell Berry’s suggested ways of living, there is little doubt that his strength is in writing from conviction. His characters, in fiction, are relatable, human, and funny. His poems are remarkable, and his essays are thoughtful and full of radiance. They never follow current trends. He is thoughtful and nuanced.

I really, really like him. 

Of course, there is the genius of The Peace of Wild Things.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence  of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Or the beauty of his poem, Marriage. (“You have been such a light to me that other women have been your shadows.”😭) And Berry’s novels about Port William, including Jayber Crow, are incredible.

In our not-aloneness, learning from the authors and poets and artists who have come before us (even the ones who are still alive) we can consider what Berry says about fear.

This quote comes from an interview about an essay he wrote, Thoughts in the Presence of Fear¹, after 9/11.  

There is something about fear that can eat away at you if you let it, and Berry, in writing this essay, these essays, responds to fear by writing through it. This is the kind of work that I want to choose today and in the days to come. When I feel afraid, I will write. I will write what I know to be true. I will write to comfort and to challenge as Wendell Berry does. I will write to self-criticize, something he mentions in the essay.

I don’t think the kind of self-criticism he means is a judgment or mean voice towards the self, but a willingness to question the self or the collective.

These are some of the questions that I ask when I am responding to my own fear: Is this right? Is this the best way? What kind of thinking have I sunk into without meaning to? Who has influenced me? Is change necessary?

The advice we get from Wendell Berry is that when we are afraid, we don’t have to go to the weapons closet. We don’t have to arm ourselves with rebukes or gotchas. We can go to the table, go to the pen, the poem. We can write. Not even in response or as a rebuttal. Just, sort it out, through writing.

“What’s curious to me is that, once started, you’re interested, you’re into it, you’re doing your work, and you’re happy,” he said. “That applies to writing. Sometimes I don’t believe I can stand it another day, but then I’m working at problems I know how to deal with, to an extent.” 

²

Writing takes fear and puts it into ordered and reasoned words on a page. Perhaps they are emotional, or overwhelmed, or quaking with terror, but there they are: written things. This is something like doing our work. This is something small, something “we know how to deal with, to an extent.” This is fear, but even fear can teach us, even fear can help us to know a little more about our body of work.

1. https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/101/2/279/3104/Thoughts-in-the-Presence-of-Fear

2. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/28/wendell-berrys-advice-for-a-cataclysmic-age