The Membership: A Wendell Berry Podcast

Episode 1: Live in Nashville

Nov 24, 2018
Allen Levi, singer-songwriter and author of the memoir The Last Sweet Mile, shares how Wendell Berry shaped his music, land stewardship, and community life. He tells the story of meeting Berry, explains moving from law to music, and describes songwriting inspired by neighbors and place. Live in Nashville conversation touches on reading suggestions and practical ways to pay attention to small things.
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ANECDOTE

Restaurant Bookshelf Sparked A Life Change

  • John Pattison discovered Berry while stocking books for his local-ingredient restaurant and was immediately hooked by Another Turn of the Crank.
  • That reading rekindled his desire to write about rural people and persuaded him and his wife to settle in Silverton, Oregon.
ADVICE

Do One Thing That Won't Compute

  • Do something every day that 'won't compute' to resist consumerist, mechanized life and foster meaning.
  • John Pattison reads Berry's 'Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front' as a practical call to love, work for nothing, and invest in the millennium.
INSIGHT

Know Your Place Before Acting

  • Berry frames literature as service to truth that requires 'propriety of place' — you must know where you are before knowing what to do.
  • Jason Hardy reads 'Poetry in Place' to show Berry's ethic that action and art depend on rooted knowledge of place.
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