Liz Prather from the Susbtack newsletter name « in Your High School Creative Writing Teacher » is the one speaking in this post.
In the fall of 1987, I took a writing class at the University of Kentucky called “Composition for Teachers.” I had no idea who the teacher, Wendell Berry, was. The class met on Tuesday afternoons in Miller Hall, built in 1898, one of the oldest buildings on campus.
On that first day, Berry walked in looking like every farmer I’d ever seen standing around a tobacco warehouse telling lies. He wore khakis, brown lace-up shoes with rubber soles, and a blue button-down shirt. His hair was gray on the sides, and his face was tan except for a circle of white on his forehead, the mark of a man who works under the sun and wears a brimmed hat. He didn’t look like an academic. He looked like my father—an austere and simple farmer, the grooves in his cheeks when he smiled like plowed rows.
In an interview published around this time in Our Other Voices, Berry was asked why he was returning to the University of Kentucky after quitting teaching a decade earlier in 1977. He replied that those who were concerned about education should do something about its demise.
Our first assignment was to write an essay on a topic of our choice. I can’t remember what topic I chose, but I’m sure I tossed it off with the same blind aplomb I wrote most required academic drivel. I was in my last semester of college, and I had never received anything less than an A in an English class.
When he returned the essays to the class, there was a large red F on the top of my paper. The University of Kentucky didn’t even allow F’s. They used E’s, but there it was, almost an inch tall, the first I’d ever received on a piece of writing in my life.
During those first few weeks, the class had been thick with schism. An off-balance theological argument occurred between Berry and some woman who thought Flannery O’Connor was a Baptist. Soon a pedagogical flap occurred when an earnest disciple of the latest College of Education writing method could not believe that Berry didn’t endorse the idea of prewriting through journaling, mapping, or bubbling. Berry didn’t suffer fools or process over product gladly.
I don’t want to leave the impression that the class was a crucible or that Berry was dour, judgmental, or embittered. Just the opposite. Even at his most didactic, his comments in class were less like sermons and more like a call to arms. His intensity came from love and belief in what he was doing, rather than severity.
Plus, Berry had a great sense of humor. His blue eyes crackled with mischief when he told us a good story, which was often, and sometimes he entertained us with sample cheers from his Port Royal athletic days (“Go back, go back, go back into the woods/Your team’s all farmers and your coach is no good”).
“He’s like Jesus with a plow,” my friend Dina said one day at lunch after we had gotten another set of essays back. This time we both received D’s. “And we’ve gotta walk beside him with our hands on that plow if we’re going to learn anything from him.”
Before midterms, most of the class dropped out until only twelve of us remained. The apostle metaphor was not lost on us.
Because we were going to be English teachers, he expected a great deal from us—and was frustrated by our inability to think for ourselves. Every day, he told us to think, to rise above ignorance. He warned that bad writing would bring “boredom, tears, and shame” in later life. A teacher’s job, he told us, was to arm children with tools against loneliness.
He read aloud to us—Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Dante’s Divine Comedy—his sonorous voice rolling through that old room like the voice of God, past the high glass windows, the banging radiator, the worn wooden floors. He disdained the idea that these great works should be studied “as literature,” which he felt caused an unnecessary and sterile disconnect between the work and its instructive value.
“At some point, each of you will have to stand in front of someone,” he told us one dark November afternoon, “and tell them that you love them.” He considered those great works as instructions on how to do just that.
Berry believed literature mattered because life mattered. We didn’t read King Lear merely to know something about King Lear. We read it because we were trying to figure out how human beings should live with one another.
At some point, I wrote a pithy little essay about body image, and Mr. Berry returned the paper with a C+ on it and a note that read : “This is just good enough that I wish it were better.” It was the kind of comment that a young writer remembers forever. He was saying, “I can see what this could be. I can see what you’re trying to do.”
