Reading in Place: Hannah Coulter
“This is a book about Heaven, but I must say too that . . .
I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about Hell.”
2 evening Discussion Sessions (hybrid, in-person & zoom options)
Cost: $50
Participant limit: 15
“All women is brothers.”
Join Farm & Forest Institute Director Leah Bayens for a Reading in Place study of Wendell Berry’s seventh novel, Hannah Coulter. This short course includes 2 evening discussion sessions (hybrid in-person or via Zoom) at The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky. Participants will receive a reading guide filled with discussion questions, supplemental resources, and hands-on exercises.
The novel adds a finely-tuned woman’s voice to the fabled Port William choir. In recounting eight decades of Kentucky farm life, Hannah shows how “all women is brothers,” as Burley Coulter puts it. She sheds light on farming women’s lives and livelihoods, wrapping them together with each other and into the fold of an encompassing membership.
But this novel is also a story about stories–from the opening page to the last. The first chapter declares “The Story Continuing.” Hannah commences a tale about “the story of our place in our time”: the orphaned mother who bears an orphaned child, a dear husband lost to World War II, carrying on with life and love on a ridge farm above Sand Ripple, the young people moving away and being replaced by tractors, the flickers of hope in their homecoming. Hannah’s life is punctuated by grief and by gratitude. “Like everybody’s,” she says, “It was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead” (51). Yet she calls her narrative “my giving of thanks” and “the story of our place” (5).
The elderly narrator reveals the ways stories can bind people to each other and a community to its place. Following Hannah’s lead, this Reading in Place study considers what kinds of stories kindle affections and keep histories by holding on to what is useful now and in the days ahead.
Current Offerings
This workshop will return in 2027. Join our mailing list to be notified of new dates.
*Reduced-rate scholarships are available for farmers and residents of Henry County.
Via Zoom or in-person
$50
Limit 15 participants
