Mary Azarian: Wendell Berry for Small Fry

Woodcuts are not a medium I naturally gravitate toward in children’s book illustrations. I miss the soft hues that characterize, say, Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius, and will always have a weakness for watercolors, but Azarian’s strident, rustic woodcuts carry their own sparse beauty.

My introduction to Mary Azarian came years ago when her charming book with Leda Schubert, Here Comes Darrell was reprinted in a collection of truck stories I scored for Pippin. Darrell is a farmer in rural Vermont who fills his year serving his neighbors until he finally must accept his neighbors’ help in the end to repair his long-neglected barn roof. It was my favorite in the anthology and often found me tearing up by the end.

Rural community! Neighborly care! Small-scale agriculture! I thought of the story again while reading so much Wendell Berry this year, and so lugged home a stack of Azarian’s work from the library to read through and test out on my children/captive victims.

The comparison between the two artist/thinkers is not unfounded, as it turns out — Azarian has done woodcuts to accompany Berry’s poems, such as here. Azarian grew up on a Virginia farm and, after an education at Smith College, moved to Vermont with her family where at various times she taught in a one-room school house, farmed, and worked full-time on her woodcuts. (I collected this last information from her wikipedia page, which is clearly and adorably edited by one of her grandkids.)

While Azarian serves as an illustrator to many authors, she’s definitely developed a particular niche. Here are some of her books our family enjoyed:

From Dawn till Dusk by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock

Discusses the protagonist’s siblings’ complaints about the hard work of their upbringing on a Vermont farm by juxtaposing each with the fun to be had in each situation. My girls especially loved the barn kittens.

Tuttle’s Red Barn: The Story of America’s Oldest Family Farm by Richard Michelson

This longer-length picture book is a great living book for moving through the history of one particular piece of New Hampshire farmland, continuously owned by one family since Pilgrim days. You can watch the permutations of each generation in many arenas: the evolution of the farm house, the diversification of the farm economy, the recycling of names from generation to generation. Spoiler alert: I read up on the place afterwards and it’s since been sold out of the family. (This is my second-most-depressing post-book research finding, second only to learning several people in On to Oregon were soon after killed in a raid.)

Barn Cat: A Counting Book by Carol P. Saul

For the youngest listeners — a vaguely Kliban-esque cat encounters a variety of animals around the farm in her quest for a bowl of fresh milk.

Before We Eat: From Farm to Table by Pat Brisson

The most Berryian of these books, Before We Eat is a simple litany of the people to whom we owe thanks as the producers of our food. The gentle rhyming text highlight the sources of various foods and concludes with an open-air intergenerational meal. “Sitting at this meal we share, / we are grateful and aware, / sending thanks upon the air… / to those workers everywhere.”

Image via

A Gardener’s Alphabet by Mary Azarian

We have a flower alphabet book already, so I was pleased to see the diversity of Azarian’s selections for each letter were not confined to just flowers.

Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel by Leslie Connor

In a vaguely Miss Rumphius story arc, Miss Bridie leaves Ireland with only a shovel and uses it to build a beautiful, satisfying life for herself in New England.

Have you read any Mary Azarian before? What other children’s book illustrators point to the beauty of a simple life for you?

April Book Reviews

This was a lighter reading month — both because it’s warm enough to begin frantically putting things in the ground and because I’m slowly wading through Crime and Punishment for Well-Read Mom. (Pippin’s Dog Man: Grime and Punishment is apparently not an acceptable substitute.)

Lemons by Melissa Savage

Synopsis: When nine-year-old Lemonade Liberty Witt’s mother dies, she leaves behind her city to move in with a grandfather she’s never met, in a small town in northern California obsessed with Bigfoot. Her mom named her Lemonade hoping she’d always be able to make lemonade out of the worst situations, but has Lemonade lost her ability to find the good as life hands her lemon after lemon?

My first-ever book recommendation from Pippin, who loved the audiobook. He says it’s the sort of book Yoda would assign Luke Skywalker because it talks about overcoming sorrow and anger. High praise!! As an adult reader, I found this book fine — the narrator was a little squeaky (think the little brunette in Garfunkel & Oates) and the story was fairly predictable for a jaundiced old reader like myself. But I thought its emphasis on emotional resiliency, its quirky cast, and its charming setting all made it a good story for Pip and a pleasant enough read for me.

The Modern Cottage Garden: A Fresh Approach to a Classic Style by Greg Loades

Mr. Loades, I guess I don’t like prairie perennials all that much, or at least, I find it hard to get excited about ornamental grasses. But I appreciate your emphasis on working with a gardener’s whims in accumulating plants, and your challenge to extend the season of interest for a garden with late bloomers and interesting foliage.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

I remember clearly reading this beside the pool the summer after Uganda, the summer we rented a pool house, back in 2009. I was 23, and couldn’t cook very well, although most of what I knew I’d picked up cooking seasonally (by force) in the Rwenzori Mountains the year before. At the time I was interested, but not especially motivated: adult life was already bewildering enough without adding in any additional strictures. Now it’s interesting to see how much I’ve learned and grown and changed in the interim, and to find myself with the margins to keep pushing more into Kingsolver’s direction. (And, bonus, we are now in the same growing zone!)

Takeaway Passage: “When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families’ tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.”

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry by Wendell Berry

I finally made it through this behemoth, narrated yet again by the lovely Nick Offerman. There was some overlap with the collection of Berry’s essays I listened to earlier in the pandemic, The Unsettling of America. I’m still not convinced audiobook is the way to go on these — I had to stop periodically because I’d realize I wasn’t retaining anything and try again weeks or months later, and these are definitely meaty ideas that would benefit from being marked up so I could wrestle with them and remember them better later.

The collection’s essays, in seeking to distill Berry’s ideas and writings across five decades, tackle local food economies; our relation to place; the human responsibility to care, both for our landscape and each other; and critique technology. Berry, as ever, resists clear conservative/liberal definitions and challenges the reader. This would be an excellent introduction to Berry and such fun for a reading group or book club to work through.

The Bride Test by Helen Hoang

Synopsis: Vietnamese-American Khải Diep’s mom, refusing to accept that her son is successful, dutiful but a loner (who’s ever heard of autism in Vietnam?), takes matters into her own hands when she brings home Esme Tran. Esme, raised in desperate poverty in Vietnam, has her own reasons for accepting an offer to spend a summer in the US trying to romance an eligible — if resistant — bachelor. But what lessons do Khải and Esme need to learn about themselves before they’re ready to love another?

The same is true for romcom books as for romcom movies, I guess — while I claim to like the genre, I rarely find one that actually satisfies me. This one was raunchier than I’d hoped. I really, really don’t need a play-by-play of the male love interest’s arousal at any given moment. (I find Modern Mrs. Darcy’s distinction between open- and closed-door romance helpful; I’m closed-door all the way.) I was interested in the conversations about culture, poverty, privilege, and the agency of women, though, and enjoyed the relationship between Khải and his brother, Quan, who accepted how Khải was different while challenging his little brother when he needed it.

Takeaway Passage: “My heart works in a different way, but it’s yours. You’re my one.”

On Educating for a Provisional Future

I’ve been listening through and re-reading Wendell Berry’s fantastic essay “The Work of Local Culture,” which can be read online here or is included in the books The Unsettling of America and The World-Ending Fire (and you can listen to both read aloud by Nick Offerman of Ron Swanson fame—!!). It’s a long and far-reaching essay, not all of which I think I’ve fully unpacked, but today I want to turn an eye to Berry’s thoughts on education.

As he plumbs just how far America has wandered from a respect for local culture, Berry notes, “The schools are no longer oriented to a cultural inheritance which it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to the career, which is to the future, of the child.” Because my husband teaches at a nominally liberal arts college that frequently advertises its job preparation chops, because I attended an actual liberal arts (Great Books) program, and because we are leaning toward at least some elements of classical education in our homeschool, this is an idea we discuss often in the Bowers household. What’s more, a respect for cultural inheritance goes hand-in-hand with Catholicism, I think — Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead” and all that. Though our children may find themselves alone temporally in a cohort where no one else adheres to their faith, they can, with a proper education, remember all those who came before them as practitioners in the faith: Charlemagne and Gregor Mendel, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Beethoven. (It is worth noting here that Berry is at least partially — maybe predominantly — referring to passing on a “cultural inheritance” that is inextricably local. And I have no idea how to pass that on, having transplanted myself hundreds of miles from the [suburban] woods I walked as a child.)

Berry points out the value-neutral methods of education currently employed, an atmosphere in which the greatest good is not human flourishing or the care of a place or community, but rather to “earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community.” It’s the whole marrying-for-money-and-career-prep argument all over again.

The educational system as it exists now is designed so that parents may

“find themselves immediately separated from their children, and made useless to them, by the intervention of new educational techniques, technologies, methods and languages. School systems innovate as compulsively and eagerly as factories. It is no wonder that, under these circumstances, ‘educators’ tend to look upon the parents as a bad influence, and wish to take the children away from home as early as possible.”

This alienation is often introduced with good intentions — to break the cycle of poverty, to equip a child with better opportunities. But the separation is also an expression of our cultural obsession with what is new and hip, in this case the newest pedagogical tricks or newest technology. Every child a laptop! we decree, as if concrete improvements have been documented. Instead, what is needed is this:

“There must also be love of learning and of the cultural tradition and of excellence. And this love cannot exist, because it makes no sense, apart from the love of a place and community. Without this love, education is only the importation into a local community of centrally prescribed ‘career preparation’ designed to facilitate the export of young careerists.”

Let me offer the disclaimer that these values of course are not unique to homeschool or embodied in every homeschooling family. But the values do require a knowledge of this particular child, of what will be demanded by him by a local community — which often has less to do with skill mastery and more to do with how he understands his place in the world, how she cares for the lives with which she’s entrusted.

The past year should show us what is really important in education and family life. By now we should realize we cannot prepare our children completely for an unpredictable world, because who among us predicted this? What we have learned to value, instead, is the strength of family affections that, depending on their presence or absence, have made the last few months tolerable or miserable. We cannot educate our kids into safety, but we can love them and equip them to love others through the storm.

Tanya Berry and the (Wo)man in the Wings

Photo by Ann Thompson from On Being’s flickr

Lately I’ve been thinking about Tanya Berry. The thing is, I need more models for her kind of quiet and unfussy intellectual endeavor with only behind-the-scenes contribution to output. I admire, too, that it’s combined with a commitment to place and community, but I guess because it’s by definition a quiet life, there are few publicized examples. I think maybe the Rev John Ames might be one fictional example. And maybe Anne Shirley Blythe in later years? Or Jane Austen in her own lifetime, mostly writing for her family’s amusement?

Crunchy Cons and (Anti?-)Consumerist Posturing

Ok, so here’s a sincere question: If we spend more time acquiring goods locally and ethically, doesn’t this mean we are becoming more materialistic, not less? We are definitely thinking more about stuff and probably spending more money, to boot. This is a question that’s been bothering me on and off since AP Environmental Science in twelfth grade, and most especially since a Dorothy Day-inspired private lecture on distributism got me thinking about consumer ethics again in a special way.