Short Fiction Wednesday

Something quite different today: Wendell Berry's children's story, "Whitefoot." I've been a fan of Berry's poetry ever since I discovered it some 14 years ago in a class on contemporary poetry. I later discovered his essays, and while I don't always agree with him, I do more often than not, and I admire the strongly pro-environment approach he takes. I've enjoyed his fiction...but it often seems lesser than either the essays or poems. Discovering this (published in 2007), though, was a pleasure. There's a calm, quiet wisdom to Berry's writing, which is there even in this story of a mouse caught in a flood. I kept expecting it to be somehow didactic or parable-ish, but it didn't veer that way. Instead it offered up a story that readers could react to as they would. Even so, it touches on some of Berry's big themes, especially in the way that Whitefoot the mouse knows the acre she calls home so intimately.

There are a few stories from the usual zines I read that I'm enjoying reading at the moment, but I think I'll leave this post just to Wendell Berry. I see that I've labeled other posts with his name before (or at least one other post, anyway), so I'd definitely recommend hopping back to those to see about his Mad Farmer poems and whatever else I might have written about him.