Two More Stories of the Port William Membership. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon, 1997.

Also collected in That Distant Land: The Collected Stories. Washington, D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004.

From the back cover:

Wendell Berry's short fiction has recently won new admirers with such collections as Watch with Me and Fidelity. We see his appreciation for the oral traditions of storytelling in these two stories of the "Port William Membership."

[His characters] are "survivors and heirs of a membership going way back, of which more members were dead than living." It is a membership of community and family, living and dead.

Berry's intention is not merely to paint a nostalgic portrait of yesteryear. In fact, he offers this lifestyle as a viable alternative to dependence on the supermarket and Wal-Mart.

But if you grew up on a working farm as I did, he will remind you of a time when food was grown and gathered for man and beast. the crib was overflowing with corn (and an occasional corn snake), the smokehouse was redolent of curing meat, and the kitchen table glowed with garden produce canned and awaiting the lean fallow season and the frugal ways of the womenfolk. [sic]

These are Berry's heroes. They are people who still honor the "old integrity of country life." They are people who "drank water from their well and milk from their cow, and in winter sat warm beside a stove in which their own wood burned."

As a celebrator of the land and the turning of the seasons that govern us still, Wendell Berry is, indeed, our writer for all seasons. Wade Hall, Lexington Herald-Leader

Cover illustration by Leah Palmer Preiss based upon photographs by James Baker Hall. [see Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy]. 62 pages.

Contents:

A Friend of Mine
The Inheritors

First Sentence:

During the three weeks they had been in the tobacco cuting so far, Elton Penn had accumulated several errands that he had put off almost too long.