Taking root below the earth

Poet, novelist, farmer, essayist, environmentalist, all-around decent human being Wendell Berry died earlier this week. I wanted to re-run this post I wrote about August 2024 that ends with my favorite Berry poem. (Confusingly, my next blog post is about this August, but more on that next week.) In looking back to this moment, I see lots of evidence in my writing life now of all that was taking root below the earth then as darkness did its work.

August was a strange month. I spent much of one week picking, peeling, and coring apples, making applesauce and apple butter, freezing bags and bags of them and giving more away. This is my second year with an apple tree, and while I love it, it’s a lot of work. (If anyone has favorite apple recipes, I’m ALL EARS.)

I got to share the cover of my next novel, The Burning Season, which was wonderful (thank you again for your fabulous support) and worked on first pass pages, but I also spent much of the month in creative discomfort, not knowing where I’m heading next as far as my writing goes. In the last weeks I’ve read close to a hundred picture books to explore and study and get in the groove for a future project of my own. Few of those books caught my fancy. I read six different middle grade novels searching for inspiration. Subjects I thought I’d like to write about have been done and done again. A picture book I’d thought about working on no longer interested me.* A glimmer of a novel fizzled out.** While I’m not a writer who’s swimming in ideas, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place where I don’t know what I want to do next. It’s been unmooring. I haven’t been pleasant to live with.

So it was encouraging to find in my blog draft folder the quotes I recently shared. They felt like messages to me:

Being an artist means…ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap…Patience is everything.

Artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are. They are like plants growing in winter. You can’t see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.

Are artists working when they seem not to be even to themselves? How does the work happen? Can we work for the work, search for it straight on, or do we have to wait to catch it out of the corner of our eye? I don’t fully know the answer to this, but I do take comfort in the thought of things taking root below the earth. I’m thinking again of Wendell Berry’s poem that speaks to art and agriculture and our whole human selves:

The seed is in the ground.
Now may we rest in hope
While darkness does its work.

*2026 update: I’ve written four picture book manuscripts since this time.
**A week or so after writing this, I found my way into my current middle grade project. I’m a third into the first draft of that manuscript.