Episode 26. Introducing New Host Matt Wheeler & Season 4 Preview
Oct 13, 2026
Show notes
In this episode, we introduce new co-host Matt Wheeler, a singer-songwriter from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. John and Matt talk about Matt's experience turning Wendell Berry's short stories into an album, how Matt answers the question: "What Wendell Berry book should I read first?", and how he started corresponding with the Berrys.
Then John and Matt preview Season 4 and reveal the book they will be discussing first: Berry's forthcoming essay collection, Dispatches from Rural America (out October 27).
Next episode: We will be discussing the essay "Against Killing Children," the first essay in Berry's new collection Dispatches from Rural America.
New Host Matt Wheeler | Season 4 Preview
The Membership: A Wendell Berry Podcast
Who should we interview on the podcast? Let us know at hosts@membershippod.com
Episode 25: Re-launching "The Membership" | "How to Be a Poem"
Oct 09, 2026
Show notes
In this episode, John announces the relaunch of the podcast with a new cohost, singer-songwriter Matt Wheeler. The first episode with Matt comes out on Tuesday, October 13. John also reads an article that he wrote for Substack in the days after Wendell Berry’s death on August 31.
Relaunching the Podcast | "How to Be a POEM"
The Membership: A Wendell Berry Podcast
Who should we interview on the podcast? Let us know at hosts@membershippod.com
Episode 24: "Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World"
Feb 12, 2025
Show notes
In this episode of The Membership, David and John discuss a book that is an unusual in the Port William series -- it's about a mouse, and is sometimes classified as a children's book -- but still feels right at home. That book? Whitefoot: A Story from the Center from the World, by Wendell Berry. We talk about the experience of compressing the imagination to the size of a mouse, where this book sits among Berry's other works, and why the realization that one lives at the center of the world is "the world's profoundest thought." And much more.
"Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World"
The Membership: A Wendell Berry Podcast
Episode 22: Singer-Songwriter Matt Wheeler on His New Port William-inspired Album
Aug 22, 2023
Show notes
In this episode, we interview singer-songwriter Matt Wheeler about his new album, A Hard History of Love. That album is inspired by five short stories in Berry’s story collection, That Distant Land. We talk about the process of writing songs inspired by great literature, about some of our favorite Port William characters, and what “membership” looks like in Matt’s life.
UPDATE: The Kickstarter for Matt’s album release is now fully funded. All backers will now receive a print of Ned Bustard’s cover art for the album. The Kickstarter ends on August 25 at 7:15 a.m. Eastern.
Episode 21: A Returning, a New Voice, and a Look Ahead
Aug 17, 2023
Show notes
The Membership Podcast returns! We catch you up on the last three years, introduce a new co-host, and preview some of the books we’ll be reading in Season 3. Our next episode is coming in just a couple days, so be on the lookout!
A Returning, a New Voice, and a Look Ahead
The Membership: A Wendell Berry Podcast
Eternal Beings Living in Time: On Wendell Berry’s “Jayber Crow”
Aug 17, 2023
Show notes
Author’s Note: Dave and I reference this short essay in the most recent episode of the podcast. I wrote it for my 2010 book, Besides the Bible: 100 Books that Have, Should, or Will Create Christian Culture. That book was co-authored with my friends Jordan Green and Dan Gibson. The three of us wrote seventy essays on the books we thought every Christian should read. Then we asked thirty of our favorite writers, artists, teachers, pastors, and musicians to do the same. This essay was the one I was most excited to write…which means that it was the essay I wrote last. By then I was exhausted, procrastinating, and looking forward to whole thing just being done. I would write the essay differently today (and hopefully better). But I’m even more convinced now than I was then of why Jayber Crow deserved to be on that list.
I will have to share the fate of this place. Whatever happens to Port William happens to me.
As a novelist, essayist, poet, and farmer, Wendell Berry has plowed the same plot of Kentucky hillside for nearly fifty years. His focus across all literary forms is healthy community built on fidelity to neighbor, creation, and creator.
The principles Berry argues for in his essays with the rigorous logic of a legal brief are tenderly brought to life in his novels and short stories, which are all set in and around the fictional village of Port William, Kentucky. The title character in Jayber Crow is not native to Port William. Jayber’s parents died when he was only three. Aging relatives in Squires Landing, a few miles from Port William, take him in, but several years later they die too. “I was a little past ten years old,” he says, “and I was the survivor already of two stories completely ended.” He is sent to an orphanage in central Kentucky, and doesn’t return to the area until he drops out of college and goes looking for “a loved life to live.”
When Jayber arrives in Port William, the town needs a barber, a job he happens to know how to do. He spends the next fifty years cutting hair, gradually being drawn into the life of the community. He falls in love with a girl who marries a man unworthy of her, and for decades he loves her from afar. Jayber performs several essential services for Port William. Besides cutting hair, Jayber’s barbershop becomes a meeting place. Whether they need a trim or not, men are always stopping by to share the latest news, catch up, or just watch life happen on the street outside the shop window. The old men tell him stories, and Jayber becomes a guardian of the town’s communal memories.
Berry repeatedly describes the people of Port William as a “membership,” an image derived from Paul’s letters to the Ephesians and Corinthians. Burley Coulter, a recurring character in Berry’s fiction, says in one short story, “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.” Jayber becomes a part of this membership, and he sees in it a reflection of the gathered Church:
It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill…And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.
And so there we all were on a little wave of time lifting up to eternity, and none of us ever in time would know what to make of it. How could we? It is a mystery, for we are eternal beings living in time.
The poem, novel, essay, and small farm were all pronounced dead by the experts long ago, but Berry’s voice is more vital than ever. The values Berry has been advocating for years – especially localism and settledness – are gaining broader popularity, thanks in part to mainstream writers like Michael Pollan and Bill McKibben who look to Berry as a mentor. (“To feel at home in a place, you have to have some prospect of staying there,” Jayber says.) It is a quiet movement, manifesting itself in the growing presence of farmers’ markets in communities large and small, urban and guerilla gardens, in the lives of people moving back to the country to work the land, and in the lives of people who apply the standards of health and good use to their work as teachers, lawyers, homemakers, and barbers. It is a return to story and to belonging, and for five decades the voice crying out in the wilderness has been that of Wendell Berry.
Episode 20: "Nathan Coulter"
Jun 04, 2020
Show notes
In this episode, John and Tim discuss Nathan Coulter, Wendell Berry’s debut novel.
Season 2 Episode 5: "Nathan Coulter"
The Membership: A Wendell Berry Podcast
If you enjoy the show and would like to support us, head over to Patreon to pledge a small monthly donation. Donations will go toward the costs of making this podcast. Thank you.
If you enjoy the show and would like to support us, head over to Patreon to pledge a small monthly donation. Donations will go toward the costs of making this podcast. Thank you.
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