Chad Wriglesworth – författare

What Clever Friends, edited by Chad Wriglesworth, is a selection of engaging, frank letters between poet Jane Kenyon and fiction writer Alice Mattison. Ranging from their first meeting in 1979 to Kenyon's death in 1995, this fifteen-year conversation between close friends reveals their experiences pursuing writing while living out the responsibilities of ordinary life. Writing to each other often, they help each other, confide in each other, and argue through the strains of rejection and acceptance, good reviews and bad, periods in which writing comes easily or when it does not. Over time, both writers emerged from obscurity to gain award-winning recognition as prominent voices in their respective genres. Witty, tender, and aware; tempestuous and lyrical, these letters trace the evolution of a deep and largely unknown friendship that situates Kenyon's work within a collaborative environment of other poets and novelists who were committed to the flourishing of contemporary women's writing. With more than 500 edited and annotated letters, a retrospective foreword written by Alice Mattison, and a scholarly introduction written by Chad Wriglesworth, What Clever Friends conveys a compelling story that will interest readers and writers.

"The letters are valuable for ecologists, students, and teachers of contemporary American literature and for those of us eager to know how these two distant neighbors networked, negotiated, and remained friends." —San Francisco Chronicle"In Distant Neighbors, both Berry and Snyder come across as honest and open-hearted explorers. There is an overall sense that they possess a deep and questing wisdom, hard earned through land work, travel, writing, and spiritual exploration. There is no rushing, no hectoring, and no grand gestures between these two, just an ever-deepening inquiry into what makes a good life and how to live it, even in the depths of the machine age." —Orion Magazine

In 1969 Gary Snyder returned from a long residence in Japan to northern California, to a homestead in the Sierra foothills where he intended to build a house and settle on the land with his wife and young sons. He had just published his first book of essays, Earth House Hold. A few years before, after a long absence, Wendell Berry left New York City to return to land near his grandfather''s farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he built a small studio and lived there with his wife as they restored an old house on their newly acquired homestead. In 1969 Berry had just published Long-Legged House. These two founding members of the counterculture and of the new environmental movement had yet to meet, but they knew each other''s work, and soon they began a correspondence. Neither man could have imagined the impact their work would have on American political and literary culture, nor could they have appreciated the impact they would have on one another.

Snyder had thrown over all vestiges of Christianity in favor of becoming a devoted Buddhist and Zen practitioner, and had lived in Japan for a prolonged period to develop this practice. Berry''s discomfort with the Christianity of his native land caused him to become something of a renegade Christian, troubled by the church and organized religion, but grounded in its vocabulary and its narrative. Religion and spirituality seemed like a natural topic for the two men to discuss, and discuss they did. They exchanged more than 240 letters from 1973 to 2013, remarkable letters of insight and argument. The two bring out the best in each other, as they grapple with issues of faith and reason, discuss ideas of home and family, worry over the disintegration of community and commonwealth, and share the details of the lives they''ve chosen to live with their wives and children. Contemporary American culture is the landscape they reside on. Environmentalism, sustainability, global politics and American involvement, literature, poetry and progressive ideals, these two public intellectuals address issues as broad as are found in any exchange in literature.

No one can be unaffected by the complexity of their relationship, the subtlety of their arguments, and the grace of their friendship. This is a book for the ages.