“Come From Away” began at a kitchen table in the Ticino, two essays by Wendell Berry open in front of me, as I prepared for this year’s FANE seminar at Sitke. It is a reflection on the New Agrarianism and on the question that will not leave me alone: what it means to belong to a place. Berry’s ideal of being born and bred to a piece of ground is one I find deeply compelling and cannot take simply, a prairie settler’s grandson and a “come from away” in Newfoundland. The essay tries to hold rootedness and its complications together honestly, without resolving them too soon, and ends where the seminar did, on a dilapidated Hungarian farm being slowly, patiently brought back to life.
My thanks to Alexander Batthyány and his family, for the warm invitation. I offer this piece in the spirit of gratitude and the long labour of ecological conversion we share.
Stephenson, Come From Away
