Author Archives: Matthew

Honey and Sustainability in Rural Nepal

Here is a new dispatch considering rural – international connections, where sustainability and food security meet, raising the
quality of life and illustrating to rural youth how prosperity could be
under their noses, or in the hive: Plan Interna…

We Juke Up In Here: Mississippi Juke Joint Traditions

Red Paden at home in Red’s Lounge; Lou Bopp

This month will see the release of a new documentary from Jeff Konkel of Broke and Hungry Records and Roger Stolle of the Cat Head music and art store. We Juke Up In Here, co-directed with Damien Blayloc…

Readings: Rural Traditions Sunk Into Eternal Oblivion

from The Farmer’s Year: A Calendar of Animal Husbandry; Clare Leighton, 1935

In our Readings
series, we offer selections from visual and printed texts that offer
perspectives, expand dialogues, and challenge assumptions. Today we feature the res…

The Tree That Bursts Through The Silo

Tree In Silo; Ken Wolf

Many thanks to María Arambula for sharing on our Arts and Culture Feed A.G. Sulzberger’s latest rural dispatch for The New York Times, “Amid Rural Decay, Trees Take Root in Silos.” The image of these trees bursting from dis…

Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture: "It All Turns On Affection"

On Monday night Wendell Berry delivered “It All Turns on Affection,” the 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center. Each year the National Endowment for the Humanities offers this lectureship, “the highest honor the federal government bestows fo…

Photographing Rural Maine, Beyond The Vacationland

Gregory Gives his Cousin Lori a Rose, 1983; Steven Rubin

This month TIME Magazine’s Lightbox photography section highlights the work of Steven Rubin and his 30 year project in Somerset County, Maine — the fruits of which are currently on view at …

Idiom and Assimilation: Miles Davis & C.D. Wright

John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, and Bill Evans, recording in 1958

If there is any particular affinity I have for poetry associated with the South, it is with idiom. I credit hill people and African Americans for keeping the langua…