Hannah & Nathan

This Reading is an excerpt from Wendell Berry's 2004 novel, Hannah Coulter with a Foreword by Gregory Wolfe, editor of the journal Image and director of the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University. Hannah Coulter, a novel set in Berry's fictional Port William, Kentucky, is something of a sequel to Berry's first novel, Nathan Coulter. In our selection, which reads more like a memoir than a traditional novel, Hannah narrates the events surrounding her courtship and marriage with Nathan after the death of her first husband in World War II. In the process, she welcomes the reader into a way of life different from our own, and into a vision for what a human life can be. As Wolfe notes in his Foreword, the story reminds us that "love is not a passing emotion but a fundamental commitment, a rootedness in being; its shape and meaning can only be known on the scale of a lifetime." There is a public dimension to marriage, and Hannah's story raises quiet but insistent questions for us who may have forgotten our own history. Wolfe asks with Berry and Hannah: What have we lost as we have made marriage into an abstract, private pact, forgetting its appropriate setting in the web of obligations that holds together a community? Touching on life and love, grief, loss and recovery, commitment and consequence, place and continuity, "Hannah & Nathan" will introduce you to characters you will want to spend time with-and a place you will want to revisit. Discussion guide included.