For the Hog Killing, 1979

This careful record invites us into the space of community, one that we are too often removed far from. This quiet visual poetry honors the transfer of life to sustenance. Herein lies a knowing I hope will not be lost on us.

~Roger May, photographer, writer, and creator of the crowdsourced "Looking at Appalachia" project

Seldom have I seen photos that are simultaneously so beautiful and so matter of fact, so raw and also elegant. Berry's art manages to transform viewers into community members, and from that vantage, we experience respect for farm labor, for the origins of food, and for animals on their way, as Wendell writes, to becoming people. An honest and unforgettable book, even more important now in the 21st century than it was in 1979.

~Ann Pancake, author of Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories

Tanya Berry's keen humanity shines through in this moving collection of photographs. Here is a meditation on the profound importance of community, lost ways of being, and how the extraordinary is always there, waiting, in the everyday, if only we have our eyes and hearts as open as Berry's.

~Silas House, author of Southernmost: A Novel

Tanya Berry's frank and intimate and compelling photographs, amplified by her husband's careful recollections, testify to the knowledge and labor and interdependence required to live the farm lives modern Americans now elegize.

~John T. Edge, author of The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South

Tanya Berry (with her able farmhand) has made for us an imperative and moving portrait of a community sustaining itself with pork, sure, but also with affection. Here we have a fortifying argument for how to feed both the bellies and the souls of a neighborhood fellowship.

~Nick Offerman

This book of Tanya Berry's fine and honest photographs, and Wendell's essay, are a snapshot of farm life at its rawest in the 1970s. They capture an honest moment that tells us as much about the world we live in now as it does about the world it shows us from the recent past. What a strange world we have made when we have hidden these things and handed them over to strangers.

~James Rebanks, author of The Illustrated Herdwick Shepherd and The Shepherd's Life