Telling a Hopeful Story

Some notes on "Hannah Coulter" and the active voice

Abraham Bloemaert, Head of an Old Man, 1625/1628

Dear friends,

I am sharing a lecture I gave at the University of Louisville on “Why You Should Read Hannah Coulter.” Members of our books club from a few years back may know and remember this book. It is often considered one of Wendell Berry’s finest. I have shared excerpts from the speech below. Hopefully it blesses someone today.

More soon!

Cheers,
Gracy

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Hannah Coulter tells the story of a woman who is, at the very beginning of her life, rejected by her stepmother and ignored by her father. She loses her first husband in World War II, becomes a single mother amid that trauma, and then later marries a WWII veteran struggling quietly with PTSD. The two of them build a life and livelihood from a small, abandoned farm. Eventually, their children leave and never move back. But one of Hannah’s grandsons returns, in a moment of need, and gives her the solace and company of kin in her last years.

When I tell the story of Hannah Coulter this way, you might be surprised by how dramatic—and even tragic—it sounds. Wendell Berry has written this book in such a quiet way, it is easy to miss how sad her story really is. When Hannah describes her and Nathan’s life, she describes it thus:

“Our story is the story of our place: how we married and came here, moved into this old house and made it livable again while we lived in it; how we raised our children here, and worked and hoped and paid the mortgage, and made a pretty good farm of a place that had been hard used and forgotten; how we continued, making our life here day by day, after the children were gone; how we kept this place alive and plentiful, seeing it always as a place beyond the war…; how we got old, and Nathan died, and I have remained on for yet a little while to see how such lives as ours and such a place may fare in a bad time.”[1]

I would draw your attention to Hannah’s verbs in this passage. My verbs, when I told Hannah’s story earlier, focused on what she had lost, or what she had suffered. Her own verbs focus on what she has chosen and preserved: first, she married (remarried as a widow, to be clear). She made a home that was livable and good. She raised her children with care. She worked hard and she hoped. She continued that working hard and hoping, even in difficult times. Because of that tenacity and care, she kept her home “alive and plentiful.” Eventually she got old, she lost her second husband. And yet, she tells us, she’s “remained on for a little while.” The word “remained” is remarkable here. Most of us would just say she hasn’t died just yet. We think in the negative and the passive. Hannah, here, thinks in the positive and the active: she’s remaining on. She’s going to see how her life might fare.

We often tell our own stories in the passive voice. We focus on what has happened and is happening to us—especially when those forces in our lives are negative. We lose jobs. We get divorced. We get sick. Our loved ones get sick. We deal with annoying bosses or nosy coworkers. We are hurt by friends, loved ones, family, colleagues, and classmates. Life is full of the annoying, the troubling, the unjust, and the stressful—not to mention the tragic. Life told in this way could be an endless litany of dark moments and painful memories.

To be clear, it is important to know and recognize those moments in life when you have undergone ill treatment. It is important to be upset about those moments or conditions of wrongdoing. It is right to be angry with injustice. And in this world, there is plenty to be angry about. The problem arises when we decide to build our emotional and mental identity right there, on that foundation of anger and bitterness. To dwell there. To tell ourselves that we are defined by that which we cannot control, the negative and the passive. To let that anger and pain fill our souls and selves to overflowing.

When Hannah tells us that this is the story of her place, she’s talking about a geographic location. It’s true. But I think she’s also telling us something important about a space that she and Nathan carved out for themselves—a space in which they learned how to tell their own stories in the active voice. Hannah shows us that in every unfair and painful circumstance, there is an opportunity to build our identity on a better foundation. We make. We work. We hope. And, as best as we’re able, we continue and remain.

This is why everyone should read Hannah Coulter. It is a book that teaches us how to live in the active voice. It is a book that teaches us the simple power of gratitude—both for ourselves, and for our communities.

Hannah does not always have this grace and quiet, though; indeed, Hannah has to grow into this active voice, this vision of herself. Her ability to do this, amid all the trials and trauma life has thrown at her, hinges on a single moment—one that I want to highlight for us today. Hannah tells us, in her voice, on page 113:

“After our children were all gone, I was mourning over them to Nathan. I said, ‘I just wanted them to have a better chance than I had.’
“Nathan said, ‘Don’t complain about the chance you had’… Sometimes you can say dreadful things without knowing it. Nathan understood this better than I did.

“Like several of his one-sentence conversations, this one stuck in my mind and finally changed it. The change came too late, maybe, but it turned my mind inside out like a sock…. It passed through everything I know and changed it all. The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about our children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life.”

There are several assumptions baked into Nathan’s statement here, and it’s important to take them one by one. After all, if Nathan’s words are going to change us the way they changed Hannah, I think we need to figure out what made them so moving to her. First, Hannah says, “I just wanted them to have a better chance than I had.” Nathan replies, “Don’t complain about the chance you had.”

So what does Hannah mean by a “better chance”? She is probably thinking about financial wellbeing, considering the poverty of her childhood and the financial difficulties of her adulthood. She is probably thinking about education, and the lack of formal education she herself received, due to her rural upbringing and aforementioned poverty. In the United States, formal education and good pay often go together. For Hannah, college and the city both present her children with a “better chance.”

But Nathan questions the adjective “better” in his reply. What is a better chance? How do we decide what is a good chance and what is a bad chance? Greater formal education can be a wonderful thing. But it’s no guarantee of a happy life. Those with PhDs can still suffer and struggle. As to wealth, it makes a lot of things easier, and a lot of us wish we had it. But wealth brings its own hardships, and it often just makes us hungry for more wealth. Every chance brings its own challenges. And so, in the end, there’s not necessarily good or better or bad chances, Nathan suggests to us. There is just “the chance you had.”

Hannah calls to mind Alexis de Tocqueville in her desire for her children to “go far.” In his book Democracy in America, Tocqueville talks a lot about democratic restlessness: our desire for greater prosperity. Americans, he wrote, are always on the move: we try to guzzle up opportunity and success as quickly as we find them. If either wear out, we move on. We don’t stick, we don’t settle, and we are never content. We are always looking for our next big break. Pulitzer Prize winning author Wallace Stegner once termed these Americans “boomers”—not “baby boomers,” to be clear, just “boomers.” Boomers are individuals always looking for the next boom of capital, opportunity, and promise. They are the ones who then create, via their avarice, the next bust. They “pillage and plunder,” Stegner says, and then they move on. They do not care what they leave in their wake.

Some might see both Stegner and Nathan Coulter as unfair here. After all, aren’t we all out to climb corporate ladders, lean in, and seize the American dream? Aren’t we all told at some point that we should do better than our parents, or go farther and achieve more than our peers? Why would you ever just accept the chance you had?

Perhaps Hannah and Nathan are right, and you can make something of anything, if you have a heart to. But if they are right, then the instant you tell the story sour, and wallow in everything that goes wrong, you are losing the battle. You cannot control where you are born, who your parents are, or what opportunities come your way. You cannot control what happens to you. All you can do is choose your response: and ask for help, to make sure your soul stays kind and open and joyful in the tough times. Then when things go wrong, you know how to remain. You, like Hannah, know how to continue. It matters when we tell the story active.

Obviously, it matters to us. But as you read Hannah Coulter, you’ll find that it also matters to our places—the homes we shelter and make our own. Many of you are going to become leaders in your communities and workplaces. You’re talented, brilliant, and passionate. You have great potential to change the world. But Wendell Berry would urge you to think about world-changing a little differently. You’re going to make the biggest difference if you first choose to bless and tend the little corner of the world in which you live. As he put it in an essay on climate change, “maybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly in it.”[2] The humble work of growing a garden or even a potted tomato, volunteering at a local soup kitchen, walking and biking when you can, and caring for your loved ones—this is what it means to live savingly. Sure, it could also mean running for office, becoming a CEO, or building a successful startup. But any of us can live “savingly.”

Alas, to live savingly is humble—it could easily be seen as too humble. It celebrates little, tiny changes and incremental forms of growth. It would be easy to worry that such living is not enough. Yet the minute we forsake living savingly and seek to change the world instead, we are liable to grow depressed and anxious. I am probably not the only one who has started researching world problems and has ended up paralyzed, doomscrolling on my phone, because it’s too much and the problems are just too big. Perhaps saving the world can begin with saving ourselves, and we save ourselves when we live actively and savingly in the place we are in.

… The chance you had is the life you’ve got. That’s the other lovely idea Hannah Coulter conveys, the other remarkable thing Wendell tells us through this remarkably humane and real character. “The chance you had” may be past tense—but “the life you’ve got” is in the present tense. Hannah reminds us, with those words, that the chance is never over. Your life is still going. If it’s going, and you’re remaining, you’ve still got a chance to make something beautiful. Never wish it away. Do not waste it on bitterness or anger over what might have been. Keep on living. Make a place “alive and plentiful.” And continue there, lovingly, for as long as you can. It’s not going to solve everything, to live that way, but it sure seems to be a good set of instructions.

The full speech should be available here soon.

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[1] Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2004), 5.

[2] Wendell Berry, “To Save the Future, Live in the Present,” Yes! Magazine, March 24, 2015, accessed March 17, 2025, https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/together-earth/2015/03/24/wendell-berry-climate-change-future-present.

[3] Berry, Hannah Coulter, 83.