Kentucky Reads Hannah Coulter Discussion Guide

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Discussion QuestionsBy Kentucky Humanities & Morris A. GrubbsToday, rural communities are changing rapidly and are ata crossroads. In Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry helps usunderstand rural communities more deeply by introducingus to the residents of Port William, Kentucky. How do youthink understanding rural America today can help us shapethe future of our country? Why is it important for all Americans,whether they live in rural communities or not, to considerchanges happening in rural America?Hannah’s children move away from Port William. “With everyyear that passed,” Hannah says, “it was getting less likelythat a farmer’s child was going to grow up to be a farmer”(121). These departures are happening in most rural communities.Young people go away to college, find themselves ata crossroads, and then either do not want to return to theirhome community or town, or their jobs take them elsewhere.Imagine you are at your own crossroads, to stay or to go.Which direction would you head—toward the countryside ortoward the city? Why is it a problem for a community if itsyoung people move away and never return?What is the best thing about being from or living in a ruralcommunity? What is the worst thing? Sometimes theseanswers are the same. Do the descriptions of the land andcommunity in Hannah Coulter make you want to live in arural community? Why or why not?Near the end of the novel, Hannah is relieved that hergrandson Virgie has come back. “But he was weeping withrelief, I think,” she says, “and sorrow, and regret” (182).Virgie goes right to work on the farm, trying to begin towork out what’s in his DNA. How does it feel to returnhome to a community, whether rural or urban, after beingaway for some time? On the flip side, how can a communitymake newcomers feel like they belong?Why is it important that we tell our children stories, and, as Hannahsays, “the kind of stories that endear them to home?” Whatare some of the stories that you have told your own childrenabout growing up and the way life was when you were young?What do you think are the most important issues facing ourcommunities in Kentucky today? And why is it importantthat we engage in discussions about our communities andtheir future?What tone is set by the novel’s opening line, “I picked himup in my arms and I carried him home”? What moral idealsspring from it? What tensions are inherent in it? Howmight the scene serve as a resonating image as the novelprogresses?Near the end of Chapter 1, Hannah makes a sweeping statementabout her past that piques our interest: “This is thestory of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me andpressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowingand now is like a dream dreamed” (5). What does this statementsuggest about the nature and complexity of the storyto come?What does Chapter 2 reveal about the life and work ofwomen in pre-World War II Port William and by extensionrural communities of the time?By Chapter 3, what portrait of Hannah is emerging? Whatspecific cultural and individual forces are forging hercharacter?At the end of Chapter 4, when Hannah foretells Virgil’sdisappearance in the war, we are reminded that she is tellingthe story from a long distance in time. How does thisdistance enrich Hannah’s storytelling and your experienceof her story?In Chapter 5, two characters have tears in their eyes: VirgilFeltner near the beginning when he looks at Hannah,and seven-year-old Andy Catlett in the corner of the diningroom “at the end of the sideboard” in the final paragraph(40). What do their tearful reactions have in common andhow does each deepen and propel Hannah’s story?What do Hannah’s details of the Christmas dinner 1941reveal about gender and racial roles and relationships atthat time?In Chapter 6, Hannah tells of what is known of the mistyorigin of Port William. We also realize that perhaps herstrong command of details of her early membership in PortWilliam comes from her daily letters to Virgil. What portraitof the Port William membership is emerging? Howdoes this chapter set the stage for Hannah’s future?6kyhumanities.org
Chapter 7, the end of Part I, is a deeply emotional portraitof the primal antidote to grief: communal love, kindness,and gratitude. What does this chapter reveal about Hannah’sgrowth as a member of Port William? How does Hannah’sshift away from girlhood in this chapter connect withNathan’s shift from boyhood at the novel’s opening? Howdoes this chapter set the stage for Nathan to enter Hannah’slife in Part II?Attraction, desire, and female beauty are at the heart ofChapter 8. How acceptable today is Hannah’s descriptionof how women realize and gauge their beauty throughmen’s reactions?Chapter 8, titled “Nathan,” reveals one of the great centralbeliefs of the community Hannah has embraced and thathas embraced her: “Members of Port William aren’t tryingto ‘get someplace.’ They think they are someplace” (67).This statement projects a tension reverberating throughoutthe last few chapters of the novel. At this point in the story,how does Nathan embody this belief?Hannah says in Chapter 8, “There can be places in thisworld, and in human hearts too, that are opposite to war”(68). How is Port William and what it represents oppositeto war? How is the war felt in Port William? What is thescale of its effects?In Chapter 10, the very core of the novel, Port Williamand its obligations of membership are portrayed as sacred:“And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it andour keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven” (83).Further in Chapter 10, Hannah says, “The stream and thewoods don’t care if you love them. The place doesn’t careif you love it. But for your own sake you had better loveit. For the sake of all else you love, you had better love it”(85). How do these statements deepen your understandingof Hannah’s story and the Port William membership? Whatcan you take from these passages to enrich your life andhome community?Near the end of Chapter 10, Hannah makes one of hermany sweeping and resounding comments: “What willfinally become of this lineage of people who have beenmembers one of another? I don’t know. And yet theirnames and their faces, what they did and said, are notgone, are not ‘the past,’ but still are present to me, and Igive thanks” (94). How often in your reading of Hannah’sstory is the line blurred between the past and the present,the living and the dead? How is Hannah’s telling of herstory a form of gratitude?At the end of Chapter 10, how does Hannah portray theBanions’ relationship to the Feltner place and Nettie andAunt Fanny’s departure from Port William?Chapter 15, “A Better Chance,” pivots the novel toward thefuture and raises the specter of the disintegration of the PortWilliam membership. One of the forces pulling the youngmembers away is higher education. As Hannah says, “Theway of education leads away from home. That is what welearned from our children’s education” (112). Have you experiencedthis pattern in your family or observed it in yourhome community?Chapter 17 reminds us of how impersonal and cold lifeand work can be in a rootless existence: “The life of membershipwith all its cumbers is traded away for the life ofemployment that makes itself free by forgetting clean as awhistle when you are not of any more use. When they get toretirement age, Margaret and Caleb will be cast out of placeand out of mind like worn-out replaceable parts, to be aloneat the last maybe and soon forgotten” (133-34). How is lifein Port William and places like it the antidote to lonelinessand obscurity?In Chapter 20, Hannah suggests why she often imaginesshe is telling her story to Andy Catlett. Why is Andy particularlyappropriate as the recipient of her story?How does Hannah portray Nathan’s dying and death?Why do you think Hannah chooses to tell what she haslearned about Okinawa right after telling of Nathan’sdeath? How is Port William reflected in Hannah’s descriptionof Okinawa?What forces have helped create the real estate developerKelly Crawley? What does his vision of the land and communityportend for Port William?What is your interpretation of the final dream-like vignette,“Given”? Why is it in present tense? What else gives it adifferent feel than most of the rest of the novel? What doesit contribute to the story and your experience of it? How isit a fitting ending?kyhumanities.org 7
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Kentucky Reads Hannah Coulter Discussion Guide

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