“It all turns on affection,” invoked Wendell Berry in his 2012 Jefferson Lecture. The Berry Center is building equitable and ecological farming futures based on affection—for creatures, for people, place, and for the planet.

How exciting to announce that my mother’s book has won an award. My daughter Virginia Berry Aguilar found a series of photographs that my mother took of an annual hog killing in the winter of 1979 while looking through some boxes of old photographs at my parent’s house. She and her husband Ben Aguilar saw the importance of the photographs not to mention their quality. Ben used the photographs for his thesis in graduate school. Leaving some steps out and thanks to Fireside Industries, and imprint of University Press of Kentucky and Hindman Settlement School, the result is For the Hog Killing 1979. The book is not nostalgia. It is a celebration of what was and what could be again. How wonderful then to couple the announcement of the award with an article by John Inscore Essick about a hog killing 40 years later of my mother’s beloved church community engaged in a hog killing.

– Mary Berry

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