Dear Mr. Berry,
I am a writer in Calhoun County, Alabama, which is not Henry County, Kentucky, but which is close enough in kind that I think you would recognize the roads.
I planted a flower farm three years ago on a hillside with a view of the Chief Ladiga Trail. Dahlias and peonies. A walk-in cooler in the workshop. A kiosk at the road. My wife and I could see the whole thing so clearly we could almost stand in it while it was still only an idea. The mayor of Anniston came out in May 2025 and walked the rows and said she could see it too. Six months later the farm was gone.
I am writing to you because I have been thinking about what you said about the unsettling — not the book specifically, but the motion. The thing that keeps happening to the people who decide to plant something in a place and stay. The thing that comes along and prices them out or washes them out or, in our case, simply could not be made to work on the math that a flower farm on a hillside in northeast Alabama had to work on.
I want to tell you something about technology, because you have been principled about refusing it, and I have been principled about using it, and I think we are both right.
You do not use a computer. You write by hand and type on a typewriter and hand the manuscripts to your wife, who types them. I understand the argument: the computer is not neutral, the network is not neutral, the infrastructure of convenience is built on extraction. You made that argument in 1987 about a word processor. It has not become less true.
I run AI systems. Transparently — I disclose everything, I mark every piece of AI-assisted content, I have written it into my business principles that the machine is never me. I do this because I believe that the honest use of a powerful tool is better than the dishonest pretense of not using it. Because I am one person and there are more things to build than one person can build in a lifetime. Because the opposite of using AI transparently is using AI secretly, and I will not do that.
I have a feeling you would tell me the problem is not transparency but appetite. That the machine is not neutral even when disclosed. That you can be honest about your chains and still be wearing them.
You may be right. I am not sure. I am thinking about it.
What I am sure of is this:
The dahlias were real. The rows were real. My daughter ran through them when she was nine. My wife cut flowers in the dark at four in the morning to have them ready by seven. We built that farm by hand, in the South, on a hillside that had probably never grown anything that pretty in living memory, and it was good while it was good.
The farm is gone. The writing is still here. I went inside when I couldn't stay outside, and I have been writing about the South and the people in it ever since — including the people who are trying to stay rooted in the same dirt you have been trying to stay rooted in for sixty years.
I run a publication called Southern Legends. It is a journal of the people, places, and stories of the South, published from Calhoun County. We are AI-disclosed, plainspoken, and unapologetically local. We publish people who stayed and people who left and people who came back. We are trying to say the thing that needs saying about this part of the country, in the way that only people who live in it can say it.
You have been doing that for sixty years longer than I have. I am reading you to learn how.
With respect and genuine disagreement about the machine,
Matt Headley Anniston, Alabama southernlegends.blog
Matt Headley is a writer, former United Methodist associate pastor, and the editor of Southern Legends. He and his wife Heather ran a flower farm in Calhoun County, Alabama. It is gone now. The writing isn't. This letter is published on Southern Legends. If it reaches Mr. Berry, he will likely not read it on a screen.
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