Happy Friday,
Cue the music, brew that pot. This week’s roundup is too similar to two weeks ago. Annie Dillard died on Tuesday, one of my biggest writing idols who had me asking myself “you can do that?,” and later taught me through her work how to write and live.
Here are 10 interesting things about Annie Dillard I’m sharing this week:
- Dillard was an ecstatic nature writer of essays, fiction, and memoir. Here’s her obituary in The New York Times, The Guardian, and NPR. As her late husband, Robert D. Richardson, said: “She is, like Thoreau, a closer observer; she is, like Emerson, a rocketmaker.”
- “You take huge steps, trying to find the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.” Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” is her best book to start with. She writes a year of meditative nature descriptions from a river valley in Virginia, keeping “what Thoreau called ‘a meteorological journal of the mind’” that — I promise you — is captivating. It won her the Pulitzer Price for General Nonfiction in 1975 when she was 28, e youngest woman to win the award.
- “Annie is impelled to walk on a very high wire without a net. That’s what impels her to take risks,” said her friend Anne Bernays in this long 1992 profile on Dillard. “What do you want read at your funeral, Annie?” “Oh, I don’t know, I’d just as soon have someone playing ‘Little Liza Jane.”
- Her book “The Writing Life” is filled with wisdom. It’s also the book I see most referenced online. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” is my favorite reminder about intention. Her advice to never hold back or save something to write later — to spend it all now — is another favorite.
- Imagine my surprise when I began reading “How To Write an Autobiographical Novel” by Alexander Chee, and discovered 1) he was a student of Dillard’s at Weslayan University, and 2) he writes about her mentorship! “Talent isn’t enough, she had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science; it’s habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they’re dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between me and them is that I’m writing.”
- You might recognize Dillard’s essay “Total Eclipse,” which made the rounds online during the total solar eclipse in August 2017 and the lunar eclipse of 2024. It’s one of 14 essays in her book “Teaching a Stone to Talk.”
- Speaking of “Stone,” it and “Holy the Firm” and “For the Time Being” are my kind of Dillard trifecta, three books I read in quick succession in my early 20s that I think represent her best. All three have that weaving, myster ious tone of Dillard I’ve admired, writing about nature and existential questions, jumping from ecstatic joy to meditative reflections on muskrats, Chinese philosphy, the history of sand, total eclipses, and plane crashes.
- Dillard had a box of over a thousand notecards she’d use as her commonplace method for writing (a common practice for writers) system in this peek into her writing process. (I love her bit about separating each sentence onto its own card/page and rearranging them over and over on a big table — something I recreate in word processors fairly often).
- Maggie Nelson was another mentee of Dillard’s, and she is also the literary executor of Dillard’s estate. Please, Maggie Nelson, write about and release more of Dillard’s work!
- “Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees. The furniture is in place; you go back for your thermos of coffee. Then, wincing, you step out again through the French doors and sit down on the chair and look over the desktop. You can see clear to the river from here in winter. You pour yourself a cup of coffee.
Birds fly under your chair. In spring, when the leaves open in the maples’ crowns, your view stops in the treetops just beyond the desk; yellow warblers hiss and whisper on the high twigs, and catch flies. Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.”
See you on down the dusty trail,
Isak