Annie Dillard (1945- )

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Annie Dillard (1945- )

• Pilgrim At Tinker Creek (1974)
• Holy the Firm (77) (moth essay.)
• Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (83)
• An American Childhood (87)
• The Writing Life (90)

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Clemson.edu (good web site w/ Dillard
links)(actually has parenthetical citations!)

• Parents affluent, strong, energetic,
  Presbyterian, sent her to fundamentalist church
  camp.
• HS hated everyone got into lots of trouble,
  but
• started reading poetry essaysnotably Emerson.
• Hollins College (VA)married her writing teacher,
  Richard Dillard
• MA 1968 thesis on Walden
• 1971 Nearly died from pneumoniadecided she
  needed to live a bit.
• Tinker Creekfour seasons.

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Tinker Creek(in Va. Blue Ridge)

• Four seasons 1971-4?
• Mostly outdoors, camping, hiking.
• Journals 20-plus volumes.
• Transcribed to note cards, then to Pilgrim At
  Tinker Creek irony of the title?.
• Took 8 months from cards to book. Towards the
  end, totally absorbed 15 hrs a day writing,
  living on coffee and Coke. Lost 30 pounds, and
  all of her plants died.
• It didnt include the moth piece. (2 yrs.
  Latersee How I Wrote the Moth Essayand Why)

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• Pilgrim brought great reviews, fame.
• Distrusted it. (Suddenly poems were accepted
  that were rejected earlier)
• Puget Sound as sort of hermetic retreat.
• Connecticut to teach. Currently adjunct professor
  at Wesleyan U. in Conn.
• Several divorce/remarriages. (You can learn a
  lot when youre married to someone. Marry
  brains! Marry brains!)
• 1984daughter.

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Transfiguration the big picture

• Where and when does Dillard see the moth?
• Where and when does she write the essay? even
  without reading How I Wrote
• Whats her point about the moth what does it
  mean?
• Whats the purpose of the catand why used where
  it is?

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Style

• Syntax
• master of parallelism, cumulative and periodic
  structure, poly- and asyndeton.
• Cf. the fugue,
• Diction (Note any effects on pace.)
• Imagery
• Figurative language

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• Sound effects
• onomatopoeia,
• alliteration,
• assonance,
• rhythm (accents), etc

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Transforming TransfigurationWhat ifs

• What if a different animal or object were used to
  represent the writer?
• One day a dog walked by, was caught in a spider
  web, stung badly, and

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What if the moth analogy were used, but different
words (diction) were chosen?

• The wax rose in the moths body and widened
  into a flame, a sort of beer-yellow flame that
  staggered under her like a hangover, like a
  midlife crisis.

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Other possible metaphors for the
writer?Wood-chopping metaphorsee Writing Life
excerpts.
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Other nature writers

• Emerson
• Thoreau both influenced her
• Barry Lopez?
• Newshour roundtable clip?

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• Rhetorical purpose self-examination?
• Importance of setting?
• Close observation?
• Style? Epigrammatic?
• Tonestance.
• E.g. identification with the subject.
• anthropomorphism

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from Walden (Brute Neighbors)

• (p.240-41, Elements)
• The red republicans on the one hand, and
  the black imperialists on the otherand human
  soldiers never fought so resolutely...Perchance
  he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath
  apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his
  Patroclus. I was myself excited somewhat even as
  if they had been men. The more you think of it,
  the less the difference.

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• I never learned which party was victorious, nor
  the cause of the war but I felt for the rest of
  that day as if I had had my feelings excited and
  harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity
  and carnage, of a human battle before my door.

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American Literature (McGraw-Hill, p.205)

• The mice which haunted my house were not the
  common onesbut a wild and native kind not found
  in the village. I sent one to a distinguished
  naturalist, and it interested him much. One of
  thesesoon became quite familiar, and would run
  over my shoes and up my clothes.

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• At length, as I leaned with my elbow on the
  bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my
  sleeve, and round the paper which held my dinner,
  while I kept the latter close, and doged and
  played at bo-peep with it and when at least I
  held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and
  finger it came and nibbled it, sitting in my
  hand, and afterward cleaned its face and paws,
  like a fly, and walked away.

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Other Dillard quotes from The Writing Life

• Once, in order to finish a book I was writing and
  yet not live in the same room with it, I begged a
  cabin to use as a study. I finished the book
  there, wrote some other things, and learned to
  split wood.
• tell the part about learning to split wood, the
  dream, and the chopping block

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• I came here to study hard things - rock mountain
  and salt sea - and to temper my spirit on their
  edges.  "Teach me thy ways, O Lord" is, like all
  prayers, a rash one, and one I cannot but
  recommend. 

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• Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One
  wants a room with no view, so imagination can
  meet memory in the dark.
• Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of
  extended emergency bivouac.

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• Write as if you were dying. At the same time,
  assume you write for an audience consisting
  solely of terminal patients. That is, after all,
  the case.
• Write about winter in the summer.
• The writer knows his fieldwhat has been done,
  what could be done, the limitsthe way a tennis
  player knows the court. And like that expert,
  he, too, plays the edges.

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• All day long I feel created.  I can see the blown
  dust on the skin on the back of my hand, the tiny
  trapezoids of chipped clay, moistened and
  breathed alive. 
• Spend the afternoon. You cant take it with you.

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Mother of all periodic sentences?

• Who will teach me to write? A reader wanted to
  know. The page, the page, that eternal
  blankness, the blankness of eternity, which you
  cover slowly, affirming times scrawl as a right
  and your daring as necessity the page, which you
  cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your
  freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you
  ruin everything you touch, but touching it
  nevertheless,

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• because acting is better than being here in
  mere opacity the page, which you cover slowly
  with the crabbed thread of your gut the page in
  the purity of its possibilities the page of your
  death, against which you pit such flawed
  excellences as you can muster with all your
  lifes strength that page will teach you to
  write.

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• There is another way of saying this. Aim for the
  chopping block. Aim past the wood, aim through
  the wood aim for the chopping block.

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Gratuitous photo of Canaan Valley WV