I’m grieving again. Glen Hansard got in a motorcycle crash at the end of July. Dolly Parton died in August, then Tim Curry, then Gloria Steinem. Wendell Berry, one of America’s best rural writers, passed away on his Kentucky farm. Two weeks ago I wrote about Hansard’s death and the nature of parasocial grief, foolishly assuming that his would be the death which hit me hardest this year. But then, on September 16, I saw that Annie Dillard was dead. I stared at my computer screen for a minute before I realized that I’d started to cry.
Dillard wrote poetry and novels, but is best known for her essays and long nonfiction narratives so profound they feel devout, like a true believer singing hymns right into your brain. An English teacher in my junior year of high school who knew I loved Edward Abbey and the other great naturalists gifted me Annie’s most famous book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I didn’t read it until three years later, when I was home for a summer and struck, suddenly, by the voracious desire to become an author. In my notebook that May, I wrote,
If I am to make a living from this, I may better well start now.
I went to the woods this afternoon. My phone remains on the table, on the other side of my seat from my Dillard copy. She won a Pulitzer for a book of thoughts and observations; when can I do that? When I get published, I suppose.
Pilgrim is both a series of essays about Dillard’s time in the woods of Virginia near the book’s eponymous creek and a longform accordion narrative accounting for the wonders and horrors of what God has delivered to His planet. In the first chapter, she describes watching a frog get the life sucked out of it, literally, writing “The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent.” The culprit was a giant water bug—of course—but Dilland is more interested in the implications of a life sucked dry. Three paragraphs later, she begins, “Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain.” The rest of the book proceeds like this: a minute observation of nature’s greatest mysteries expands into a stab at explaining what the hell is happening, and who’s up there deciding. She published the book when she was twenty-eight years old, which gives me a solid deadline for my first Pulitzer.
By the time I wrote those lines in my notebook, I’d already moved on to Holy the Firm, which became my favorite book of hers. My copy is sixty-five pages, and it begins like this:
Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split.
I wake up in a god. I wake in arms holding my quilt, holding me as best they can inside my quilt.
Of course, that god is at once the Puget Sound and a cat. Later in the book, she describes a moth who flies too close to its desire and melts into a candle wick, its wing lighting its body aflame. Even later, she writes about a little girl who survived a plane crash onto Dillard’s Puget island, “only to have her face burned off by a splurt of hot fuel,” as Daniel Lewis put it in his obituary of the writer. It is a book about pain, about why pain happens and whom we should blame for it. Flip to any random page, and you’re as likely to see the word “God” as you are to catch sight of “the.”
If Pilgrim was a great big double-edged sword of a book, Holy the Firm is a thousand throwing stars chucked at your mind. Each phrase spins and spins—you never know where exactly the next one is aiming. Her prose has an urgency, a sense that she must snatch words from the abyss right when she sees them, for if she waits too long, they’ll never return. Reading this little lyrical polemic on pain, I realized that Dillard is not merely a writer I should keep reading because her books are good, but one I must read if I wish to understand why I find this whole art thing so goddamn urgent.
I spent the rest of the summer reading Dillard. I read For the Time Being next, and it became my favorite of hers. Then I read An American Childhood, her autobiography, and it became my favorite. Then came Teaching a Stone to Talk, an essay collection that made me abandon the idea of ever having any other “favorite” again. I have dog-eared fifty-two of An American Childhood’s two-hundred fifty pages, and scrawled marginal notes in all the rest. I’ve inhaled the essays in Teaching a Stone at least six times each; I’ve read one of them, “An Expedition to the Pole,” at least fifteen. It’s the funniest thing you will ever read. It is at once about a farcically botched church service and the quirky nineteenth-century men who tried to find the Earth’s poles, and ends in a dreamscape featuring herself, those explorers, the members of the service, and many clowns. “In my hand I discover a tambourine,” begins the final paragraph. It ends with, “I am banging the tambourine and belting the song so loudly that people are edging away. But how can any of us tone it down? For we are nearing the Pole.”
Her oeuvre is at once entirely cohesive and so widely scoped it becomes confounding. How she can write, with equal expertise and tenacity, about cloud-shapes and the writer’s life, about niche insects and nicher rocks, is all a mystery to me. But one notices a throughline when they follow the trail she’s left for us: a pounding sense that she must write, that she must bang the tambourine. In Holy the Firm, following her depiction of the moth, she recounts a moment with her students at Western Washington State College. She asked them if they wanted to grow up to be writers. They all raised their hands. “Then I tried to tell them what the choice must mean: you can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax . . . They had no idea what I was saying.” Soon after reading all of this, I returned to Yale and found myself flustered. Why was anyone splitting time between the arts and economics? Why was anyone taking internships in New York? How could anyone stop questioning their world? Why wasn’t I more certain? Dillard taught me that there was no going at this whole writing thing, or at life, half-assed.
By February of that year, I’d become addicted to the high of hearing her hymns. When my friend told me she’d be diving into Dillard’s records for “Writing from the Archive: Imagining the Real,” I fibbed that I was in that class too and accompanied her into Beinecke Library’s basement, where we poured over her earliest, pre-Pilgrim notebooks for a few hours. Of course every page held brilliance, raw and scrawled, as if they were the cave walls of her brain. There were poems and essays and anxieties, existential fears and hopes and laments, endless drawings of grotesquely long or fat or twisting faces. Then, thirty minutes before Beinecke closed, I flipped a worn page and saw a spread of dancing bears. Some of them leapt from one line to the other, others rolled bass drums and boulders, and one simply boogied in the corner. The top of the left-hand page was inscribed, “Don’t do anything I’d do!” with two slanting lines under “I”. On the other page, above the boogying bear: “He gives you so little to go on, either starts treatin’ you like shit right away, or if he knows that that little bit is enough.”
I’ve tempered my addiction in the years since, but I could never quit cold turkey. I wrote an essay about her moth for class, and reread “An Expedition to the Pole” every few months. There comes a time in a lot of my friendships when we have a significant conversation and, later that day, I send them a photo of a paragraph from An American Childhood that seems to explain quite precisely how my brain works. It comes at the end of a chapter about going, as a child, to her friend’s family’s house in the woods, and never being able to enjoy it, fully, because she knew the week in the woods would be her favorite of the year, and that, soon, that week would end. She writes,
I knew what I was doing at Paw Paw. I was beginning the lifelong task of tuning my own gauges. I was there to brace myself for leaving. I was having my childhood. But I was haunting it, as well, practically reading it, and preventing it. How much noticing could I permit myself without driving myself round the bend? Too much noticing and I was too self-conscious to live; I trapped and paralyzed myself, and dragged my friends down with me, so we couldn’t meet each other’s eyes, my own loud awareness damning us both. Too little noticing, though—I would risk much to avoid this—and I would miss the whole show. I would wake on my deathbed and say, What was that?
After I wiped my tears and stretched my legs, I spent much of the morning after Dillard’s death on her website anniedillard.com, maintained by Dillard herself, begins with a few short paragraphs of warning. The second two essentially inform readers that because Wikipedia and the internet cannot be trusted, she has “posted this web-page in defense . . . as a corrective.” But the first has a classically Dillardian frankness:
I can no longer travel, can’t meet with strangers, can’t sign books but will sign labels with SASE, can’t write by request, and can’t answer letters. I’ve got to read and concentrate. Why? Beats me.
It perfectly encapsulates the feeling one gets every time one reads her sentences. She was the most playful misanthrope, prickly and earnest and ambitiously thoughtful. Despite her first success being a modern Walden, she rejected being called a modern Thoreau. She wasn’t put on this planet to chop wood and plant rows of beans, nor answer letters and sign books. She needed to concentrate. She needed to find God. And as she says, it doesn’t matter why. The pursuit itself was admirable because it was vocational, and she was devout.
An Editor-in-Chief, 2025-2026.
