I keep mentioning the news to people as though it’s about someone they knew.
“Did you hear? Annie Dillard died.”
People seem to sense something in my voice and respond with sympathy. Then comes the slightly awkward admission: “I don’t know who that is.”
Philip Yancey encountered the same thing. When he interviewed her in 1978, he said when he mentioned her name to friends, some knew immediately who he meant while others simply asked, “Who?” By then Dillard was 33. Three years earlier, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize.
Jason Edwards
She was born Meta Ann Doak in Pittsburgh in 1945 and grew up with two younger sisters in a family full of books, jokes and strong personalities. As a girl, she rode her bicycle through the city, collected rocks and insects, peered through a microscope and played piano. Reading became another form of roaming — from Dickens to Freud, Mad Magazine to Rimbaud, Emerson and C.S. Lewis.
In An American Childhood, she wrote, “I would go through life like a plankton net.”
Years later, when she sat beside the creek in Virginia, Annie was still that little girl with the microscope. She read biology and geology, theology and physics — whatever the creek seemed to be asking about that week. One fact would lead to another, often taking her far beyond whatever boundary separates a muskrat from metaphysics.
“Nature writer” never was enough to capture her. The creek kept on opening into questions larger than the creek. Tinker Creek itself ran through suburban Roanoke, with houses and roads nearby and still, Dillard found plenty there to occupy her: An insect floating on the water, a sycamore caught in sunlight, the remains of some small creature another creature ate.
The Annie in those pages seemed solitary and severe, standing alone before creation with her notebook and some terrible question about God. But the people who knew her tell a livelier story.
Pico Iyer remembered Dillard sending him books she’d suddenly decide he needed and reading his work closely enough to notice a word he used too often. One year, while he was staying at a monastery, a package arrived from her containing a book about a Midwestern blues drummer. Iyer called Dillard “furiously alive.”
Annie loved the Pittsburgh Pirates, played ping-pong and miniature golf. And, at Hollins, joined her friend Lee Smith as a go-go dancer for an all-woman rock band of English majors called the Virginia Woolfs.
“I want you to write like you.”
Maggie Nelson remembers workshops that wandered out of the classroom, through the woods and through a hole in a chain-link fence before ending at Dillard’s house. Dillard sometimes sent students away from their desks to find someone worth meeting. Nelson once spent an afternoon playing video games with the owner of a baseball card store because Dillard wanted her to write about a real person.
Alexander Chee remembers coffee, Brach’s caramels and legal pads covered in notes. Dillard cared about sentences down to their smallest joints, and yet she’d tell students not to read her while they studied with her. Her voice was too easy to imitate.
“I want you to write like you,” she told them.
Something similar happened in an essay Dillard wrote about Christian fundamentalists singing near a campus fountain. From a distance she knew the type well enough. Then she went downstairs and joined them. As she continued to return, the category became less useful. The people she met didn’t agree with one another as much as the view from her window suggested. Some scarcely knew each other. Up close, “the fundamentalists” kept turning into particular human beings.
Our own world gives us more windows than Dillard could have imagined from Tinker Creek. Before our coffee is finished, a phone can show us a bombing, somebody’s vacation, a baby, a sermon clip, even a dog wearing shoes. I wonder: What is that much seeing doing to our capacity to attend?
In Teaching a Stone to Talk, Dillard says to the world, “Now I will stop and be wholly attentive,” imagining what it might mean to give “your life’s length to listening.” The world she watched that closely wasn’t always reassuring. The creek could dazzle her one day and trouble her the next. The theological problems were right there in the landscape, crawling around.
She brought that same sense of risk into church. “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?” she asked in An Expedition to the Pole. Christians, she thought, ought to come to church wearing “crash helmets,” and ushers should pass out life preservers and signal flares.
“She brought that same sense of risk into church.”
When Phillip Yancey interviewed her in 1978, Dillard resisted pointing to beauty as proof that God is good. An honest account of the world, as she saw it, also included people whose suffering made God’s goodness difficult to explain. She returned to that difficulty for decades.
By 2020, when The Christian Century asked how her mind had changed, she still called herself Christian, although she said she no longer could give intellectual assent to many established Christian dogmas. She did say: “I know only one thing for certain — there is holiness.”
After The Maytrees came out in 2007, Dillard mostly stopped publishing books, believing she’d taken her writing as far as she could. On her website she eventually explained that she no longer could travel, meet strangers or answer letters. “I’ve got to read and concentrate. Why? Beats me.”
Still, she read constantly, walked and painted. The money from her paintings supported Partners In Health, the organization Paul Farmer helped found. Friends also tell other stories about her generosity. She’d do things like read their manuscripts carefully and encourage younger writers.
Robert Richardson records that Wendell Berry once criticized Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, saying he found no real land-use ethic in it. It’s a fair question to ask of a book so absorbed in seeing. What exactly is the impact of all this attention? What does it ask of us? Years later, Dillard asked a version of that question herself in the author’s note of For the Time Being: “Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?” She never did answer Berry directly. But the people who knew her best give us an idea of where her attention sometimes led.
Annie Dillard died this week, and I guess I’m not too surprised to find out some still don’t know who she is. Dillard’s words have somehow managed to find their way deeply into some of our lives without ever making her a household name. And that actually suits her. After all, she spent much of her life paying attention to the things most of us pass by without notice.
There’s a creek behind somebody’s house right now doing something nobody is watching closely enough to see. Somewhere nearby, there may even be a “tree with the lights in it.”
If you don’t know Annie Dillard, I envy you a little.
You still get to meet her.
Jason G. Edwards serves as senior pastor of Second Baptist Church in Liberty, Mo., and is author of the forthcoming At Home with God: How the Cross Transforms Us. He also writes on Substack.