Remembering the great Annie Dillard.

Annie Dillard, the masterful stylist and brilliant thinker, has died at 81. Her death was confirmed by her literary executor, Maggie Nelson. Dillard, who wrote in many forms and experiments, was an invigorating writer whose dedication and care seemed to make anything possible.

Her first book, the Pulitzer Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was a Walden for a new age, a psalm to nature and the passing of seasons, written at night in a college library while she drank chocolate milk.

The complications from Pilgrim’s immediate success sent Dillard in search of new ways of writing. She published essays, poems, criticism, novels, journalism, and a best selling reflection on the life of a writer. I particularly love her book of found poems Mornings Like This—though not her words, it’s a wonderful showcase of her intelligence, wit, and lyricism.

As she wrote in The Writing Life, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” Why not spend an hour with Dillard’s writing, and some reflections on her life and work from her friends and admirers on Lit Hub?

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“Write as if you were dying.” Read Annie Dillard’s greatest writing advice, Walker Caplan

What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying patient that would not enrage by its triviality?

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Annie Dillard on How Writers Learn to Trust Instinct, Annie Dillard

The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses—to secure each sentence before building on it—is that original writing fashions a form. It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop. Perfecting the work inch by inch, writing from the first word toward the last, displays the courage and fear this method induces.

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The Time I Played Catch with Annie Dillard, Michael Croley

Annie threw first. A soft but straight throw to my chest. I lobbed it back to her. All of those first throws were fine and then she short-hopped me and the ball went spinning into the concrete sidewalk, clipping my shin, and heading down the street toward Spring Bayou. I broke into a jog and scooped it up with my glove. “Sorry,” Annie called.

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“What Kind of Writer is Annie Dillard?”, Geoff Dyer

Dillard opens our eyes to the world and to new ways of articulating what we see. More exactly, she alerts us to the possibility of being free of formal conventions that constrain in the guise of enabling. She does this when you first read her and does so again when you re-read her. She did it in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and she is doing it again in The Abundance in what might be regarded as a re-framing or re-hang of much-loved work. The pleasure and excitement are intense whether you know the original material well or are encountering it—waking to its astonishments—for the first time.

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Contemplating the Infinite with Annie Dillard, John Freeman

But most of all, through everything, she has never stopped reading. “I have written down every book I’ve read since 1964,” Dillard explains as I turn the Berger book over now, wondering in what obscure corner of her mind she will sock this information away.
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As for her, what is she after, inhaling those hundred or more books a year since age five? That library in the sky of her mind she has built. What is she seeking? “It’s what I’m for,” Dillard says simply, putting out her cigarette. “Somebody has to read all these books.”

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Jen Hadfield on Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in conversation with Michael Kelleher

So she focuses on Tinker Creek, which in theory is finite and bounded: it’s a single place that she sets out to talk about in theory, although she  does travague around, as folks say in Scots, but the detail that she conjures of that place makes you realize that the detail is infinite.

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Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse” is the best thing you can read about the eclipse today, Emily Temple

I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane.

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Yes, She Reads Everything: Pico Iyer on Annie Dillard, Pico Iyer

Annie is like a whirlwind constantly throwing off sparks, and angled towards delight; yet underneath that, she is someone who takes her human responsibilities with the deepest, lightest seriousness. Irreverent towards orthodoxy, she’s never impatient with compassion. I’m not surprised that so many books (like the most recent one by Phyllis Rose, like one I am trying to complete right now) are dedicated to her; she’s a writer who has thrown open windows for generations to come, but she’s also a living soul whose great delight is in opening doors for others.