Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard joins Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as my favorite “nature writers.” Annie is pithy, often wry, insisting that we notice and guiding us with her own noticing.

A classic quote: “In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that… No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single… show more.

Annie went off with this one!

Basically a female version of Walden, Annie Dillard wrote this book about a year in the natural life of a creek near her suburban home, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. I cannot believe Annie Dillard wrote this when she was 27 because it is so elegant, so deeply informed, and – I was not expecting this – so funny.

Just one of Dillard’s lines, as an example: “Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.” Annie!!!

Here’s one way to cut out all that digital chatter: spend a year in the forest alone. Next best: read Annie Dillard’s account of it. The narrator of this beautiful, boundless, philosophical work observes the Virginia forest around her and achieves a level of extraordinary connection. Growing up in Virginia, reading this brought me right back to the best moments of being a child: quiet afternoons marveling over the intricacies of a leaf or leaning on a tree, feeling the gust of a breeze and falling in love with the earth. Pick a spot outside and let this book soften… show more.

This winner of the Pulitzer Prize is not about going someplace, but about truly discovering what is in your own backyard. Dillard spent a year alone studying in intimate detail the natural environment around her Virginia home. Her realizations about the capriciousness and brutality of life on earth were both unsettling and beautifully powerful. She said: “There is no one standing over evolution with a blue pencil to say, ‘now that one, there, is absolutely ridiculous and I won’t have it. Not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create anything. He will stop at… show more.

Throughout her putative nonfiction, the naturalist Annie Dillard locates her voice using the framework of nineteenth-century Emersonian pantheism; she seeks knowledge, inspiration, and even identity from an impersonal nature coded as male. Most strikingly, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is not the autobiographical nature writing of a contemporary woman, but the trickster fiction, or tinkering, of a postmodern confidence woman impersonating the voice of a fifty-year-old man. Winning a Pulitzer for non-fiction, Dillard anticipates an era of James Freys and falsified memoirs; but Dillard’s “transgressions” are deliberate literary devices, highlighting the way nature is a social construct. She subverts two genres,… show more.

This book is luminous, every page glowing with beautiful prose. The world that Annie Dillard perceives is utterly filled with wonder, and it’s so refreshing to spend time in her presence, finding enchantment in the small things. Dillard tackles some of the biggest questions, pivoting backwards and forwards between profound solemnity and quirky humour. It also has the most perfect crescendo to the end that I know – I remember reading it on a bus to Frankfurt Hahn Airport and wanting to shout for joy as she wrapped it all up.  

In the domain of nature writing, few books are as wondrous as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In a voice that is uniquely creative and with an eye that probes below immediate impressions, Annie Dillard delves into the purest world of emotional experience of place. Her prose invariably captivates and surprises. Although her field excursions were local her vision was vast. This book revolutionized my view of fieldwork and nature writing, teaching me that brilliant writing, ingeniously phrased, can transport the imagination to a new sense of the world.