annie dillard
Annie Dillard in spring
Each March, I find my thoughts returning to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life wasn’t made for times like these
But it has helped me to survive them.
Vibrant, vigorous, and weird
Almost any page of this collection yields the precise puzzling haunting music of Dillard’s mind at work.
by Brian Doyle
Glimpse of the holy: Notes on three spiritual writers
A pet peeve of mine is the pigeonholing of authors—especially the label "nature writers" inflicted on certain writers of immense spiritual power.
by Brian Doyle
Disasters and deformities
Several years have passed since I last encountered a book by Annie Dillard, but her images remain as strong in the memory as Proust's madeleine. Her gaze concentrates on the ordinary until it is transformed into the transcendent: a tree so intensely colored that it gives off light; a sky's invisible clouds revealed only in reflected images on the surface of a glassy lake; a bowl of pond water where one-celled creatures are visible to the naked eye.
reviewed by Jill Peláez Baumgaertner