Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Surely the most spiritual and meditative of the books in this series, Annie
Dillard’s
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for general
nonfiction. Her solitary “pilgrimage” along the creek that borders her
property in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Roanoke, Virginia, does not
resemble that of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, who appear to have been
more attracted to communal recreation than to serious reflection on nature and the
understanding of the self. But in the free play of her mind over what she sees and
investigates, Dillard does enjoy a sort of recreation. Whether we read the book as
religious or mystical, perhaps even specifically Christian, may not matter. Certainly she
is as likely to cite Thoreau, the
Koran
, or Pliny as she is to quote the
Bible
. Very much
of this book reflects what Dillard sees, what she teaches herself to discern in the world
around her; she regards herself not as a scientist, but as an “explorer.” The second
chapter is entitled “Seeing.” Reflecting on the praying mantis and other insects, she
notes, “Fish gotta swim and bird gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible
thing after another” (63). But just twenty pages later we encounter a very different
voice: “What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of
pure devotion to any object” (82). Although she uses various kinds of humor
throughout, Dillard concludes, “Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in
jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest” (270). One must either “ignore it, or see,”
she observes. Some books may be read casually; this one requests to be read carefully.
Author Information
Born Meta Ann Doak in 1945 to affluent parents in Pittsburgh, Annie
Dillard recorded her girlhood experiences in
An American Childhood
(1987). Her parents were tolerant and open-minded, but she proved
rebellious in high school. Dillard prospered at Hollins College (B.A.,
1967), where she studied English, creative writing, and religion. She
married one of her writing teachers, R.H.W. [Richard] Dillard, who has
authored more than half a dozen books of poetry. They later divorced,
and she has since remarried and is the mother of a daughter born in 1984. She
received her master’s degree at Hollins in 1968, writing a thesis on Henry David
Thoreau, whose thinking and writing has profoundly influenced her work. Dillard
began writing
Pilgrim of Tinker Creek
while recovering from a nearly fatal case of
pneumonia in 1971. Following receipt of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, Dillard taught for
three years at Western Washington University. She taught subsequently at Wesleyan
University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she is an emeritus professor of creative
writing. Her dozen published books include
Tickets for a Prayer Wheel
(1974), poems;
Holy the Firm
(1977), narrative nonfiction;
Living by Fiction
(1982), which she
