On the literary influence of Annie Dillard, perhaps the first author who felt like “mine”

An overdue tribute to a writer who has long shaped my reading life

I read with sorrow the news that American author and Pulitzer winner Annie Dillard died recently at age 81. She was not long preceded in death by another author I count among my serious literary influences, Kentuckian Wendell Berry, who died two weeks earlier at the age of 92. My love of Wendell Berry and his work have been well documented in our spaces, and many readers reached out to acknowledge his passing, and to share their own tributes.

This was incredibly kind, and wholly unnecessary. I’ve heard less about the loss of Annie Dillard, and nothing at all from readers, though her influence in this reader’s life is just as great, if not greater. The gap may be what made me realize how little I’ve talked about her publicly, though I’ve thought often about her privately.

Annie Dillard came into my life as assigned reading. I was seventeen, and despite being an enthusiastic reader for as far back as I can remember, so much of what I read in senior English—and the writers behind those works—were altogether new to me. My (unverifiable) memory is that the Dillard piece in our Norton Reader was “The Death of a Moth,” her essay ostensibly about a moth burning to death in a candle flame.

I can only say the piece caught me: before that time, I hadn’t read much narrative nonfiction, let alone nature writing or idiosyncratic personal essays. I didn’t know it was possible to write like that. But I wanted to read more like that. I took myself to the public library (one of the first places I could drive on my own, the thrill!), in search of all the Dillard I could get my hands on. That wasn’t a lot, back then.

Not many months later, I encountered Dillard again in the classroom, this time as a college freshman. Every student in my honors program was required to enroll in a small freshman seminar of their choosing; I homed in on ”Writers on Writing,” focused on the works of new-to-me writers like Adrienne Rich, Donald Hall, Eudora Welty, Stephen Jay Gould, and also … Annie Dillard. We read her three-book compendium of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, and The Writing Life. I was obsessed.

I well remember our rowdy round table seminar discussions about Pilgrim. Our little group was split: half found Dillard’s work messy and meandering; half found her brilliant. Give us grace for our pointed opinions—we were all teenagers—but you can guess which camp I landed in. How I loved my plunge into the world of Dillard, and Pilgrim, specifically. I spent much time in that work, in that world, for I was tasked with presenting on what made it distinctive to the class. I can still picture my index cards tiled out before me for my presentation, bearing phrases like “via negativa” and “the tree with the lights in it” and “there are seven or eight categories of phenomena in the world that are worth talking about, and one of them is the weather.” (This last one, I still reference twice a month in ordinary conversation.)

After graduation, she was one of the authors I kept coming back to for my own reading, and kept recommending to friends. I lent out my beat-up copy of Three by Annie Dillard so many times that eventually the long-broken spine could no longer anchor the pages, and one of the friends I leant it to took it upon herself to replace my original copy with a thrifted one in better condition. (“Better” because all the pages held, but how I wish I still had my original copy with my college underlinings!)

Throughout my early adulthood, I kept coming back to Annie Dillard until I was dismayed to realize I’d read everything she’d written. (It’s only in the course of writing this reflection that I realized I’ve long been an Annie Dillard completist.) The final work I read by her was her 2007 novel The Maytrees, but at the time I had no inkling it would be her last published work. I remember strongly disliking this novel at the time, thinking perhaps Annie Dillard and I had grown away from each other, but looking back (almost twenty years now) I suspect I simply didn’t understand it, and perhaps was too young for it, and should give it another shot today.

I’ve re-read her work occasionally through the years. I’ve read through Pilgrim a half-dozen times; every two or three years I pick up The Writing Life—often to seek out one specific passage—and then end up reading the whole thing. (As I did again this week.) I find it so dizzyingly wise and quotable, every time. My eternal question: how does she write like that?

I first encountered Dillard in the 90s, and her writings continue to be relevant to me, and seem far from saying everything they have to say. I quote her every so often here on MMD, or recommend her work on What Should I Read Next?. I touch on her oh-so-briefly in I’d Rather Be Reading (in my essay “All the Readers I Have Been”); her words (from The Writing Life) serve as an epigraph to Don’t Overthink It.

Annie Dillard always felt like an author—perhaps the first—who was mine, that I discovered at a pivotal time in my life and reading life. I encountered her work and it stuck, and said something to me I wanted to hear and hadn’t heard before. I’m grateful for her words, and especially grateful that they were generous and flexible enough to teach me not just about the worlds they pointed to but of my own relationship with words. I’m sorry it was her death that prompted this reflection, but I’m grateful for the reflection all the same.

I’m interested in hearing about your experience with Annie Dillard, and perhaps also with the authors who have long felt like yours. Would you please share in comments?

P.S. Assigned reading we actually enjoyed. And more Dillard mentions:What I didn’t know about the writing process and How do you choose your vacation reads?

P.P.S. Don’t be fooled, that’s not Tinker Creek in the featured image. But I hoped Dillard might consider another photo I snapped in wild and beautiful nature (specifically: Colorado) to be fitting for this piece.