Download Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and more Exercises Voice in PDF only on Docsity! 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
