by Annie Dillard
This book traces one year that Dillard spent exploring Tinker Creek in Virginia. The book follows the seasons and while it focuses on the creek and its inhabitants, the book expertly moves between so many thoughts and conversations not housed in Tinker Creek.
The book is divided into 15 chapters. The chapters vary in length and usually focus on an interesting animal, insect, plant or natural event at Tinker Creek. What I admire (among so, so many things) is how Dillard manages to maintain a very intensely private and intimate first person perspective — one gets the feeling that they are taken along with Dillard, watching a video reel of Dillard along in this environment — while also teaching so much about the animal, insect, plant, or natural event. For instance, did you know mosquitos can permeate the scales of a snake?2 I surely did not. I never thought to ask. Dillard did, and then did the research, and then wrote about it. All while maintaining a sense of whimsy, adventure, and fascination.
The book really is a personal narrative, but I picked it up thinking it a collection of essays, an error that Dillard also discusses in her Afterword. While the chapters can be read alone and have central foci, they do call back to each other. Just like the seasons of one place each look different with lingering similarities, so, too, do the chapters of Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
I love the sense of place in this book. I love the range of knowledges and conversations. Dillard pulls in flora and fauna research, but also literature and philosophy. Thoreau makes frequent appearances. But when Dillard pulls these other voices into her text, they are not large and overpowering. They are typically only a sentence or two, if a direct quote, or a simple paraphrase or retelling of a study or a cultural tale. In this way, Dillard’s book can be a great pedagogical tool for emerging writers thinking about how to tie in research, especially if “research” may set off certain academic alarm bells in writers’ minds. If teaching an advanced course on environmental writing, I would suggest pairing it with Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Highlight: “Fecundity”
My favorite of the chapters is the tenth, “Fecundity.” Dillard’s voice sounded different, a bit darker, or at least more nuanced than in previous ones. The chapter really zooms in on reproduction, but also death and the pressure to live at any cost. The inhumanity of it all. Eventually, Dillard arrives at the zenith: “Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a species that I can hardly believe that they evolved” (180). “We could have planned thins more mercifully, perhaps” Dillard writes, “but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very compromising terms that are the only ones that being offers” (183).
I love this chapter. It encapsulates the beauty of the natural world and the cruelty that we normally turn away from. Dillard takes this sentiment a step further, as is her mark of expertise, by asking, “Do the barnacle larvae care? Does the lacewing who eats her eggs care? If they do not care, then why am I making all this fuss? If I am a freak, then why don’t I hush?” (180). Though this is a book of personal narrative, it is written quite essayistically in that Dillard explores all perspectives, twists and turns her thoughts around in her hand as though looking at a specimen up close. For this reason, I might even pair a chapter like this one with Montaigne, just to see how the essay mode (which I borrow from Karen Babine’s “The Taxonomy of Nonfiction; Or the Pleasures of Precision“) might work.
Highlight: Afterwords
I also loved Dillard’s 1999 and 2007 Afterwords (I would highly recommend getting the 2007 or 2013 edition of the book to make sure these notes are included). In the Afterword, Dillard discusses how she put the book together, which I found fascinating.
She offers a few bits of reflection that I read as sort of writerly advice in her first Afterword. The first: she wanted to “write about the world before [she] was tired of it.” And the second: in her hope that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek “seems bold” (281), I think Dillard may be telling young writers not to be afraid to write young. “How boldly committed to ideas we are in our twenties!” she writes, which I love (279). It’s true.
Pairings
As I mention above, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants would be a helpful pairing here. I would also suggest select essays by Montaigne to pair with certain chapters here in order to investigate the form of the individual chapters. If one wants to focus on craft, I would also suggest Karen Babine’s “The Taxonomy of Nonfiction; Or the Pleasures of Precision” as a pairing.
Notes
- Dillard, Annie. “Afterword.” Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Harper Perennial, Modern Classics Edition, 2007, p. 280.
- p. 230.
Compsing 