“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” ― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Last year, Down the Rabbit Hole published a review of Annie Dillard’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Vol 1, Issue 2, Spring). Let’s not call it a review. It was more of a persuasive commentary, a recommendation to give her book a moment of your time, if 1970’s spiritually infused nature writing is your thing, but also, even if it’s not. I originally discovered her work, appropriately enough, by stumbling down my own rabbit hole. I was looking for inspiration in my faltering creative life, and somewhere between a list of past Pulitzer Prize winners and obscure Substack reading recommendations, the title of her book kept popping up, catching my eye. The creative impact of the book was not lost on me: Imagine winning the Pulitzer Prize with your first published book and being the youngest woman ever to win the prize. I could see the words “why haven’t I heard of this before?” in giant red neon letters flashing on and off in the back alleys of my brain. To be honest, I don’t read a lot of nature writing. I don’t even spend a great deal of time reading non-fiction, but something about the excerpts from her book called out to me at a time when I needed them most (as the universe is want to do), so I went out and found an old dog-eared paperback copy at a local used book store and brought it home.
Annie Dillard passed away this past Tuesday, at the age of 81, after what feels to me like a life well lived, not only writing and publishing, but teaching and mentoring a generation of young writers (If you’re a frequent Substack surfer, it’s hard to escape this news as Substack feeds—at least my feed—are overwhelmed with wonderful tributes and memes with her best quotes).
It’s hard to measure the impact a writer’s words have on our creative lives or even on our ordinary day to day lives. I know that the beauty of some of her sentences filled me with jealousy, envy, and filled my eyes with misty admiration. They made me stop and think. In an attention economy screaming “pay attention” at me every minute of the day, her writing made me pay attention with just a whisper of an observation, true and heartbreaking. Her words are a part of me now, part of my own internal Large Language Model, resurfacing every now and then in some mysterious, unknowable algorithm percolating inside me. Rest in peace Annie Dillard. And thank you.