Authors
Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
Bibliography
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
Every American nature writer is in some measure shadowed by Henry Thoreau:take a sojourn in the woods, and words from Walden echo around you – as an inspiration, and also as a vexation. The challenge is to make nature-writing new – in light of what we know, now, about the actualities of what unfolds around us, and also in light of the world to which we must eventually return, a world very different from Concord at the end of the 1840s. How does Annie Dillard achieve that necessary revitalization of language and point of view?
1. People who write about wilderness are often champions at the art, or vice, of digression. Choose a couple of paragraphs where Dillard strays imaginatively from wherever she is, and compare those passages to paragraphs in Walden where Thoreau goes off on a reverie or a jag. What are the differences you see?
2. Most of Tinker Creek is set in the woodlands near Radford, Virginia. With an online map service, find those woods, and look at them with a map and with satellite images. Walden Pond is quite close to Concord, and Concord is only thirty miles out of Boston. How close is Dillard to bright lights and big cities? Do those difference in location make a difference in the spirit of each book?
3. Thoreau portrays himself as a playful eccentric in Walden. How would you describe the Annie Dillard that Dillard creates in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek?