Fictional interview w/Annie Dillard

Nancy Griesinger J. Pahl Fall 1995
Creative Writing Assignment: PROFILE: Annie Dillard
due before Dec.21, l995




Annie Dillard's voice, when reading her essay "Total Eclipse", moves with dignity and passion over the well-chosen words. The expression on her face is expectant as if someone were whispering in her ear. She seems to be listening to her own words as intently as the audience.

She reads from her book, Teaching A Stone To Talk, as if she is in awe still today, of the moment in 1979, when she and her husband stood on that Yakima hilltop in the center of Washington state watching that total eclipse.

She stands in front of us reading, and for a brief moment looks small and quite ordinary. Light glances off her blond hair and bounces around the room. You can feel the electricity. Her words are like bits of sunlight shooting through a prism. As insight overtakes us, we realize we are in the presence of greatness.

I am in awe of this writer and still cannot believe that she has consented to be interviewed by me. I leveled with her when I called, saying I had attended her lecture and as part of my assignment was supposed to interview someone and would she mind terribly, could she possibly...I stumbled over my words like a nervous child. She said she was flattered and consented, and with a giggle (a giggle!) invited me to her home the next day.

Ms. Dillard has been called a nature writer, and indeed she is a keen observer of the natural world, but she does not limit herself to watching plants grow or the sky darken. What Annie Dillard does so well, is to hone in on the effect these matters might have on the human soul.

Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dillard received her Bachelor's Degree from Hollins College in 1967, and her Master's from the same school the following year. She is a vivacious blond and a lively conversationalist, peppering her sentences with profanity as readily as she tosses in Biblical quotes. She gives you the impression that in and around all of the seriousness, this is one woman who is having a ball.

In writing "Total Eclipse", Ms. Dillard admits to taking her lead from Faulkner's, As I Lay Dying. She wanted to retell one moment of experience, she says, "through differing layers of consciousness." She hoped to retell that one moment over and over again, "because", she explains, "consciousness and the danger of dabbling in the irrational was the true subject of the essay."

Despite the fact that she edited The Best American Essays of 1988, Dillard does not consider herself to be a writer of essays, but rather, "a writer of prose." In her introduction to that publication, she speaks positively in regard to the genre. "The essay can do everything a poem or short story can do - everything but fake it." She says she has published only one book of essays herself: Teaching A Stone To Talk.

Dillard lives with her husband and daughter in Middletown, Connecticut and teaches creative writing at Wesleyan University. Her home is large, but has the feel of a Cotswold cottage. The foyer is actually the library with three walls filled with books stacked floor to ceiling on polished cherry shelves. Reading benches line these walls and there are open books everywhere. The archway of the fourth wall invites the visitor into a living room filled with flowers and downy soft cushions. Everything is very feminine and yet understated and comfortable.

Ms. Dillard is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize, winning, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, which was published in 1974 when she was in her twenties. She says of "Pilgrim", that it is not a book of essays, but rather "a sustained narrative," and that she put it together like one knits an Afghan - one square at a time - because that is how she thought you wrote a book. She motions for me to sit down on the sofa beside her and suddenly I am shaking. She senses my nervousness and offers to help with my recorder. I whisper a weak, "Thank you," and her soft voice continues feeding information onto my tape while I settle back to listen.

She was on a camping trip in October of 1972 and reading what she calls, "a wretched old man's book on nature." The author kept making statements like, "oh how pretty the summer evenings are, and the dear little finches, and the lightening bugs.... aren't they cute, I don't know what makes them glow...etc." She says she thought, "C'mon Buddy! Write a book!" She said, here she was a reader, and she knew what made the lightning bugs glow, and here he was a writer and he didn't, and she thought I might as well write one of these books.

She had been writing prose because she loved writing prose. She would have written a book of prose on any subject she says - cooking even - she knew she simply had to find something to wrap prose around. So she chose to write on nature because of her aggravation with this inept author. And Pilgrim At Tinker Creek was born.

She had nineteen journals which were simply notebooks filled with information from her reading. She began by outlining those journals on five by seven cards, and from the cards, she wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction novel.

In her book, The Writing Life, she says, "a writer when looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but what he alone loves at all." She says further, "there is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin."

"You were made," she goes on to say, "and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment." When she says this, I know why I love her writing.

Ms. Dillard shares her astonishments throughout her writing and says the real writing comes "when you are fingering the fringe of the garments of God. That is when you are doing the most interesting work and you can start a line of words and simply follow the line of words to the end." In Holy The Firm, she claims that she knows "only enough of God to want to worship Him in whatever means at hand."

She tells her students to "be careful of what you read, for that is what you will write." It is obvious Ms. Dillard has read widely and voraciously. She seems as much at home with physics and science as she is the Bible and philosophy.

Annie grew up in the 1950s in a house, she says, "full of comedians reading books." She finds her own books hilarious, calling them a "riot." She enjoys showing her comic flair to her readers, inserting it in unexpected places, not unlike hiding the penny in the tree stump and waiting and watching to see if a stranger will come along and discover it, the way she does in "Pilgrim".

For instance, in Holy The Firm, when she is speaking of God's grace, she describes a singer who came to her church once as a "wretched, hulking blond with chopped hair and big shoulders, who wore tinted spectacles and a long lacy dress, and sang, grinning, to faltering accompaniment, an entirely secular song about mountains." And then, in typical Dillard style she goes on to say, "nothing could have been more apparent than that God loved this girl."

In her autobiography, An American Childhood, published in 1987, Annie says, as a child, she wanted to "notice everything as (Sherlock) Holmes had." She berated herself for having forgotten the floor plan of a former home and vowed that noticing and remembering everything was going to be her niche. She would become a sleuth and this would be the way to her Scotland Yard. She vowed to "beat the days", literally pound them into her brain, and one way she tried to do this was by drawing pictures. She drew sketches of her left hand, her baseball mitt, a saddle shoe. She drew from memory the faces of people and formed sentences around them. This was the way the young Annie unknowingly prepared herself to become the insightful writer we know today. She felt that "noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening part" which she thought was already piling up behind her.

She says she began to awaken fully at about age ten when she feels most children awaken to life and its possibilities. She had been reading books "to delirium" and remembers fondly one called, Kidnapped. She was reading this book on her sun porch and thinking, "I am awake now forever."

Her journey into awakening had started two years earlier at age eight when she began her life of reading books and drawing and playing at the sciences.
The science book which impressed her the most was a thin blue volume with tissue paper pages. It was titled, The Field Book Of Ponds And Streams. She found this little book in a branch of the Pittsburgh Carnegie Library, located in a Negro section of town called, Homewood. This branch was the nearest one to her home, and her mother drove her there every two weeks for years until she could drive herself. The librarians, after a trial period, gave the little girl a card to the adult section. There, Annie was drawn to the area marked, Natural History. It was in Natural History, "in the cool darkness of a bottom shelf," (she speaks almost reverently), that she found The Field Book Of Ponds And Streams.

This book impressed her so much that she read it every year, and when she stopped reading it, she continued to "visit" the book, just to reassure herself that it was still there. For a moment I see her become that little girl once more and I feel suddenly very close to this lady.

This thin blue volume was unbelievable, she says. In chapter three, which she thought was the book's most provocative chapter, the author spoke of going into the "field" (which young Annie surmised must be vastly different from the baseball field) and wearing hip boots and carrying corked test tubes, a notebook, a hand lens, and a map. That anyone had lived this fine life, she says, astonished her. She also found it unbelievable that the author of such an adventuresome book was a woman. In spite of the author's name, Ann Haven Morgan, young Dillard felt the writer surely must have been a man.

Consequently, when she wrote Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, she tried to write it from a male point of view, figuring it would come across as somehow more credible.
Brought up in the 50s it was simple, she explains. Men were the explorers, women nested. She admits that her father, during her most impressionable years, had never knowingly read a book written by a woman. She worked at finding "male" phrases for her book such as, "rubbing my hands on my trousers," or "pants." She knew she shouldn't say "slacks." She floundered about worrying about the word usage until it became a totally useless and silly thing to do, and also, she says, a waste of time. So, she changed then and wrote it straight from her heart.

As a child in Pittsburgh, she intended to read fiction, and she did read many stories recommended to her. She read all of the works the adults in her world thought were proper for children, but she learned to be cautious. She took the posters she saw displayed at the library very seriously. WHEN YOU OPEN A BOOK, the sentimental posters proclaimed, ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN! She had found that statement to be absolutely true. A book of fiction, she says, was a land mine that would blow your whole day. It was dangerous.

She grew weary of the assigned readings, preferring to forge her own path through the wilderness. She found a clue in the logo that stood for the Modern Library. It was a little man running, or dancing, and she found that following the logo through the library shelves was a bit rocky, but she read anyway. She read everything she could get her hands on, forming her own opinions as she swam through that sea of literature.

Ms. Dillard's blond hair reflects the sunlight and her Nike running shoes look as though they have seen a few miles. She smiles readily and laughs heartily at herself and the world at large. She, contrary to the serious and plodding text that must be running through her mind, is a lively, animated woman. She does not appear to be a reclusive writer, but your sister or your best friend from high school. She offers cookies right out of the package when she comes back from the kitchen with coffee. There simply are no pretenses with this woman.

Her young daughter is chatty like her mother but does not try Annie's patience as one might expect. Instead, Dillard takes care of her daughter's demands with grace, and gives me a wink, then continues with our interview as naturally as she flips the pages of her notebooks.

Her books have been referred to as meditations, a word she hates because it has no force in it, she says. When asked to explain further, her voice sounds raspy as she says, "Dammit! I knew there was a reason I wanted to write under a man's name." She thinks of her non-fiction narrative as being "muscular and vivid, and full of active verbs."

When she wrote "Pilgrim", she spent nine months in solid, solitary writing - blinded, she says, by effort. She equates it with the likes of fighting a war. She let all of the house plants die without even realizing it. She vows she will never work like that again. One reason is because, "I now have a life to live - a husband, a daughter, teaching." She calls the way in which she wrote "Pilgrim", the fanaticism of her twenties, and says she knew she would live to regret it -- and has!

When asked what role feelings play in her work, she says: "Feelings have no place in writing." She thinks it is the job of the writer to make the reader feel. You are writing a book, she proclaims in a tone that sounds irritated, "you are not finger painting, and you're not talking to a shrink!" "Do the task," she says.

She speaks of herself slogging off to her studio seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year to "do the task; to exercise whatever skill you have, or can muster in the service of your art."

She began her autobiography in ernest when her daughter was three weeks old. Writers write about their childhood she says, "because very likely it is the occasion of their last actual experience."

She was prodded to write her own story by an autobiography of Edwin Muir, who was a translator of Kafka's and a poet. He had written his story in two parts. The first part was wonderful, according to Dillard, because it was written on the eve of World War I when he was quite young. "God! it's the best!" she exclaims. "He thought he was going to die when he wrote it, but he didn't die, and when he wrote part II, he wrote it just prior to the second World War. The second part was full of name dropping and was a crashing bore!" She learned, after reading Muir's autobiography, you should write your story before you've lived long enough to become "a pompous ass."

Dillard smiles when told she has been compared to Emerson and Thoreau and says she is honored to be mentioned with those gentlemen since they are two of her literary heroes.

Ms. Dillard speaks with great exuberance about her favorite writers. Regarding Melville, she says, "Melville is like a wellspring. I don't care what I write about, I want the passion - the Melville kind of passion - to be there."

She agrees that her writing is intense and she does work very slowly at it, despite the fact that the finished product gives the impression of having been written effortlessly.
She is a bit unnerved by the notoriety she has received. Her living room is cluttered with gifts from admirers and she says she is touched by these gestures but does not feel comfortable with the fact that many fans think nothing of coming out to visit her.

"They wouldn't dream of knocking on John Updike's door," she says. "But the notion is that as a woman writer you're available and giving. And in fact, I am." She takes a long sip from her coffee mug. I smile and do the same.

Her husband, Gary Clevidence, is an anthropologist. This civic and community-minded family takes part in the social activities in and around Middletown, and at Wesleyan. Dillard, like in her childhood days, plays softball (she's a second baseman). I told her my husband plays in an over fifty league and her eyes lit up as if she'd just discovered a new species of plant. She wanted to know what position he played and what his batting average was. I had the feeling I could invite her to dinner and the two of them would talk ball all evening.

Her writings reveal a broad range of interests from physics to literary criticism, to her favorite music, the blues. Many readers wonder what her real discipline is. There is none, she says. "The only thing I really know about is writing."
She wrote Encounters With Chinese Writers about a "moment" drawn from her participation in a delegation of American writers to the People's Republic of China in 1986. "I didn't know doodly-squat about China when I went there, but when I came back I read zillions of books. It (the visit) opened up a whole new section of the library for me." Dillard claims she has no "experience" to write about. "I only have books," she says, and she feels that she may not be learning a whole lot about the world, but she claims she is certainly learning her way "around the stacks."

Her book, The Living, was her first attempt at fiction writing and was not met with enthusiastic reviews. Some readers have no doubt found it dull, but Dillard fans who love her style will find the charm and passion with which she writes, waiting on each page.

What this author tries to do in her writing is what she instructs her students to do. In The Writing Life, she explains, "one of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes." It is evident when reading Dillard's books that she has taken her own advice.

In Living By Fiction, she explains an extreme and fantastic view of art she subscribes to (interpreted from an idea of Buckminster Fuller's). His idea was roughly this: The purpose of people on earth is to counteract the tide of entropy described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Dillard explains: physical things are falling apart at a terrific rate; people put things together. People build bridges, write music and novels and constitutions; they have ideas. That is why people are here, she claims, the universe needs somebody or something to keep it from falling apart.

She goes on further to say she believes the very act of producing art carries weight in the universe. Thoughts count, Dillard says, "and the lone artist with his thumb in the dike is saving the universe. He does not need a publisher or a gallery or a producer or a symphony orchestra." She wonders further if "a decent line in a decent sonnet doesn't weigh in the balance with a bonfire, say, or the force of a very high tide," and further still, she asks, "could a complex and ordered novel pull the stars from their courses?"

This is how Annie Dillard thinks, and when she says good-bye to you she places her arm around your shoulder and gives you a hug and you know you have made a new friend. A friend you could invite over for hot dogs after the big game; who if she met your weird cousin would engage him in conversation and make you see him in a new light. I thanked her for being so generous with her time and stepped out into the sunlight refreshed and renewed.