It is absolutely impossible to overstate the importance of Annie Dillard on my life. My life as a reader, my life as a writer (so, consequently now, my life as an editor).
I was assigned An American Childhood as summer reading at some point in high school, and although I’d of course been a voracious reader before that, it was really the first time that I had that soul-deep sense “this is for me.” She, as a writer, was for me. Although I was never much of an outdoorsy kid (I was far too prissy), her work nevertheless inspired me to make brief forays into the small patch of woods behind my grandmother’s house, right on the Indiana/Illinois state line, to sit on the banks of Plum Creek and think about the expansiveness of the universe.
I devoured as many of her books as I could get my hands on in the mid-to-late ’90s via our local mall’s Barnes & Noble, and I was inordinately pleased with myself when I immediately recognized her authorial voice in an otherwise anonymous excerpt from her essay “Soujourner” on that year’s AP English exam.
My class was given an assignment at some point that year to write a formal letter to a local business (training us all to be good little future middle-class middle managers, I guess), but I stretched the bounds of the instructions and wrote, instead, what amounted to a fan letter to Annie Dillard, in care of her publisher. And she, unbelievably, wrote me back!!! I had mentioned in my message something about my own informal, self-directed studies of Taoism, and she in turn commended Meister Eckhart’s work to me. What grace. What a blessing.
Back in the mid-2000s when I first joined Tumblr, I would occasionally see quotes from her work popping up on my dashboard, and to this day “#Annie Dillard” remains the only tag I ever set up there, just so I wouldn’t miss any mention of her. I was always hoping that some new writing would be released somewhere, though I suppose I was also hedging against the inevitability of the day of her eventual death, so I would be sure to see the news. Instead, word came via a text from my husband this morning.
There’s no proper way to sum this up, because there’s no end to her work’s importance in my life, in a very actively ongoing sense. I don’t actually even talk about her and her books that much, publicly, because her influence on and importance to me is too deep, too sacred, really. As she writes in “Living Like Weasels,” “I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it.” I’m endlessly grateful for all her brilliant forgetting.
Queen of Peaches 