Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Something more will arise for later, something better. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. 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. Her advice: “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.

I didn’t come to college to think my own thoughts I came to learn what had been thought.” Annie Dillard’s books include Holy the Firm (1977), which is only 66 pages long, but took 14 months to write Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) and The Maytrees (2007). As far as I was concerned, writing in college didn’t consist of what little Annie had to say, but what Wallace Stevens had to say. She says: “In college I learned how to learn from other people. It was so popular that it helped usher in the memoir craze.ĭillard went to college, and ended up marrying her writing professor. She wrote about growing up in Pittsburgh in her autobiography, An American Childhood (1987). She says, “I opened books like jars.” One of her very favorites was The Field Book of Ponds and Streams (1930) by Ann Haven Morgan. That book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), won the Pulitzer Prize, when Annie Dillard was just 29 years old.ĭillard was the daughter of an oil company executive and read voraciously as a child. She decided she had enough for a book and at the very end, she was writing for 15 to 16 hours a day. Eventually, she wrote so much she filled 20 volumes of journals. She’d write about everything she saw, like animals and birds, and even her reflections on theology and literature. In 1970, she began keeping journals of her daily walks around Tinker Creek, by her home outside the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. It’s the birthday of American nonfiction writer and novelist Annie Dillard born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1945).

Annie dillard tinker creek