Annie Dillard: Holy the Firm

Known for her “fearless and unbridled” writing about the natural world, Annie Dillard’s first three non-fiction books conjure lyrical insights so vivid that they seem to burn. So much more than a “nature writer,” Dillard’s observations of whatever she’s looking at—the transient effects of an eclipse viewing in a small town, a near-deadly airplane crash on an island in the Pacific Northwest, the unraveling of a tangled snake-skin she finds wandering through the woods—reveal the living textures of things: their ordinary strangeness and transcendent beauty. We’ll read her Pulitzer-winning classic, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well a book of incandescent travel essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk, which is as sensuous as it is unpredictable. We’ll close with the astounding but brief book-length treatise Holy the Firm, which questions the very nature of suffering in a spiraling rhapsody of prose that’s nothing less than hypnagogic. The visions that Dillard collects in these books can leave one mystified, and viscerally sensing the theological presence she encounters in her travels. Together, we’ll contemplate the power and poetry of this modern mystic and abide with her in a sense of feral wonder.

Texts
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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