More on: Annie Dillard

Duplex isn’t a disenchanted world, where saints have been replaced by stonemasons. It’s not even a world where belief in the soul has been replaced by the fact of robots. It’s a hinged world, a duplex world, where the human and the cosmic, the soul and the stars, stand side by side.

When the dots connect, you feel a pulse of intentionality in a universe that seems to be putting on this show just for you. I wonder if those of us who dwell in books are especially susceptible to such delights.

There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination. What…

The following advice was sent to the creative writing students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, following a series of talks Ms. Dillard presented to the students there. § AFTER I left Chapel Hill, I thought of many things I wish I’d said to you. Here are some of them. Dedicate (donate,…

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard (HarperCollins, 2007) A NEW BOOK by Annie Dillard comes with extraordinarily high expectations. We expect her observations to make us sit up and notice the natural world—and our part in it—with new eyes. We expect to focus small in order to think large. We expect her lyricism to impress, her language…

ARE YOU CONVINCED that everything is going to hell in a handbasket? Down the tubes? Or are you possessed of a more sanguinetemperament? Do you feel that life is getting better every day in every way? Do you believe in progress or regress? What would the make and model of your handbasket happen to be?…

The following is adapted from the commencement address for the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing delivered on August 7, 2010. THIS PROGRAM IS blessed to have its intensive, ten-day residencies at two of the most beautiful places on the continent: the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and…