Annie Dillard is Weird

Yup. Just in case you didn’t know, I just brought that little gem to your attention. Meta Ann Doak, who is the"number one sexiest American nature writer of all time" according to “Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour" blog, is weird. But besides that she’s funny, smart and really that’s all you have to be when you’re a writer and I’ll love you forever. So I love Dillard. Have you been to her website? She’s very self-deprecating which I think everyone should appreciate.

I feel like I learn something every time I read Dillard, reinforcing the fact that she is most assuredly smarter than I. Which I’m okay with. She knows more about nature than I’ll ever probably know. I don’t blame myself that she’s lived a life which has given her access to learn and experience things that I never dreamed of. Being a minority most everything is about how the “others” live, this including my own parents lives in their native countries. So seeing how other’s experiences are is like being transported into a completely new world, where everything is different, but life is just the same– equal parts beautiful and terrible.

As someone who wishes to write for a living, Dillard is someone to look up to. She writes with clarity and purpose. And with spirit. Everything she writes has a spirit behind it that inspires me to write. Does that make sense? Let’s pretend it does.

I ended up reading The Writing Life, which I enjoyed infinitely more than Teaching a Stone to Talk mainly because it describes a life and world that I want to become more intimate with. Reading about writers and how they have to work and struggle to write sometimes makes it seem like we’re all in this together– just trying to string together enough letters for everything to start making sense. Or sometimes just smashing the keyboard and hoping that the autocorrect makes some sense of it all.