I will always associate Annie Dillard with a fencing mask.
One thread of memory tied to the place we were both students, three decades apart.
A 1967 graduate of Hollins College, Dillard is synonymous with creative writing at Hollins, now a university steeped in literary tradition. She received her Master of Arts in English there in 1968, and in 1975, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
Dillard died last week in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, at age 81, with more than a half-century of poetry, nonfiction books, essays and fiction that stretch beyond her young success with “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” which sharply observed the natural world near her then-home in Roanoke County.
Dillard’s words, in that small way that nudges large change, shifted all the details that became my life. But it was not “Pilgrim” that steered me to this place.
After my junior year of high school in 1992, I completed a summer program at Washington and Lee University. It was the first time I had been to western Virginia, living near the ocean as the daughter of a career Coast Guardsman. A kind and supportive W&L law professor gave me two pieces of advice in my exit interview: 1) “Read Annie Dillard’s ‘The Writing Life,’” and 2) “check out Hollins College.”
Through grace and scholarships, I would take root there. I would learn what it is like to be in a place where courses across disciplines elevated writing as a craft, whether or not you would ever write a book that would win a Pulitzer.
Ripple effects of ‘The Writing Life’
Last week, Hollins posted a tribute to Dillard, who received the university’s Distinguished Alumna Award in 2007.
Hollins President Mary Dana Hinton shared reflections in an emailed statement: “Annie Dillard is among our most illustrious alumnae, and Hollins is honored to have played such an important role in her observations of our world as well as her writing. I’ve heard many stories from her peers who recall her writing for untold hours in our library and who remember her outstanding ability to make even the smallest moments special. Hollins will miss Annie Dillard, and we are truly honored to have been a part of her life and her legacy.”
Hollins has seen six decades of writing students since Dillard’s days as one.
Creative writing workshops threaded through my undergraduate years, even while I majored in history. Poets, novelists, historians — some Hollins graduates, some visiting speakers — flowed through campus, and I was afforded rich chances to hear and meet historians David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin, poet Henry Taylor, novelist and screenwriter Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey and many others.
Somewhat unexpectedly but with gratitude, I landed in the Master of Arts in English writing program, at that time a one-year cohort capped at 16 students, following in Dillard’s footsteps exactly 30 years later.
The Hollins writing experience distilled to one element: Revise, revise, and then when you think you have sifted enough to see gold flecks in your pan, revise again.
Eulogies for Dillard, such as one by National Public Radio, trained the eye on this quality of her life and work. Compress description until nothing extraneous remains. Simultaneously, don’t hoard experiences. Use them all. You will not pass this way again.
Reunion, disguises and a sense of place for pilgrims
In 1997, Dillard was celebrating her 30th class reunion at the annual reunion gathering, primarily of classes at five-year intervals. Two weeks after graduation, a classmate and I were the elders of a student work crew helping Hollins staff facilitate the endeavor.
On a June evening on the brick patio outside the campus sports facility, we all scurried around to assist alumnae and run errands. There, it became apparent that some conspiracy had taken place to help one famous member of the Class of ’67 mingle more privately, by virtue of a nametag swap. The woman wearing Annie Dillard’s nametag was someone else.
At some point, another tactic to preserve her privacy emerged. That is why, whenever someone mentions something solemn from her trove of golden words, I first picture a woman poised casually at a reception, head completely obscured by a fencing mask, walled away except from classmates who knew her before she was THE Annie Dillard.
In 2014, Hollins Theatre presented a stage adaptation of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” in which adapter/director Andy Belser and actor and Hollins graduate Rachel Nelson joined then-theater chair Ernie Zulia to create and produce the work.
Longtime Roanoke journalist Mike Allen recounted memories from Zulia of that production in a 2024 story for Cardinal News examining the legacy of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” Zulia noted that Annie Dillard gave her blessing to the adaptation but had not planned to attend. He later learned, however, that she had slipped into a performance, disguised in a hoodie, baggy jeans and crutches, and that she had “loved it.”
Hoodie and a fencing mask, all fit to the same purpose. I smiled at the time, yet feel a shade of sadness that success would prompt such a need.
In addition to the Pulitzer, the Hollins tribute noted, Dillard’s lifelong honors included a 1975 New York Press Club Award for Excellence, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts/Literature grants in the 1980s, and a collection of honorary doctorates. Dillard was one of 10 recipients of the 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded the following year.
A 2014 story in The Roanoke Times cited Dillard’s discomfiture with the success of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” saying she was happier with some of her later works.
But though Dillard lived in the Roanoke Valley only about 12 years, she returned to the region regularly to visit Hollins and, eventually, spend autumn visits at cabins in Wythe County.
For over half a century, she has allowed “Pilgrim” readers to vicariously walk by Tinker and Carvins creeks, look up at Tinker and Brushy mountains and McAfee Knob, and glimpse what we who live here can feel, in her words then: “The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.”
Echoes of Tinker Creek
Allen’s story explored the possibilities and challenges of creating a physical testament to the book along a waterway that winds through private property.
Beyond cultural considerations, the creek that inspired Dillard would become part of a larger conversation about stormwater management.
Within the book, Dillard recounts in a chapter named “Flood” how the remnants of 1972’s Hurricane Agnes roiled Tinker Creek, swamped a neighbor’s house and chipped away at a neighborhood bridge. After her descriptions, she splices in the disastrous scene in Richmond, where all the floodwaters converged and plunged the capital into darkness. She counts Roanoke as lucky, overshadowed by mayhem strewn along the East Coast.
In November 1985, the remnants of Hurricane Juan would concentrate destruction here. The flood’s wake in the Roanoke Valley included impacts on Hollins. Fishburn Library, built in the 1950s and precursor to the stately Wyndham Robertson Library that opened in 1999 across campus, was swamped in 1985 as Carvins Creek and Tinker Creek rose with all the floodwaters, as an alumna recalled in this 2025 collection of memories. Photos taken after the flood showed books set out in the sun to dry.
A bond referendum in 1989 approved funding toward the $72 million Roanoke River Flood Reduction Project, a joint venture with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That project concluded in 2012, and flood reduction work continues on the Roanoke River’s tributaries.
With flood abatement reaching campus, the old library was reimagined as the Richard Wetherill Visual Arts Center. Only some of us can squint and see the kernel of an unassuming, low-slung library where nearly half a century of students digested and reassembled words.
Dillard’s words among them.
Eclipses across time
For her skill at elevating the commonplace of the natural world, Annie Dillard’s conveyance of a rare event is shattering.
This past week, I ran across an essay Dillard wrote about the total solar eclipse of Feb. 26, 1979, printed in her 1982 book “Teaching a Stone to Talk” and reprinted in 2024 with Dillard’s permission by the online journal Pioneer Works. She witnessed the eclipse in Washington’s Yakima Valley.
A partial solar eclipse, which she had seen in 1970, was no preparation for what would unfold with the total.
“The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience,” she notes, but then she carves out a path accomplishing that very thing, using a dense onslaught of language merging the ethereal and mundane, breathtaking and grounding.
These few minutes of celestial cataclysm weave one more thin strand between the life she lived and mine.
In the late 1970s, a boy in Arkansas looked in a library book and saw an “X” marked on a treasure map. The nexus marked paths of totality for total solar eclipses in 2017 and 2024, fantastical years away, but located near his hometown. He purposed then to see them both.
At the turn of the century, he would move to Virginia to work for The Roanoke Times. He would meet a girl who had gone to Hollins and stayed, becoming a copy editor at the newspaper right after graduating from the creative writing program. They would marry.
With young children and the busyness of family life, he would take the first leg of this decades-long quest alone, viewing the Aug. 21, 2017, total eclipse in western Kentucky. He would propose to share the next date.
And so it was that our family of four joined the family of his childhood friend on April 8, 2024, as they hospitably shared their lake house with us for the experience. My husband, Cardinal Weather writer Kevin Myatt, gave an account in his column of this singular day for our family.
Later, he created a photo collage for one of our sons, for whom the experience especially resonated. Daily, we look and remember these four minutes that stand apart from time.
“What you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know,” Dillard wrote. Thanks to the crossing paths of a girl whose brush with Dillard’s work had set a certain trajectory for her life, and a boy whose dream of seeing two eclipses with crossing paths came to fruition, I know she was right in saying this.
Benediction
That 2024 story about the effort to build a monument to “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” prompted me to forage for that book, “The Writing Life,” and a few others from college days. I revisited pieces of them, then set them on my nightstand shelf. Other books balanced atop in intervening time.
Last week, Kevin texted me that Annie Dillard had died.
Then, reflection, and a return to the stack.
For over 50 years, people have turned to Annie Dillard’s multifaceted work for rumination on the natural world, theology, wordcraft and the nature of life and death. There are many others more knowledgeable about the breadth of her writing, her Hollins days and her developing philosophies over time than I.
And yet, with prayer for guidance and grace at a succession of turns, a younger me heard of Annie Dillard and the place that had nurtured her words and found a new home and life in the shadow of mountains ringing a Southwest Virginia valley. Nearing my own 30th reunion, I’ve started looking through words I wrote then, some pages with encouraging scribbles from professors and fellow students. Old words do the work of an internal photo album.
Last week, I found I had turned down the corner of two pages in “The Writing Life.” Too long ago to know reasons why, surely one of them was this passage: “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.”
