Dillard Enters the Wilderness

Previous fifteen posts in this series on Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard, super duper genius writers.

Throughout the early 1970s, Annie Dillard — a “faculty wife” and writer, according to her earliest bios — is landing poems and other pieces in major publications. She’s in The American Scholar and The Atlantic, and various journals that follow the naming-form [Place] + [Review]. As early as 1969, she lands a review of Julio Cortazar’s Cronopios and Famas in the NYT.¹

In 1974, the year of Tickets For a Prayer Wheel and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she lands a piece in Living Wilderness, the magazine of the Wilderness Society. (The same issue features a review of Pilgrim.) It’s called “Thinking About Language,” and features this charming anecdote: