Perspective: Remembering Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard writes, “One day while I was walking along Tinker Creek, thinking nothing at all and I saw a tree with lights in it…I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen.” Because of these words I have seen a tree with lights in it. Dillard woke me to how sentences can sing.
Then when I was sitting in the reception area of Newsweek, waiting for religion editor, Ken Woodward to see me, Dillard’s words startled me: “The churches are children on the floor playing with chemistry sets, mixing up a bunch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.”
When I sent her my poems, she thanked me on a typewritten post card for poems she “admired and enjoyed.” Those words bore down, something like hope: a gentle pointing—-this is the road, walk in it. My brother had just died. My family was gone. I begged off an ugly, painful family dispute.
I have led a life full of good gifts, a life full of loss. It’s funny how a writer’s words can thread through your life, mark you, take you to those scenes bright in your memories. Dillard writes, “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient to grasp your one necessity and not let it go.” That little postcard nudged me toward that one necessity.
I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.