Remembering the great Annie Dillard.

Annie Dillard, the masterful stylist and brilliant thinker, has died at 81. Her death was confirmed by her literary executor, Maggie Nelson. Dillard, who wrote in many forms and experiments, was an invigorating writer whose dedication and care seemed to make anything possible.

Her first book, the Pulitzer Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was a Walden for a new age, a psalm to nature and the passing of seasons, written at night in a college library while she drank chocolate milk. The complications from Pilgrim’s immediate success sent Dillard in search of new ways of writing. She published essays, poems, criticism, novels, journalism, and a best selling reflection on the life of a writer.

I particularly love her book of found poems Mornings Like This—though not her words, it’s a wonderful showcase of her intelligence, wit, and lyricism. As she wrote in The Writing Life, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” Why not spend an hour with Dillard’s writing, and some reflections on her life and work from her friends and admirers on Lit Hub?

What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying patient that would not enrage by its triviality? The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses—to secure each sentence before building on it—is that original writing fashions a form.

It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop. Perfecting the work inch by inch, writing from the first word toward the last, displays the courage and fear this method induces.

A soft but straight throw to my chest. All of those first throws were fine and then she short-hopped me and the ball went spinning into the concrete sidewalk, clipping my shin, and heading down the street toward Spring Bayou. I broke into a jog and scooped it up with my glove.