Listen Here (22 page)

(April 30, 1945–)

Annie Dillard grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her memoir,
An American Childhood
, focuses on her early years and her parents. She attended Hollins College in southwest Virginia and earned her B.A. in 1967 and her M.A. in 1968, both in English literature.

Dillard spent what she describes as “twelve wonderful years” in Roanoke, Virginia, where, in 1973, she wrote
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
, which won the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction in 1975. In addition to
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
, her nonfiction narratives include
For the Time Being
(favored by critics),
Holy the Firm, The Writing Life
, and
Encounters with Chinese Writers.
She has two books of poetry, and
Teaching a Stone to Talk
is a collection of her narrative essays.

In 1975, she moved to coastal Washington state and later set
The Living
, an historical novel, there.
The Living
made the Century's Best 100 Western Novels list. Her books have appeared on four separate lists of the 100 Best Books of the Century: western novel, nonfiction, essays, and spiritual writing.

She married Gary Clevidence in 1980 and had a daughter, Rose. She also has mothered part-time for many decades two daughters, Corinne and Shelley.

In 1988, Dillard married author Robert D. Richardson. She now lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and in Wythe County, Virginia. She avoids publicity and appearances. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Phi Beta Kappa, and the Key West Saturday Morning Volleyball Association.

Novel:
The Living
(1992).
Nonfiction:
For the Time Being
(1999),
The Annie Dillard Reader
(1994),
The Writing Life
(1989),
An American Childhood
(1987),
Encounters with Chinese Writers
(1984),
Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
(1982),
Living by Fiction
(1982),
Holy the Firm
(1977),
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
(1974).
Poetry:
Mornings Like This: Found Poems
(1995),
Tickets for a Prayer Wheel
(1974).

Carol Schaechterle Loranger, “Dillard, Annie,”
Oxford Companion to Women Writing in the United States
(1995), 249–50. Nancy C. Parrish,
Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers
(1998). Grace Suh, “Ideas are tough; irony is easy: Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Dillard speaks,”
The Yale Herald (4
October 1996).

I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginias Blue Ridge. An anchorite's hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. Its a good place to live; there's a lot to think about. The creeks—Tinker and Carvin's—are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. The mountains—Tinker and Brushy, McAfee's Knob and Dead Man—are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.

…

Like the bear who went over the mountain, I went out to see what I could see. And, I might as well warn you, like the bear, all that I could see was the other side of the mountain: more of same. On a good day I might catch a glimpse of another wooded ridge rolling under the sun like water, another bivouac. I propose to keep here what Thoreau called “a meterological journal of the mind,” telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead.

I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn't the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he'll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least
where
it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can't learn why.

So I think about the valley. It is my leisure as well as my work, a game. It is a fierce game I have joined because it is being played anyway, a game of both skill and chance, played against an unseen adversary—the conditions of time—in which the payoffs, which may suddenly arrive in a blast of light at any moment, might as well come to me as anyone else. I stake the time I'm grateful to have, the energies I'm glad to direct. I risk getting stuck on the board, so to speak, unable to move in any direction, which happens enough, God knows; and I risk the searing, exhausting nightmares that plunder rest and force me face down all night long in some muddy ditch seething with hatching insects and crustaceans.

But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure. I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.

I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves “lightning marks,” because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees. The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broadleaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood.

Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. Power broods and lights. We're played on like a pipe; our breath is not our own. James Houston describes two young Eskimo girls sitting cross-legged on the ground, mouth on mouth, blowing by turns each other's throat cords, making a low, unearthly music. When I cross again the bridge that is really the steers' fence, the wind has thinned to the delicate air of twilight; it crumples the water's skin. I watch the running sheets of light raised on the creek's surface. The sight has the appeal of the purely passive, like the racing of light under clouds on a field, the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed. The breeze is the merest puff, but you yourself sail headlong and breathless under the gale force of the spirit.

(August 27, 1956–)

Hilda Downer was born and raised in the small western North Carolina community of Bandana, a place so named because a red bandana tied to a laurel signaled the train where to leave the mail. Her birthplace is crucial to her poetry, providing its remote settings, natural imagery, and indigenous language.

She graduated from Appalachian State University with a double major in English and biology in 1978. After completing a nursing degree in 1983, Downer earned an M.A. in English from Appalachian State University in 1989 and an M.EA. in poetry from Vermont College in 1996. Having worked as a newspaper editor, a waitress, a children's room librarian, a home health nurse, and, for more than a decade, a psychiatric nurse, she continues to practice nursing and to teach English classes at Appalachian State University.

“Just as I have come full circle, moving from being ashamed of the shack I grew up in to being proud,” she explains, “I have had to move from feeling that writing meant there was something wrong with me to feeling that it is the main thing right with me.” For a decade she almost gave up writing, she says, “to devote time to my children and mostly to trying to make an awful marriage work.” Because of her personal struggle, she says, “I feel a responsibility to younger writers to encourage them to never allow the same strange ideas that people in the mountains transferred to me—that you should never get divorced, for instance—to interfere with what is right with them.” She lives in Sugar Grove, outside of Boone, North Carolina, with her two sons.

Poetry:
Down to the Wire
(forthcoming),
Bandana Creek
(1979).
Autobiographical essay:
“Mutant in Bandana,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 99–104.

Fred Chappell, “Double Language: Three Appalachian Poets,”
Appalachian Journal
8:1 (autumn 1980), 55–59. Joyce Dyer, “Hilda Downer,” in
Bloodroot
, 98. Judy Jones, review of
Bloodroot, Lexington Herald-Leader
, 3 May 1998. Anna Dunlap Higgins, “‘To Walk These Hills': Poetic Inspiration for Appalachian Poet Hilda Downer.”
North Carolina Literary Review
12 (2003), forthcoming.

from
Bandana Creek
(1979)

Grey house in which grandparent
would have grown, where a
wife may have taken for granted
what I watch once—
man shaving in porch dark.
All that matters is his back, naked.

Downed in bed,
his feet extend drawerknobs over edge.
The cliff of his side,
too big to feel my presence,
everyone he has ever touched
touches me.

from
Bandana Creek

I crawl into bed as a woman,
and lay thinking as a woman.
Quilt covers and reveals.
I want to express the soft of my mouth,
that a dead poet knows me.
Blue pains and tight fears
embraced with sky of quiet,
I wait as a woman waits.
I like my own smell.
No man has known me beautiful
when I am alone and woman,
still or stirring,
a drawing power in the shoulders,
waist hidden from vertical glance,
breast to hip.
And between the ticking hips,
springs and cogs,
scraping and bleeding,
pain compensation for kicking,
how would this child have been?
Imagined no less than noble,
souls subtly pass through.
I must feel their lives for them.
And however I see myself,
connector for man,
reporter for God,
the most I could be is woman.

from
Appalachian Journal
(1993)

Tooth of my son,
its pale body slides loose in its coffin,
the bright orange treasure chest
the dentist provided.

Where the gum ignited and swelled the eyes closed,
the empty place, left sunken as red soil,
haunts with the whistling
of a gaped toothed graveyard
and how smiling in moonlight.

Tooth of my son,
cradled so fragile I cannot touch
and so alone in its whiteness,
proves braver than its biggest rattle.
Its small body of a stone christening gown,
I think of antique pictures of still babies
in handmade white dresses
propped for viewing in their darkest wood embrace.
This tooth is a smaller heaviness
though continuous like the gift of loneliness,
and it hurts just the same.
After marriage and mortgages,
the value of this tooth may go unrecognized,
that once was the dagger in the mother's heart.
It will be lost as my own ashes,
a false pollen sifted onto butter-and-eggs
by honeybees of Bandana.

Long before this loss, long before I lost baby teeth,
I trembled into solemn woods
with wondering how we could live forever and ever and ever
or who made God?
Now I anticipate that my son might be wasp-stung
in his lifetime, and sometimes I cry
imagining a fall out of a tree or a bicycle wreck.
I try to bite off some of my death each day.

Tooth of my son,
little death embalmed in hard fact,
what will you remember of us?
Incisor like the hitchhiker behind the windshield
of a stranger's truck,
what was your view of the world each time my son smiled?
And, my son, what will you remember of childhood?

What do you think of your mother pressing her hands to a great rock

until I turn to you with tears of joy?
Will these tears sink pebbles in your memory's well?
Will one of those memories become my tombstone
as a lost baby tooth of your child will become yours?