Her essay, like the subject matter she describes, goes on millions of tangents simultaneously, with an abandoned energy that, for some students, seemed unwarranted. “In what ways is form meeting content, here?” I asked, and we discussed how Dillard’s chapter, in tackling the complexity and messiness and intricacy of the natural, biological world, is also complex and messy and intricate. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork-for it doesn’t particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl-but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. I then read from the middle of the chapter, where Dillard writes, Aside from a few echoes and patterns, the reverse outline we created appeared random and confusing and discursive. When I asked what they saw, they replied, “a mess.” Which was true. By the end of the hour, the board was crammed with phrases such as “red blood cells,” “the goldfish in the bowl,” “chloroplasts,” “evolution and trees,” “eye pouches and Henle’s loop,” “intricacy and red blood cells and speckles.” To help my students digest it, I broke the class into groups and had each group take a five-page chunk of the chapter “Intricacy.” They identified their section’s major images, symbols, and ideas, and they transferred those glosses to the board. It is a hard book to read and a hard book to teach. It is meditative and philosophical, chockfull of allusions. To be sure: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is dense. I hesitated, as a result, when assigning the book to my class because I couldn’t bear the thought of them not appreciating it, or-perhaps even more-the book no longer living up to my memory of it. Reading such passages when younger, I felt pummeled, played on, breathed upon.

We’re played on on like a pipe our breath is not our own,” Dillard writes (15). “Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. I was struggling with religion, trying to understand my own beliefs, and Dillard’s environmental spirituality-deep and dark and unnerving in its questioning-felt like a new kind of communion. The first time I read it, I was a quiet, intense high school student who enjoyed gardening, writing, and hiking. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is, without a doubt, my favorite book.

It was the worst teaching moment I’ve had,” she said. “I once taught a book that I loved, and the students hated it. When I first assigned Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in an environmental writing course, I immediately recalled a warning my mentor had given early in my teaching career.

Tinker creek book