Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Book by Annie DillardWikipedia
62
MENTIONS
27
EPISODES
26
PODCASTS
Search complete. 62 mentions across 27 episodes found for "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek".
Oct 15, 2026
Carlos EireHOST
It was pre-Christian and to a considerable extent non-Christian.
Carlos EireHOST
So between 1600— And 1612, he's working as a shoemaker and writing a book about his experiences.
Carlos EireHOST
And that book, which he finished in 1612, the title of it was Aurora, or Morning Redness at the Rising of the Sun, at the sunrise.
Carlos EireHOST
Morning Redness
Alberto de la CruzHOST
at Sunrise.
Carlos EireHOST
And it was not, he did not intend for this to go public, but it did.
Carlos EireHOST
in manuscript form not printed in manuscript form it circulated he acquired a readership and obviously he was talking to people about all these things too at the very same time he acquired kind of a a core number of followers who thought very highly of him and were intrigued by what he was saying and thought it was correct.
Carlos EireHOST
But of course, this is when trouble begins, when his book Aurora starts circulating.
Caitríona LallyGUEST
It was just a new approach to, to reading or analyzing that, that was really interesting.
Caitríona LallyGUEST
And one writer was Annie Dillard, and it was Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Caitríona LallyGUEST
And so that's when I was introduced to her kind of na- nature writing, and the close, the close reading of nature, or the close...
Caitríona LallyGUEST
I loved that.
Caitríona LallyGUEST
And I think that came to me a bit with Eggshells, the kind of the detail.
Caitríona LallyGUEST
It's, it's not nature I'm writing about, but this just absolute minuscule, kind of microscopic look at tiny things that seem to add up to something bigger.
Caitríona LallyGUEST
But I came from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to The, The Writing Life, her gorgeous book of...
Caitríona LallyGUEST
It's mini- I want...
Andrew ProctorHOST
When Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, she was the youngest woman ever to do so.
Andrew ProctorHOST
She won for a book published the previous year called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which is a nonfiction book that meditates on writing, solitude, the natural world, and spirituality.
Andrew ProctorHOST
The book had a profound impact at the time of publication and garnered comparisons to Henry David Thoreau's Walden.
Andrew ProctorHOST
Dillard went on to have a genre-bending career, publishing over a dozen titles, including book-length nonfiction, novels, essays, and criticism, in addition to more than 25 years of teaching at universities in the Pacific Northwest and the East Coast.
Andrew ProctorHOST
In 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal for her life's work.
Andrew ProctorHOST
In this talk, her characteristic sense of irony and humor elicits huge laughs from the audience, and her generous spirit invites quiet attention when she tells a story.
Andrew ProctorHOST
She reads two excerpts, first from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and then from a book of essays called Teaching a Stone to Talk.
Andrew ProctorHOST
Whether she's describing muskrats in Virginia or witnessing an eclipse in the Yakima Valley, she draws profound insights into the nature of existence and what the natural world has to tell us about ourselves.
Kennedy WarneGUEST
[laughs] I know, I know.
Kennedy WarneGUEST
It's just, it's, it's funny, isn't it, when a couple happen quick suc- ... lard, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a book.
Kennedy WarneGUEST
She wrote this book when she was 28, which just amazes me because it's a book of such depth and profound thought as bizarre-
Catherine RyanHOST
Annie Dillard, her name is.
Catherine RyanHOST
Yep
Kennedy WarneGUEST
I do hope...
Kennedy WarneGUEST
Annie Dillard.
Kennedy WarneGUEST
Yeah, I do hope many readers have come across that, or if not, it's a, it's a wonderful book.
Warren SmithHOST
It's the story of one of my friends and mentors, Jim Kilgo, who passed away a number of years ago, and his humorous first meeting with the writer Annie Dillard, who died last week on September 15th.
Warren SmithHOST
Annie Dillard's book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is one of the books that made me want to become a writer.
Warren SmithHOST
So, of course, I noticed when she died.
Warren SmithHOST
The story was one that did not quite fit here at Ministry Watch, which I think you'll see when you read it.
Warren SmithHOST
He clerked for Judge Alex Kaczynski.
Warren SmithHOST
of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Sandra Day O'Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Christina DarnellHOST
He's also written two legal textbooks that have become standard books in the field, as well as over 100 law review articles.
Christina DarnellHOST
And then given all that, I get that he's important in legal circles, Warren, but why did you want to feature him here?
Jeff HoffmeyerHOST
The Bible can help.
Jeff HoffmeyerHOST
Scripture is the script, and all 66 books of it can guide us in conversation with God.
Jeff HoffmeyerHOST
The Bible is God's answer to that durative request made in the Gospel of Luke by an unnamed disciple, Lord, teach us to pray.
Jeff HoffmeyerHOST
and welcome to episode 80 of Teach Us to Pray.
Donovan HohnHOST
If you're a reader of The Quarterly, I suspect you're already familiar with at least some of Annie Dillard's work.
Donovan HohnHOST
A poet, essayist, novelist, she's most famous for her second book and first narrative essay, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975.
Donovan HohnHOST
I love all of her books, but my personal favorites are For the Time Being and her 1982 essay collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk.
Donovan HohnHOST
Over the years, she contributed to 10 issues of Lapham's Quarterly.
Aimee JosephGUEST
If we're not noticing where we are and with whom we are and what's going on, noticing the movements in ourselves and those around us and our places.
Aimee JosephGUEST
I mean, I think about Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and it's Annie just writing about one little plot of land, literally.
Aimee JosephGUEST
an entire beautiful classic book about one little plot of land because she noticed she just noticed it and so i was reading um some of thomas hardy's poetry so when thomas hardy was about 70 years old he wrote a poem called afterwards and it's kind of like his this is what i want them to say about me afterwards when i'm gone and the the kind of the the line that kind of the through line that he tweaks a little bit in each verse.
Aimee JosephGUEST
But he basically says, or stanza, he says, I want to be remembered as someone who noticed, right? I want to be remembered as someone who noticed and held space for the great mysteries of life.
John MitchinsonHOST
Anyway, he's a massive Annie Dillard fan, almost as big an Annie Dillard fan as the great Jay Griffiths, who's the author of Wild, An Elemental Journey.
John MitchinsonHOST
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I think, is one of those books that people discover at a certain moment in their lives and have plenty to say about it forever afterwards.
John MitchinsonHOST
And this show definitely
Andy MillerHOST
harvests that.
8 MINS LATER
Andy MillerHOST
Good
John MitchinsonHOST
instinct, I think.
John MitchinsonHOST
The book we're here to discuss is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.
John MitchinsonHOST
First published by Harper Magazine Press in 1974, it's a classic of nature writing that has exerted a huge influence over the genre.
Jason DafnisHOST
Exactly.
Abbie PhelpsGUEST
I mean, it was serendipitous timing rewatching this because Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and a bunch of other wonderful books, died this week.
Abbie PhelpsGUEST
And people have been reposting passages of her writing, and she has one on memory that I think is very apropos to the kind of, you know, the...
Abbie PhelpsGUEST
the way that memories work in this movie where it's like extremely vivid, but it's also decaying.
17 more episodes mention Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
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