PAYING ATTENTION WITH ANNIE DILLARD

Annie Dillard was only in her twenties when she began writing what would become the nature writing classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Over several seasons, she took her notebook to the creek and paid close attention to the muskrats, water bugs, and birds, focusing on the miraculous minutiae of the material world, and compiled what Thoreau might have called “a meteorological journal of the mind.” With a child’s capacity for awe, Dillard captured what she found to be holy and singular about nature, and reveled in the “scandal of particularity” that so bedeviled theologians. “Why, we might as well ask, not a plane tree, instead of a bo?” Dillard wonders. “I never saw a tree that was no tree in particular.” Since its publication, Pilgrim has inspired generations of writers who return to it for its commitment to specificity and its joyous prose. What does the moon look like? Like “a smudge of chalk,” or “softly frayed, like the heel of a sock.” What do you call the shedding of leaves in fall? “A striptease.” What does cold air do? “Bites one’s nose like pepper.” (And so on.)

In this cross-genre seminar, we will read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and use the book as a guiding text to hone our own faculties of attention, observational writing skills, and descriptive ability. We will work and rework our descriptions so that no tree is just a tree, and no sunset is just a sunset. The output of this course will not be stories, essays, or poems, but rather, lists of descriptions of oranges, the texture of bark, weather, and a repertoire of new vocabulary words for describing colors and materials. Weekly exercises will prompt us to become nature writers in the city: we will stalk pigeons, inventory trash and weeds, study maps of buried streams, and examine a drop of puddle water through a microscope. We will dissect Dillard’s prose to see how she puts her words together to achieve various effects. We will compile lists of active verbs and make our sentences somersault and sing. Though taking inspiration from Pilgrim and based in the natural world, the exercises in this class are meant to carry over into other kinds of writing; paying close attention is an asset no matter what the subject matter. Field trips will include a walk in Riverside Park, a visit to the Greenpoint Sewage Plant, and an optional day-trip to the Beinecke Library to se