Galvanized by reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek beginning in the summer of 1976, I studied with Annie Dillard at Western Washington University in the autumn of 1978. Given that Pilgrim superficially resembles a nature book by a nature writer, the name and scope of the class—"Techniques of Fiction"—at first confused.

But not for long. Annie was not particularly interested in nature; she was and is generally interested in everything. As hundreds to thousands of popular and scholarly writings by now tiresomely reflect, Pilgrim's scope and subject matter resulted from her encounter with a particularly leaden nature book. Determined to do better, better she indeed did, to the point not only of winning the Pulitzer Prize but also energizing with Pilgrim consideration of a new literary genre, Creative Nonfiction, a confection itself characterizable as fiction, particularly, even peculiarly, in the case of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which throughout its pages ascribes to the fantastic supernatural objective agency in the natural world. (That Annie's next book, Holy the Firm, is also classed as nonfiction is even more absurd.) Reading either book is best enjoyed as encountering a butterfly with beautiful wings. (The one non-optional Dillard work if you read any Dillard at all? "This Is the Life.")

Ironically, Dillard husband Robert D. Richardson, Jr., would best Pilgrim for concision of its selfsame message when, for a 2012 interview, he wrote:

I was supposed to teach American Literature so I read a lot of Thoreau, and one day I read a description of where to look for muskrats feeding along a stream. I went out and walked down to the stream 50 yards from my home in Denver, a stream called Harvard Gulch. It ran under a shopping center in a concrete box, then it came out and wandered west amid weeds and urban rubble. Thoreau said to look along the bank right at water level and to stand still for a few minutes and right where the grasses stuck up through the water you would see a muskrat if there were any. I stood still for a bit, and sure enough in a few minutes I saw a muskrat in the middle of the city 2,000 miles from Walden Pond. And I realized that Concord is where you are right now, and Walden Pond is the nearest body of water.

Truly, as I had written in the months leading up to my sojourn in Bellingham, if you loved Here, you'd be home by now.