Annie Dillard and the Writing Life

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Whenever there’s a writer I really like and I hear that they’re teaching a class at a university or college, I always try to imagine what that must be like to be sitting there in their class, hearing them. Right, soaking it up, right? Learning from them. Yes, what exactly do they do?

If you want a taste of how Annie Dillard teaches students, check out an essay by Alexander Chee. It’s in the Morning News, which is an online magazine.

And he took a class with Annie Dillard in 1989. And he really gives you a sense in this long essay about what that must have been like. And one of the things that he said she emphasized again and again and again is the importance of verbs.

She had the students take an essay that they’d written, and then they cut up the essay sentence by sentence. And they cut out the very best sentences, like literally cut it out from a piece of paper and put them on the floor and then start writing sentences to connect their very best sentences.

Oh, yeah. I’ve heard of this technique.

Oh, really? Really? Super cool.

And the other thing that she had them do was something that she supposedly learned from Samuel Johnson. She makes them count their verbs and see if they can up their verb count per page.

I’ve never heard of that.

Isn’t that interesting?

That’s astonishing, yeah.

And so, of course, after I read all these instructions from Annie Dillard, I thought, I’ve got to go back and look at her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which is one of my favorites.

And I went back to this image that’s haunted me for decades since I read it the first time. She’s talking about walking alongside a creek, and she sees a frog sticking out of the water.

And she writes, He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled. And began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped. His very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I gaped, bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drain frog. Then the shadow glided away. I had read about the giant water bug, but never seen one.

The frog I saw was being sucked by a giant water bug. I’d been kneeling on the island grass when the unrecognizable flap of frog skin settled on the creek bottom, swaying. I stood up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldn’t catch my breath.

That was a verb explosion, wasn’t it?

I was trying to count and I lost count.

Well, that is wonderful.

Yeah, well, not for the frog.

You can watch. I went to YouTube and you can see videos of this. It’s awful.

With these giant water bugs due to frogs.

I’ve never heard of that.

I didn’t know they existed. It was so compelling. That image has haunted me all these years.

How can the beauty of such writing compare with the thing that she’s writing about? What a kind of counterpoint.

Yeah, right?

So that’s wonderful. I’ve got to say, now I have to check out Annie Dillard and all her books.

Yes, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And the article was by Alexander Chee and in the online magazine, The Morning News, right?

Yes, check it out.

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