09/19/2026
A better tribute.
It feels like the loss of a longtime friend. And yet this is the miracle of writing: the engine room of the friendship remains fully in tact.
Put simply, she dazzled me. Her writing could get me out on the ledge over the abyss and dare me to watch her dive. Her writing could leave me breathless with disbelief at what language could do. She could veer into a kind of glossolalia, and yet she had the same raw materials as any of us: just the plain old alphabet. (Apparently caffeine helped. The trick, she explained, was to determine the lethal amount and then back off just a touch.)
She wrote some of the loveliest prose in the English language in a cubicle after hours in a library. A drab woods with a creek that people walked by everyday and ignored turned out to be a realm of the soul. When a muskrat arrived, it was as profound as the transfiguration.
And also: she was one of the funniest humans to ever put pen to paper.
A country music writer told me in the South of France in 1995, much like a doctor writes a prescription for a struggling patient, that I seemed like the kind of lost soul (aka an aspiring writer) that needed to go find, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. What’s it about, I asked. He did his best to explain that it defied explanation. You had to be there.
My ensuing baptism by immersion into the writing of Annie Dillard led to Holy The Firm, and The Writing Life, and An American Childhood, and Teaching A Stone To Talk, and For The Time Being, and maybe my favorite, Mornings Like This, her collection of “found poems.” I’ve never conducted a songwriting workshop without referencing this book with as much affection as I can muster. By way of apology, she explained in the intro that we had been hoodwinked: Mornings Like This contained not a single line of original writing. It turned out she had simply opened one of Vincent’s letters to his brother Theo, or flipped to a page in a junior high biology text book, or perused an old newspaper article about a doomed journey to the North Pole, and then with her tuned ear, her perfect pitch, began pulling lines off the page, forming them into something unexpected, shimmering, brand new.
(Years later, I tried to return the favor. When I opened, The Maytrees, and read the line, They kissed all over Ohio, I immediately sat down and wrote a song called, All Over Ohio.)
In all of her writing, it seemed she was gently pointing out that inspiration was everywhere if we had eyes to see and ears to hear. “We are here to abet Creation and to witness it, to notice each thing, so each thing gets noticed … so that Creation need not play to an empty house.”
If we were in doubt as writers as to how much we should spend, Annie Dillard insisted we spend it all and more — spend the abundance, hold nothing back, sink our teeth into our calling, let it drag us across the face of the earth until the flesh fell from our bones.
How many winter nights by lamplight did I curl up under the comforter in a chilly farm house with, For The Time Being, the weirdly beautiful philosophical psalm that weaves disparate themes together — a brief history of sand, the life of Teilhard de Chardin, Hasidic midrash, birth anomalies (apologies for the euphemism) — a sort of Bach fugue for the spiritual imagination, an unflinching gaze at the astonishing possibility that the holy might well be more unhinged than we can account for?
How many times did I laugh outloud reading, The Writing Life, before taking that final numinous flight with the stunt pilot?
And also, the aside in her incandescent essay, Total Eclipse — her casual mentioning that the difference between a partial eclipse and a total eclipse was the difference between kissing a man and marrying him?
She was all in.
I’m writing this, far from my personal library, in Texas hill country, on September 16, the day the news broke of Annie Dillard’s passing. Apparently she died the day before, September 15, and mysteriously, that evening (9/15/26) before we drove to an airport hotel, I picked up my first edition of Pilgrim At Tinker Creek quite suddenly and sat down and held it and looked at it. I flipped the book open and found the little pamphlet inside with her photo on the cover. I sat on the edge of the bed and just held the book for awhile, felt the heft of it, marveled for a few minutes in silence. I don’t understand any of it, but I sat there and wondered how Annie Dillard was doing.
It reminds me of something that happened on the day I learned Mary Oliver had died. I walked across the winter fields deep into a woods with old beech trees, oaks, maples. I held still for awhile and then realized a great horned owl was watching me. When I returned the gaze of the owl and made eye contact, after a few seconds it flew slowly off into the trees and disappeared.
Maybe holding a favorite book is a way of returning the gaze of a writer for a few moments. A way of saying a deep thank you — for the companionship, the friendship, the delight, the wonder, the thrill and life’s work of the writing itself — when there is no longer need for words.
I’m not in the business of dispelling mystery. I am only in the business of abiding it.
A friend pointed out that with the loss of writers like Annie Dillard, Frederick Buechner, Luci Shaw, Madeleine L’Engle, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver et al, the world feels less mature, like some of the adults have left the room.
And yet the miracle is this: the writing remains. Gone/not gone.
Memory eternal, Annie Dillard.
My heart overflows with gratitude,
Linford Detweiler, Sept. 16, 2026, Wimberley, Texas
