11 October 2019
Pilgrim. The word implies desperation. It means: devotee, traveler, wayfarer and believer. It means: one who abandons the past in hopes of something new, something special.
I first sponged up Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek because the whole thing—in its way—“takes place” in Virginia, in a pocket of my once-upon-a-time home-place.
I saw Tinker Creek as my kind of returned-to origin story—whatever that could mean.
With Annie going about her deliberations and musings along a creek, tucked in beside the Blue Ridge Mountains and only a couple hours’ drive from where I was born, what came from my initial interest—my initial draw to the book—is a wide swath of landscape and legend, the exploratory roads of a mind on the move in the oldest of American regions: Appalachia.
In reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I wanted to go back to Appalachia in my own way, to somehow find where I was from and move through it.
With Annie’s wanderings, both on and off the page, I thought I could learn to see where I was from again and trust what I found.
Writing from Here 