The Writing Life

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Dillard Annie

This winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, and listed by the New York Times as one of the best 100 non-fiction books of the century, gives timeless reflections on solitude, writing and faith amid the beautiful though sometimes brutal world of nature on the author's doorstep in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

The Writing Life

Annie Dillard

"For nonwriters, it is a glimpse into the trials and satisfactions of a life spent with words. For writers, it is a warm, rambling, conversation with a stimulating and extraordinarily talented colleague." — Chicago Tribune From Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Dillard, a collection of essays on writing that illuminates the dedication and daring that characterizes a writer's life. In these short essays, Annie Dillard—the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood—illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that characterize the existence of a writer. A moving account of Dillard’s own experiences with the creative process while writing her works, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one of the most mysterious professions. With profound insight and startling imagery, this essential work of literary nonfiction confronts the paradoxes of a writer’s work. The Writer’s Discipline: Dillard explores the daily commitment required to face the blank page, from the practical necessity of a schedule to the metaphysical terror of a single sentence. Artistic Sacrifice: Learn why the part a writer must often jettison is not only the best-written, but the very passage that was to have been the point. A Philosophy of Writing: Through unforgettable metaphors—from a stunt pilot carving the air to a typewriter erupting in flames—Dillard builds a powerful case for what it means to live a life in words. Inspiration for Writers: A profound and deeply honest companion for anyone who has wrestled with the absurd, noble, and necessary task of making art.

For the Time Being

Essays (PEN Literary Award Winner)

Annie Dillard

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and one of the most compelling writers of our time comes a "beautifully written and delightfully strange" (Daily News) narrative that renews our ability to discover wonder in life's smallest—and often darkest—corners. For the Time Being is Annie Dillard's most profound narrative to date. With her keen eye, penchant for paradox, and yearning for truth, Dillard asks: Why do we exist? Where did we come from? How can one person matter? Dillard searches for answers in a powerful array of images: pictures of bird-headed dwarfs in the standard reference of human birth defects; ten thousand terra-cotta figures fashioned for a Chinese emperor in place of the human court that might have followed him into death; the paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin crossing the Gobi Desert; the dizzying variety of clouds. Vivid, eloquent, haunting, For the Time Being evokes no less than the terrifying grandeur of all that remains tantalizingly and troublingly beyond our understanding. "Beautifully written and delightfully strange...as earthy as it is sublime...in the truest sense, an eye-opener." —Daily News "Stimulating, humbling, original. [Dillard] illuminate[s] the human perspective of the world, past, present and future, and the individual's relatively inconsequential but ever so unique place in it." —Rocky Mountain News

An American Childhood

Annie Dillard

"An American Childhood more than takes the reader's breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that, when you have put down this book, you're a different person, one who has virtually experienced another childhood." — Chicago Tribune A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s and 60s. Dedicated to her parents—from whom she learned a love of language and the importance of following your deepest passions—this brilliant coming-of-age memoir captures a girl’s intellectual awakening with a vividness that will resonate with anyone who has ever recalled with longing playing baseball on an endless summer afternoon, caring for a pristine rock collection, or knowing in your heart that a book was written just for you. It is a time and place captured with unforgettable clarity—a world built from moments of both breathtaking wonder and startling discovery. A Vivid Mid-Century Childhood: Step into the streets, backyards, and leafy neighborhoods of 1950s Pittsburgh, a world of snowball fights, terrifying nuns, and the startling beauty of a girl skating alone under a streetlight. A Mind in the Making: Follow a young girl’s journey of discovery as she unravels the world through library books on everything from microbe hunting to rock collecting, finding the universe in a drop of pond water. Unforgettable Family Stories: Meet a father who quits his job to chase a dream down the Mississippi, and a mother who teaches her daughters to question everything—a family full of wit, love, and complexity. Literary Nonfiction Masterpiece: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, this beautifully written memoir is a profound exploration of what it means to be awake and alive in the world.

Holy the Firm

Annie Dillard

"[This] is a book of great richness, beauty and power and thus very difficult to do justice to in a brief review. . . . The violence is sometimes unbearable, the language rarely less than superb. Dillard's description of the moth's death makes Virginia Woolf's go dim and Edwardian. . . . Nature seen so clear and hard that the eyes tear. . . . A rare and precious book." — Frederick Buechner, New York Times Book Review A profound book about the natural world—both its beauty and its cruelty—from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard In 1975 Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound, in a wooden room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice, death, and the will of God in a searing work of theology and philosophy. In Holy the Firm, she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things—rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire. Here is a lyrical gift of profound nature writing to any reader who has ever wondered how best to live with grace and wonder in the natural world. This landmark of literary nonfiction confronts the raw beauty of the world with its baffling cruelty. A Crisis of Faith: Dillard watches a child suffer a horrific accident and asks: Where is God in a world of random, meaningless pain? The Problem of Evil: A searing, unflinching look at theodicy that challenges easy answers and confronts the silence of a God who allows both breathtaking beauty and unbearable suffering. Puget Sound Setting: The wild, isolated landscape of the Pacific Northwest becomes a character in itself—a backdrop of salt sea, rock mountain, and holy fire for Dillard’s meditations. Spiritual Essays: From a moth burning like a holy wick in a candle to a baptism on a cold beach, Dillard finds transcendent, terrifying meaning in the particulars of the physical world.

The Living

Annie Dillard

The story of Whatcom, Washington and its inhabitants during the nineteenth century.

The Arvon Book of Life Writing

Sally Cline, Carole Angier

The thirst for real-life stories, is an area of creative non-fiction that is exploding in popularity. Biographers' Carole Angier and Sally Cline teach at the world famous Arvon Foundation writing course and have distilled the essence of their course into this practical handbook with contributions from leading writers.

Writing Life Writing

Narrative, History, Autobiography

Paul Eakin

Why do we endlessly tell the stories of our lives? And why do others pay attention when we do? The essays collected here address these questions, focusing on three different but interrelated dimensions of life writing. The first section, "Narrative," argues that narrative is not only a literary form but also a social and cultural practice, and finally a mode of cognition and an expression of our most basic physiology. The next section, "Life Writing: Historical Forms," makes the case for the historical value of the subjectivity recorded in ego-documents. The essays in the final section, "Autobiography Now," identify primary motives for engaging in self-narration in an age characterized by digital media and quantum cosmology.

Capture Life

Write a Biography : Your Own Or Someone Else's : how You Can Write a Life Story : Five Techniques to Get You Started : how You Can Publish the Story

Nikki Hanna

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Encyclopedia of Life Writing

Autobiographical and Biographical Forms

Margaretta Jolly

First published in 2001. This is the first substantial reference work in English on the various forms that constitute "life writing." As this term suggests, the Encyclopedia explores not only autobiography and biography proper, but also letters, diaries, memoirs, family histories, case histories, and other ways in which individual lives have been recorded and structured. It includes entries on genres and subgenres, national and regional traditions from around the world, and important auto-biographical writers, as well as articles on related areas such as oral history, anthropology, testimonies, and the representation of life stories in non-verbal art forms.

Encyclopedia of Life Writing

Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. A-K

Margaretta Jolly

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Write Your Life Story, 4th Edition

How to Organise and Record Your Memories for Family and Friends to Enjoy

Michael Oke

Biographies are not just for celebrities. 'Normal' people's lives - your own, in fact - can be much more fascinating and interesting. The aim of this book is to help you celebrate your life - and those who are special to you. Taken a step at a time - maybe just writing a few episodes of your life - you will see that writing your life story is not as daunting as it first appears; indeed it can be great fun. You need have no writing experience at all - writing at its best is simply speaking on paper.