Environmental Book Study: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The Environmental Team of the Justice Committee is reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. This is a classic book by a revered writer who grew up in Point Breeze. It won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Told from a first-person point of view, the book details Dillard’s explorations near her home, and various contemplations on nature and life. It is based on a year of living through the seasons at her Virginia home in the Blue Ridge valley near Roanoke. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of “mystery, death, beauty, violence.”

Here is a statement from Barbara Kingsolver: “I was in my 20s when I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Her writing helped me see nature not as a collection of things to know or possess, but a world of conjoined lives, holy and complete, with or without me. She left me with this sentence that has guided my life ever since: ‘Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.'”

Consider reading the book and joining our discussion in person on Thursday, August 8, 7 pm, led by Sally Jo Snyder.

For more details, email Nancy Heastings.