![]() ![]() ![]() Rummaging the close-at-hand will always turn up beauty and wisdom. Geographical boundaries, according to this tradition, do not fetter the literary imagination, but magnify its powers. Yet Dillard's wanderings in and around her valley issued, eventually, into her great theological-pastoral-evolutionary-tragic-metaphysical-almanac, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975.Īmerican literature has long had an affection for parochialism - the intense concentration on the local - as an artistic approach. Hardly the landscape, one would think, to yield a classic of nature writing. The mountains which close off the valley's head are not nobly named: Brushy, Dead Man, McAfee's Knob. Down by the road, beat-up beer-cans roost in the bushes. Sassafras and ivy thrive in what she nicknamed "the weedfield" - a few acres of rough pasture. A felled sycamore trunk serves as a bridge to the grassy island which sits in the middle of the creek. Steers graze the meadow, rabbits fossick the scrub. There are farms, outbuildings, barbed-wire fences. Dillard's Virginian valley isn't particularly wild country. ![]()
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