“I salt my breakfast eggs. All day long I feel created.”

9 september Wen-Juenn Lee on annie dillard

Of ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’, Annie Dillard said, “I tried to be a transparent eyeball.” Reading Annie Dillard (born 1945) always reminds me of two verbs: to watch, and to create. Dillard is as obsessed with the spectrum of creation—muskrats, parasitic worms, deserts, eclipses, the North Pole—as she is with the spectrum of creating; the writer’s life, people, God. In both, Dillard embeds a deep sense of awe and reality—this is not creation abstracted but lived through, with ‘all its deformities’. Similarly, how one writes, how one attends and throws themself against the ‘sublimity of our ideas’ conjures up a wrestling between faith and doubt. Dillard is not known for her poetry, nor for belonging to one faith—after leaving the Catholic church, Dillard said, “I stay near Christianity”—but in her attempts to understand nature and God, her non-fiction follows more closely the logics of poetry, devotion and Christian thought.

Wen-Juenn Lee, in her writing, is interested in gaps, leaks and spillage, which often take the form of place, memory and divinity. Her work has been published in Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Review, Going Down Swinging, among others. She was a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow for 2022, and has been awarded the Tina Kane Emergent Writer Award for 2023.

More can be read about Annie Dillard, by our own Carol O’Connor: The Carmelite Library: Annie Dillard