SOURCE: "'Choosing the Given with a Fierce and Pointed Will': Annie Dillard and Risk-Taking in Contemporary Literature," in The Hollins Critic, Vol. XXX. No. 2, April, 1993, pp. 1-9.

In the essay below, Brown-Davidson provides an overview of Dillard's works.

Imagine this. You are a lectured-into-submission child, attending another dull Protestant church service with your parents. The ordinariness of your life has driven you into a repressed fury that makes your stomach knot at the meat-and-potatoes dinner you eat every Wednesday night, at the English homework (verbs-adjectives-adverbs-nouns) that always fails to engage you, at a life in which you seem to be peering through one smeared window or the next to glimpse a landscape that loses color as you age. Then you begin to paint. Secretly, at first. The bumbled efforts of any child, the too pastel watercolors you smear onto the tiny stretched canvas with your fist, the windows...