SOURCE: "Perceptions of Nature: Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 101-13.

In the essay below, Tietjen argues that Dillard focuses too much on individual experience in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and misleads the reader.

She stared as if she were about to tell me that she dreamed last night of hanging in space above our blue planet. With her leather jacket, loose wool pants, serious hiking boots, and a collecting pouch slung over her neck, she looked the perfect image of the woodswoman I desperately wanted to become. Her cornsilk hair was lit up like a lamp. Annie Dillard sat on a ledge in a clearing, beckoning the reader to come into her woods. I held her Pulitzer Prize-winning book on my lap in the back of an old bus, headed for Canyonlands.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was one of...