Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Annie Dillard was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and taught for more than two decades in the English department at Wesleyan University. She is the author of a wide range of fiction and nonfiction works, including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, as well as a 1987 autobiography, essays, and works of poetry.

In Teaching a Stone to Talk, Dillard establishes her ethos as a writer who stands in awe of nature and embraces the divine, the surreal, and the strange. Dillard’s essays suggest an author who spends a great deal of time pondering life and its mysteries. Though in most of the essays, Dillard suggests an idea that she believes to be true, Dillard avoids prescriptive morals and leaves much of her writing open to interpretation. In doing so, she invites the reader into the process of uncovering the mysteries of God, nature, and man along with her. Dillard further encourages this process by switching back and forth between the first-person “I” and the second-person “you” in many of her essays. Rather than tell her readers what to think or believe about what she has written, Dillard invites them to make their own connections and draw their own conclusions from the stories and ideas she has shared. In this way, Dillard makes her essays seem conversational, as if she and the reader are sitting down to a long exchange of thoughts, beliefs, and memories.

Dillard writes nonfiction, but many of her essays delve into subject matter that might be classified as surreal, divine, or even supernatural. Dillard presents these ideas in a matter-of-fact way, suggesting that she does not believe in the divide between what we often consider to be “real” and what we might classify as “unreal.” Dillard often combines the normal with the fantastic, by turns seeking out the extraordinary in the ordinary (such as turning an encounter with a weasel into an experience with entering the mind of an animal) and the ordinary in the extraordinary (such as comparing 19th-century polar expeditions to attending Sunday mass). This combination of material turns an essay collection about nature into an exploration of reality, humanity, divinity, memory, and time.