My Annie Dillard story

Back in 2003, Harper’s published a dense little piece of fiction by Annie Dillard, signaling that eventually, we were probably going to get another novel from her. The Maytrees is out now from HarperCollins, and most of the reviewers are ga-ga for it. USA Today says take it to the beach; the Times warns it may induce orgasms. Seriously.

All of this is sort of exciting for the 20 million of us who have a Dillard story squirreled away somewhere, waiting for a moment of relevance when we can dust it off again. In Sunday’s Post Bookworld, for instance, Daniel Asa Rose begins his interview with Dillard by recalling a whirl around the dance floor 25 years in the past.

My own collision with her wasn’t quite so long ago… After that excerpt of The Maytrees came out, I wrote it all down:

At the beginning of my final semester at Arizona State University, in the spring of 1998, I dropped my plans to go to graduate school. Unexpectedly, I had flunked the Graduate Record Exam in literature, which at least temporarily ruled out the Ph.D. programs—probably for the best, since I didn’t want to write book-length criticism anyway. Though I had let most application deadlines pass, I was thinking of getting an MFA instead; I had written a little collection of stories as an honors thesis, and that spring I had enrolled in a graduate workshop with the story writer Ron Carlson.

I had the idea that I was doing some pretty good typing. Right away I brought in a story called “Where I Am,” and the night before it came up in workshop, I got so excited I read the whole story over the phone to a friend in Tucson—on her quarter. I had given a copy to my friend Scott McMahan, too, a nineteen-year old poet taking Carlson’s other class, an introductory undergrad workshop. When my class met the next day, Carlson pried out the story’s staple and taped all seventeen pages across the chalkboard, then worked with an orange highlighter for several minutes, marking paragraphs—and scenes and names and characters—that ought to go. Finally, he glanced around the room. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but it seems to me we need to change the title, too. I think this one’s real title is ‘Where Am I?’”

At four o’clock, I slunk out of the literature building, squashed. Scott found me later and told me that morning Carlson had stood at the podium and said, “I’m going to read to you from a story by one of my graduate students.” He had given a little smile and added, “After that we’ll talk about what not to do when you’re writing a story.” Scott handed me back my story. “It was pretty funny,” he said.

A few weeks later, on the sidewalk outside his office, Ted Humphrey, a philosophy professor and the Honors College dean, asked what I’d be doing after graduation. I told him I was going off to live at the homeless shelter. He got my little joke—When I’d started volunteering at a Phoenix soup kitchen and shelter a few years before, he had loaned me a copy of Robert Coles’s biography of the Catholic Worker’s founder, Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion, and I’d talked shop a few times with Humphrey’s wife, Janet, a social worker (and formerly his student). The dean asked a little more about what I’d be doing at Andre House, and then he changed the subject.

“I have a proposal for you,” he announced. When he had something to say that pleased him, Humphrey had the habit of rocking up onto the toes of his wingtips, his hands in the pockets of his slacks, like a six-foot-four little boy with a carefully sculpted gray beard and a secret. “In April, Annie Dillard will be coming to campus for the Centennial Lecture,” he said. “She’ll spend ten days at a dude ranch in Wickenburg before she arrives at the university for the week, and she’ll need somebody to go up and bring her here to her hotel.” His eyebrows arched. “I’d like to suggest you and Renee Larson take care of that.”

The rest of the piece is here.