Anne Dillard's Remarks

In case you missed it, here's the transcript of author Annie Dillard's remarks at Calvin College Conference on Faith and Writing. It first ran in The Seattle Times. This is what today's letters are all about.

Q: Do you miss living in the Pacific Northwest?

A: Um . . . no. I dream about it all the time. I dream about it three or four nights a week. I have pictures of it all over the walls of my study, huge enlargements. But when I go out there, it's no place for an intellectual woman . . .

The men were just wonderful, but the women out there had a kind of culture I couldn't share. They used chain saws and canned things and they breast-fed . . . I thought I was a hippie until I went out there. Out there I was suddenly a bluestocking (Editor's note: a bluestocking is a literary or learned woman). And all of these men were following me around everywhere I went. And the husbands and everybody, just this huge train of men behind me and every once in a while I'd turn around and say, "You guys, my name is Legion. I'm an Eastern woman; we're all this way." But their women were so dull, you know, that they would give up anything just to hear me for five minutes. At first they were a little weird. If you told a joke, they'd all sort of gather around with sympathetic expressions like you'd just been run over or something. It was just weird.

It was really, really beautiful out there. But it was really no place for an intellectual, an intellectual woman in particular. And I'd forgotten that, and I was out there hiking a couple of years ago, going up a mountain, and I saw somebody on the way up. You know, backpack, ice ax and the whole bit, and I said something like, "Is it gonna snow?" And the guy recoiled. Because I'd forgotten this rule that I'd learned out there: A woman doesn't address a man. Absolutely not. And if two men are talking, and a woman tries to sit down (and I'm no Eastern, you know, radical feminist or anything), they just ignore it. It really drove me nuts. They don't try to include her in the conversation. I'd come from the South, where you have some manners. They wouldn't even turn, they wouldn't introduce you, they wouldn't do anything. They would just completely ignore you. It was as if a spaniel had come and curled up at their feet.

So, I was happy to be East, but I kind of wish I was more South.