Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This book, which won the Pulitzer literature prize when it was released, is the most beautiful book about the wild. Dillard spent quite a long time in this small area in a particular valley called Tinker Creek in Virginia, America. She just recorded what she saw and what she thought about it, and this book is a collection of her observations.
Tell us about your next book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
One of the other things that, for me, goes very much with silence, although it’s not the same for everybody, is a deepening of the experience of nature and understanding of ecology. This book, which won the Pulitzer literature prize when it was released, is the most beautiful book about the wild. Dillard spent quite a long time in this small area in a particular valley called Tinker Creek in Virginia, America. She just recorded what she saw and what she thought about it, and this book is a collection of her observations. And it’s a very lovely book because it takes on the ferocity of nature and is very unsentimental, while at the same time being very beautiful. I think that she would say, and I would say, that being silent actually allows you to see the world more clearly. It’s often said that silent people have more acute hearing, and I think that they have a more acute sense of sight too. She just notices everything.
Moving to Scotland into a solitary house on the remote moors of Galloway, Sara Maitland now lives the life of quiet she celebrates in her latest book, A Book of Silence. The book is an examination of the importance of silence, its cultural history, and the aversion contemporary society has to it. Although she is now a nonfiction writer, she also has a large bibliography of novels and short stories.
