From brain pickings:
The drama of original choice is that it goes on moment by moment for an entire lifetime.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament I give my mother credit for putting this notion of writing a book into my head. In 1976, at age sixty-three, she sat on a stool in a narrow hall closet of our home in Ohio and slowly typed a short memoir on an ancient black Underwood typewriter. My father had her manuscript professionally typeset and printed as a small pamphlet. Mom and Dad then distributed her memoir to the extended family and friends. It was her only real writing effort, and as far as I was concerned, it was an impressive achievement, full of warm reminiscences of growing up on a farm and some signal events in her life. I thought, “One day, I could do something like that.”
The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard (1945-), published in 2007
I’ll start with a confession, actually two: First, Annie Dillard is one of those authors that reinforces the fact that sometimes I prefer books to people. I can become engrossed in her writing—contemplating difficult sentences or paragraphs over and over, wondering where meaning is found for us mortals—without a care for humanity at large while doing so. Reading her work is a form of meditation; and I am not alone when I read her work. It is also like spending time with an old friend, which gets to my second admission…her books are old friends that I never quite fully comprehend. But I relish her company anyway. She leaves me at peace in spite of her dangling philosophical questions. Annie Dillard’s work has touched me, particularly Holy the Firm (1977) and Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), standouts by my reckoning, read many years ago, and again in 2007. Her novel, The Maytrees (2007), is another notch on her belt, so to speak.
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