Tonight I was Annie Dillard.

Seriously. I even wore a name tag that said "Annie Dillard." Suddenly, I was famous. I had this amazing internationally known writing career, and everyone wanted to hear the words I said.

Everyone being about twenty people who were in the basement of a bar near Pitt's campus where the MFA students hold a reading every Thursday night. Someone had the bright idea for us all to wear name tags bearing the names of our favorite authors, and I chose Annie Dillard.

In addition to Madeleine L'Engle and Azar Nafisi, Annie Dillard is also one of my heroes. Her addition to my hero list happened the same weekend I failed to get L'Engle's autograph. I got Dillard's instead. In fact, I had breakfast with Annie Dillard and two dozen very fortunate high school students (and their clever English teachers). I was fourteen years old--I have no idea how old Annie was at the time--and I was struck by Annie's disposition. Not her words, her disposition.

When Annie was introduced on stage, she sat in the chair behind the introducer. At first, it seemed that she didn't even know she was being introduced. And then the intro-er said something clever about her, and she laughed. As she listened, sitting there with her huge red-rimmed glasses, she reminded me of a kindergarten student being introduced--excited to be there, but rather humble at the same time. And totally un-self-conscious. Of course, that's the way she seemed to my hyper-self-conscious adolescent mind. And I wanted to be like her.

So she became my hero. And afterwards, as I read the rest of An American Childhood (which I now need to reread, since Annie grew up in Pittsburgh), I could hear her voice in my head, saying the words.

Tonight, it was doubly symbolic that I chose to be Annie Dillard:
A) She's a creative nonfiction guru--and that's what I'm studying.
B) It was my night to read to the MFA students a CNF piece that I had written. I wanted to be un-self-conscious, just like Annie.



And--if you didn't know--it's after her book A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that this blog is semi-named.