Connecticut Voices; Nancy Cobb/Annie Dillard

Hello and welcome to Connecticut voices a production of the Connecticut Center for the book in partnership with the Hartford currents North-East magazine. I'm Nancy Cobb. I'll be talking with author Annie Dillard in her studio in Middletown in the early 70s. Annie Dillard tucked herself away in a cabin at Tink Creek Virginia observing plants animals and her own inner truths. The resulting memoir pilgrimage Tinker Creek is one of America's best loved books on the natural world. It is in fact required reading for many high school and college students across the country. Dillard's other nonfiction books holy the firm an American childhood and the writing life add to the Chronicle of her personal journey from Pittsburgh to Puget Sound and on to New England where today she is a writer in residence at Wesleyan University in Middletown Connecticut. Dillard also is a poet literary critic and now a novelist with the publication of her latest book the living. This is the story of four men and. The main character Claire Fishburn who's a big tall enthusiastic good natured

man is essentially America. Itself. His character reflects the American character at that time as it was perceived as it in fact really was a kind of good natured optimism and the thoughtlessness and enthusiasm of childishness retained into adulthood an enormous vigor. And he becomes thoughtful he comes of age. America itself comes of age in the economic crisis that hit that region they thought they were going to be the greatest of everything it's a sort of miniature of all of American history. It all took place telescoped into those 50 years. And I was writing this 100 years later as America as our country now was looking at new economic realities and not being there.

Leader of the world economically. Has this been. Has the idea of a novel been percolating for a long time I mean how you have seven books of nonfiction. It's a phrase repeated quite often in the Psalms I know that I should I think that I shall see the Lord in the Land Of The Living the land of the living is a phrase repeated in the songs and some of the Psalms are quoted in there that use that phrase in 1908 or read a short story called The Living with the same characters the young American Clare Fishburn the terrible villain below been chane the old pioneer lady players Mother Ada his wife June their daughter Mabel essentially the same situation the story was 60 pages long and it interested me greatly and I wanted to get back to it. I wanted to turn it into a novel.

The living which is an extraordinary epic novel set in the Pacific Northwest now I know you lived for a while in Puget Sound. What was the what was the original fascination with that part of the world for you. What brought you there. What brought me there was I simply had to go somewhere and I thought I should stay within the continental United States because I was an American. And it was as far as I could get from New York City and still be in America. Without short of going to Alaska. There were a lot of very high mountains there and the sea was real nearby. When I got there I discovered an enormous number of people had picked the place in the exact same way I had which was by consulting an atlas. All sorts of people who have spent a lot of time with an atlas will end up there because if you look at the atlas you discover that there are these high mountains right near the city. The snow covered mountains year round snow covered mountains there are more glaciers in that county than in the rest of the United States combined.

So the physical the continental United States. Yeah it was. It was landscape it was to look at harsh things in Virginia the landscape was extremely lovely everything flowered everything bloomed and was bright and sang. And I wanted to look at hard things in the living. There is a way that people speak with something that struck me was that the language in this book was so different then the way we speak and the rhythms that you build. What was that like for you. I read a lot of 19th century novels and I wanted to write in one thousand century novel as if it had been written in the 19th century without one tiny shred of anachronism it presented a wonderful challenge with the language and I enjoyed that part enormously more than anything. At the beginning for about the first year and a half I was working on it I wouldn't read anything that was written after the date on

which I was working if I was writing about the 1850s I wouldn't read anything after the 1850s. After about a year and a half I realized I'd I had it. I had the language enough I had enough of a sense of the language that I could read anything I could pick up the newspaper or anything. I could keep it separate. My husband has an enormous research library and I could use all these books in the 19th century they say. Some things were much more subtle. We say a group of people came over the hill. They would say a company of people came over the hill. Little things like that were very pleasant. Do you keep a journal. I keep notebooks with information on my reading. I don't keep my she expression of my feelings in day to day life. Not in the least. But I keep an enormous number of commonplace books full of information. Otherwise if you read you forget I at least forget everything that I

read and then it's all lost this way I have physical access to what would have been throughout many decades the contents of my mind. I'm talking with any Dillard about the living. Her first novel and the latest of many credible books. This is the beginning of the novel the living which is set in 1855 on Puget Sound in a little settlement called Watcom. The sailor put down the helm and Ada Fishburn felt the boat round up towards the forest. She stood in the bow as supple young woman wearing a deep brimmed sun bonnet. She carried her infant son in her arms without a sound the schooner slipped alongside a sort of dock that met the water from the beach. This dock represented the settlement on Bellingham Bay. From behind her on deck ater heard her older son Clay are singing a song. Claire was five a right big boy for five long in the leg bones

like his father and life suited him very well and he found his enjoyment. It's this man Clare who is the main character. Ada glanced back and saw her husband Rooney moving their four barrels their five crates their four kegs and their old featherbed to the rail. Rooney tied the two cows and gave the ropes to Claire to hold and the boys sang to them half dead as they were. Neither man nor boy glanced up to see where he was getting off which was a mercy one a few for she herself scarcely minded where she was and she lost her boy Charlie on the overland road. But she hated to see Rooney down hearted when he staked his blessid being on this place and look at it. Ada and Rooney hold their possessions off the dock. The baby Glee stayed asleep moving its lips and missed the whole thing. The schooner sailed off north and left them there. It was the rough edge of the world where the trees came smack down to the Stones. This was Puget Sound and there was not a thing on it or anywhere

near it that she could see but some black docks and humpy green islands. God might have created such a plunging shores this before he thought of making people. And then when he thought of making people he mercifully softened up the land in the palms of his hands wherever he expected them to live which did not include here. Rooney inspected the tilting dock ate it tried to read his expression but she never could for his bushy red beard seem to grow straight down out of his hat and only the tip of his nose showed he set off up the beach and has stayed in the silence with their pile of possessions. Deep inside the bonnet her boat shaped mouth was grave. Her dark brows almost met above her nose her eyes were round and black. She made herself look around. The beach was a narrow strip of pebbles and logs. Now a Lummi Indian comes up in the canoe. He talks to Ada and Rooney and their little boys and he takes them over to some people

called the rushes and the rushes are the only other people or almost the only other people in the whole settlement. It's fall they have nothing. The rushes take them in. That night Aiden lay on her feather bed on the rushes floor. Ada reflected that it DAYBREAK this morning she had never clapped eyes on any Laura Rush nor her husband Felix rush either and tonight they were all her world. They acted decent more than decent and they looked almighty glad to have company which was just as well for they had it. His mind became aware of the prayer that her heart cried out to God all day and maybe all night too that he would lend her strength to bear affliction and go on. She was not aware that underneath she prayed another prayer as if to a power above God or at least to his better nature that he was finished with the worst of it. Her boy Charlie was the worst of it for she had not braced herself for life back then a few months ago. She did not know how life could be how it could do

between one step and another. She had been a merry girl and although travelling the overland road was hard most of the time. She had a head for adventure. Claire was 5 years old and Charlie was three and the road was taking their big train along the Sweetwater river. Charlie fell out of the wagon and their own wheels ran over him. One big wooden wheel after the other and he burst in weirdly and died. There was no time to stop the oxen up ahead though she shouted out. And Rooney turned around and said What. Well the wheels ran straight over Charlie's middle before he could get away. He was such a well-favored boy. People used to say he would be breaking hearts some day when what they meant was that he was breaking their hearts right now the way his green eyes sized up a person and his mouth was so wide and dark and his hair stood up in front. She knew she should not love a child for being so pleasing to look at. She knew it at the time. There could be a statute about Thou shalt not go looking at a child every minute and certainly there was Thou shalt have no other God before

me that might have been why he got run over. But it was hard. Charlie had never been a god to her but just a boy a beloved son that God of all people should know about and know that a person's beloved son was not a god like gods was but just an ordinary human child which is how life goes on if he will let it. Charlie had been riding with her in the front wagon. Claire was larking off somewhere up ahead in the train and Rooney walked ahead with the oxen. When Charlie got to lively in the wagon Rooney carried him although he was three years old and Rooney's curly beard tickled his neck that morning Charlie was riding in the wagon right beside her and she was looking up at the neat curve of his forehead and he stood up and over the board he went and into the rut. Their train had eight hundred head of people and three thousand head of stock. It took a week just to cross it all over the Missouri River oxen were slow but they were strong and they took one step after another. The day Rooney first bought the teams ate it walked around the four beasts and looked into their eyes and found nothing

there just shine in brown like wet boots. When Rooney was busy she drove the team herself. She sat on the wagon and called out up odd and up bright and tapped them with the whip. She tapped all four of them on their white hip bones that looked like shifting mountains. Whether she tapped or not when the cow column ahead moved the teams all down the line started up and the wagons rolled and there was no stopping them. Now 40 years have passed and the settlement grows up into the booming town of what Kim in those 40 years the story of the foreman plays itself out. It's the main story the story of Claire and the guy who tries to kill him. Ada got old. Now she was living with her grown son Clair and his wife June and their little daughter Mabel. Here she was again reflecting in bed. In July player and his brother Julie had shifted old Ada from her attic

bedroom into the parlor under the tall south windows that gave out on checking out Ridge. Ada lay with her legs far apart on the feather bed on a cot so narrow the red trade blanket pooled on the floor on both sides. Her wind was failing moving her pillow wore her out. Throughout her life Ada had skinned off her suit of underwear for the summer. On the day she saw the first snake this year she kept it on. She wore a yellow dress of sprigged calico unbuttoned in the back and a shawl. Her hand swelled and their backs were dark blue just under the skin. It seemed to aid her right friendly to live in the parlor under the circumstances. Her granddaughter Vinnie helped out often in the company of up bright hue Hohner from Goshen now 17 and a college boy who used to be two years old on his mother's knees like everyone else and who had carried her second husband Norval home by the ankles with his head hanging off her inside stopped working and her belly grew tender so she could not endure the blanket.

Dying was time on her hands. Ada recognized in her thoughts the familiar inescapable self she had been toting up hill and down dale these sixty odd years. With the jolt she realized that the dying must often feel this way steaming along just fine while on ahead someone has torn up the rails. It could not turn in bed this morning. The dog was sleeping on one half of the blanket on the parlor floor and the cat on the other. Her spine jab through the beds feathers and she lay in a hard trough when her father was giving out in Illinois his head pained him confoundedly and he had wanted to stick with a spoon in the wall. He wanted rest but when it came right down to dying he was not ready to leave after all and he fought it and lost of course and finished his circle right on this feather bed where they put him eight or perceived events clearly. By afternoon she noticed that young Hugh Hohner was there. She heard June up stairs mocking the baby to itself through the tall window by her cot she saw two blue shadows slide

down check on that ridge quick as otters but she could not see the clouds that made the shadows. Her mouth was dry. She drifted off and when she came around again the parlor was dark and the window showed some stars over the black shape of the ridge. The household was asleep and so was everyone in the town outside asleep like children. She purely missed every major figure in her life starting with her mother and father in Illinois and thought the world was going to produce an without the likes of them and the likes of her too if the truth be known. The people remaining were not serious. They succumbed to the world's secret enticements and its plain ones. Even the new livestock lacked heart. The good hogs that you could reach an understanding with were dead and so were the good cows like you never see any more. She must have struggled for she opened her eyes again to find yellow lamplight and the doctor kneeling there by the cot. She looked at him for a bit panting then ignored him. She judged she had lived a

good life a strenuous one and a lucky one for she had truly felt God's power. Charlie got killed in the rut. Her little daughter Nettie died whose initials she wore in a braided hair ring. She buried two fine husbands. It was not everybody got so deep into the battering and jabbing of it all got in the path of the great God's might. She moved across the burning plains crossed two mountain ranges. She saw from the western shore with her own eyes the mild islands rolling off in the light the way they must have looked at the foundation of the world. She called me a nook sack women her till it comes. Her friends and they called her to come. Which Who would have guessed. She lay under mats in the bottom of a canoe once during the Indian troubles and Rooney told the Indians she was clams lived in five or six different places including a stockade. She felt her freedom reared two boys to manhood busted open this wilderness

by the sea buried the man on their lands. She saw a white horse roll in wild strawberries and stand up bread. She took part in the great drama it had been her privilege to peer into the deepest well hole of life surprise. She felt the fire of God's wild breath on her face. Now her daughter in law wearing I should me with her brown hair unpinned was opening the gas jet on the wall. It hissed. She touched a match to it and it popped into flame. A detour her gaze from the pleated tin reflector behind it. The doctor looked to be but a mite older than her granddaughter. He said addressing Claire that Ada had about an hour to live Possibly too. So when morning light cleared checking out ridge and poured in the window she found the whole world sitting in the parlor pretty much triumphant as if she had produced a baby and not just opened her eyes. Her pain was gone. There was nothing to

breathe. The road before her was clear. Claire was up stairs stuffing the baby into her clothes. There was Hugh Hohner on the organ's stool. Curly haired like a dark lamb. He was wearing overalls and a necktie. She met his pale solemn eyes then drifted off. Hugh Hohner was used to the dance necrotic smell of Ada. He noticed it only when he first came into the house. Back on his farm he doctored most people's stock. He knew the stink of hoof rot on sheep of abscess pus of cattle bloat gas. This was the smell of a person dying in old underwear. Now he saw eight his eyes roll up under their hairless brows her eyelids closed and she strained as if to see her mouth eased and took on a boat shape. She drew a great breath and called out into the distance. Maad. She called up. Right.

Her features bunched forward. The mystery was being accomplished once again before he dies. He could hear Claire's footsteps on the stairs he could hear the women running out of the kitchen. Ada called out. Up now up up. I'm talking with Annie Dillard who is the author of An American childhood the writing life teaching a stone to talk Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for which she won the Pulitzer Prize when she was 28 years old. What was that like. When I heard that I got the Pulitzer Prize I was washing spinach for dinner and a reporter called and said oh you've got the Pulitzer Prize What are you doing right now as you hear that you got the Pulitzer Prize and I said I'm washing spinach. And he said doesn't that don't you know that this means that you will never need to wash spinach again as long as you live. And I thought sure I will I told like sand in my Spanish. And I think of it every time I wash spin it I would guess at

least twice a week. The assumption seemed to be that the idea was to make a whole bunch of money and hire a maid. But my assumption was that if I was lucky I could continue to write some books and contribute a little bit to the literature which I love. It's a great story. And spanning in writing an epic novel This is the longest span I'm assuming of any character you've ever covered. So somebody like Ada for instance does it did she sometimes take you. Did she surprise you at times during the writing as she aged. Yes I've always disliked fiction writers who say oh the characters took over and what is a poor helpless author to do when all these fascinating characters assume a life of their own and so forth and I always think it's self-aggrandizing and feeds a kind of romantic view of writing

which should be stamped out but in fact it does happen. It happens however in any original art that you're writing it happens in a poem it happens in it in a narrative essay it happens in anything that you're doing seriously. That the form changes as you go. And so when you're dealing with characters the form changes as you go and so it seems as if the characters have taken over or the essay is taken over the poems and taken over whatever that it is assumed a life of its own. It's just part of the so-called creative process. Can you talk a little bit about what you're working on now. I'm working on poetry now. When I was interrupted by the Pulitzer Prize in moving to the Pacific Northwest and all of that I had been working on a book of poems that I always wanted to get back to and that's what I'm doing. But that fit what a different form after this. It's a pleasure. And Pina Why do you like pina. You know it's a great

game. Three hand cut throat pinnacle pinnacle you play all night is a network of ever shifting alliances. I played with my oldest stepdaughter He's 26 and my has been all night and two of us would gang up against the leader which is how you play three hand cut throat. I used to play in Virginia for 10 years and all I did was play piano go and read books. And then in Washington I played binnacle with a Marxist and a guy who taught logic in the Philosophy Department and the Marxist always won and the guy who taught logic always lost. I've been talking tonight with Annie Dillard the author of the living an epic novel set in the mid 19th century in the Pacific Northwest. Her publisher is Harper Collins.

She is the author of pilgrimage Tinker Creek an American childhood living by fiction and those books and others are available at bookstores and libraries in your neighborhood. Once in order to finish a book I was writing and yet not live in the same room with it I begged a cabin to use as a study. I finished the book there. I wrote some other things and I learned to split wood. All this was on a remote and sparsely populated island on Herro Strait the island was in Northern Puget Sound Washington state across the water from Canadian islands. The cabin was a single small room near the water. Its walls were shrunken planks not insulated. It was cold. It was very grand but you get used to it. I don't much care where I work. I don't notice things. The door used to blow open and startle me witless. I did however notice the cold. I tried to heat the cabin with the wood stove and a kerosene heater but I

never was warm. I used to work wearing a wool cap long wool tight sweaters a down jacket and a scarf. I was too lazy to stick a damper in the wood stove chimney I kept putting off the task for a warm day throw said that his firewood warmed him twice because he labored to cut his own. Mine froze me twice for the same reason. After I learned to split wood in a manner I am shortly to relate. After I learned to split wood I stepped out into the brutal northeaster and split just enough older to last me through working hours which was not enough splitting to warm me. Then I came in and kindled a fire in the stove all the heat of which vanished up the chimney. At first in the good old days I did not know how to split wood. I set a chunk of alder on the chopping block and harassed it at enormous exertion into tiny wedges that flew all over the sand flats and lost themselves. What I did was less like splitting wood than chipping flints. After a few whacks my older chunks still stood serene and unmoved its base untouched its tip a thorn

and then I actually tried to turn the sorry thing over and balance it on its wee head while I tried to chop its feet off before it fell over. God save us all this was a very warm process. I removed my down jacket my wool hat and scarf. Alas those early wood splitting days when I truly warmed to myself didn't last long. I lost the knack. I didn't know it at the time but during those first weeks when I attacked my wood every morning I was collecting a crowd. Or what passed on the island for a crowd at the sound of my axe real islanders proper wood splitting Islanders paused in their activities and mustered unseen across the sand flats under the furs. They were watching me over the idleness tried to split wood. It must have been a largely silent comedy. Later when they confessed and I railed at them one of them said innocently that the single remark he had permitted himself had been. I love to watch and he split wood. One night while all this had been going on I had a dream in which I was given to understand by the powers that be how to split wood you name it said the dream. Of course at the

chopping block it's true. You aim at the chopping block not at the wood. Then you split the wood instead of chipping it. You cannot do the job cleanly unless you treat the wood as a transparent means to an end by aiming past it. But then alas you easily split your days would in a few minutes in the freezing cold without working up any heat then you utterly forfeit your only chance of getting warm. Who will teach me to write. A reader wanted to know the page of the page that eternal blankness the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly affirming time scroll as a right and your daring as necessity. The page which you cover woodenly ruining it but asserting your freedom and power to act. Acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless because acting is better than being here in mere opacity. The page with which you cover slowly with the crab thread of your gut. The page in the purity of its

possibilities. The page of your death against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life strength. That page will teach you to write. There is another way of saying this. Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood you will have nothing. Aim past the wood aimed through the wood. Aim for the chopping block. Annie Dillard on Connecticut voices. Thank you for being with us. It was a pleasure. It seemed oh so good.

We have this self back here if you want to. Write in her sylvan he's not a cowboy. What if we were you know all life all thought tell them what it is yeah a. Prefab tool shed. OK is this a we. There goes that I just watch for. OK so these are different. Pick up OK and I really like them I hate it when your it can't mean you say I know it's a prefab tool shed insulated. I'm Nancy Cobb and I'm talking with Annie Dillard. Today in her prefab insulated tool shed where she writes. And I wanted to read something from one of the five million glowing reviews from one of her books the

writing life. I'm too close. I'll sit back and I was I was feeling it would be close or should I just start again. Yeah I bet you think that all of that is in a way adults like you just write the way. Yeah yeah. Right. I'm here today. Actually I'm here tonight interviewing Annie Dillard in a place where she writes and I just want to describe this place. You want need it is great I want you to describe it. Well it's an insulated prefab tool shed. It's out in the backyard behind a volleyball net under a bunch of trees.

It's your haven that you come to every day. I come to it every day a certain time every day in the morning. Your mornings are your writing time. Yeah and there's a bed in here because I always read on a bed. I always remind him. To keep your feet up. And then I work at one of those computer chairs that you kneel on. Right. And where's your computer. I moved it inside yesterday. I want to read. I just want to read something that I read in a review from The Wall Street Journal back from a couple years ago about the writing life. I wonder if you remember saying this and how the strikes today particularly after writing the living which is your first novel. One of the few things I know about writing is this. Spend it all. Shoot it. Play it lose it all. Right away every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book. Or for another book give it give it all give it. Now the impulse

to save something good for a better place is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later something better. These things fill from behind from beneath like well water. Similarly the impulse to keep yourself what you have learned is not only shameful it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find the ashes. That's a sort of basic religious insight. It was it's in the Qur'an. There's a verse in the Qur'an that says they shall ask thee what thou shalt expand and you shall answer them. The abundance spanned the abundance. That's why we teach. That's why anyone would teach you learn this stuff you pass it on. You don't really need to teach but if you try to keep it to yourself what you've learned you're not really doing your duty you have to be a link in the chain

to the time you spend teaching during the year of actual teaching and I know you're talking about your teaching and your writing as well. How does that balance or does it balance the work for you in some way. I don't actually teach very much and that sounded very righteous but in fact I don't teach very much at all. Just because I get tired of talking about grammar I love to to have the young people around and watch them grow and learn. But I gets so durn tired of talking about grammar. I don't teach very much. If. Reading I looked up spook the horses there are a lot of horses in this book it's a Western and discovered that you couldn't spook the horses and I thought how can I write about the West without saying something spooked the horses. You can use spook as a noun after Shakespeare but you can't use food as a verb until the 1000 twenties in America.

So I had to say it startled the horses lately erected. Did you find yourself as the deeper you got into this going to the Stop and Shop and speaking sometimes in this way did you find yourself. No no no. It was a completely separate issue room this little room here and I would enter the 19th century you would as soon as the door closed then it became you and these characters who were so young. Here I go. Skinny's each character of course has his own voice or her own voice and some of them come from the south so I get to use all those wonderful Southern expressions. He was fixing to pitch a fit. And a lot of them use the local slang that Chinook jargon which was peculiar to the.

It was a trading language peculiar to that coast from California up through the Alaskan peninsula and some of them are real rough in their speech and use a lot of really vivid 19th century slang. It was a great passion. It was fun to read to hear. I mean words that in out of context and and words that I'd never heard before and it fit so incredibly into these. Into these people's lives. Now I'm sure that you've answered this question a lot because this is called the living and there's a lot of dying in this book. We live in a culture now that I believe sanitizes death death as a way of life in throughout your book. Children die adults die usually by some freak of nature a log jam a drowning a well somebody is poisoned and dies instantly fall out of a tree a broken bone that Patroons

to the skin. What terms of calling this the living and having dying be such a natural course and part of the life from childhood. And I just wanted you to speak about that. They were the generation that was alive and so real and vivid to themselves and they seemed to be on the very cutting edge of the present. And so do we. It's about how life feels as you live it. They saw themselves as living in of course the most extremely modern times their generation had seen more change and acceleration in the rate of change than any generation ever had and they were perfectly aware of it. They already had a kind of nostalgia for the good old days before these fast trains. Made travel so instant and before the Telegraph made

communication so instant and so forth they knew they were settling the frontier they knew they were the pioneer generation and they knew they were the next generation to spring up in the Pioneer and the incident been settled. There self-consciousness is as just like ours. They were completely self conscious. They were alive this was the vivid scented seasons that you could smell when the sun would come up and the seasons would change and it's no different from our lives at all. It's all it all can be seen as a comment on our own lives. As for the accidental deaths I don't think there were many more accidental deaths then than now. We have car wrecks they had trees fallen right but it had more to do with nature then than it does now does it does it seems you're sure more to do with technology now than it does with and prolonging a life through technology. Yeah well we have antibiotics is the great writing so our life expectancy is much higher right in the first third of the book. A lot of the

characters die but the deaths stop and the characters you have then are the characters that will go there right. Right. You talked about being an American. What does that mean. You said it. Well then we'll just forget that one in American childhood I was right about one thing. Well I could talk about what they are actually because the main character here this is triangles. Interesting. I like games a lot of writers like games. What other games talk about your baseball volleyball other. I still play softball I'm 48 years old and I played softball this spring and doing all the exercises I have to do so that I don't end up like everybody else arriving on the first base bathroom pulled hamstring or a pole quadriceps. I thought when do you stop this I am forty eight criminally How

long can I continue to play second base. Your second is worth it. Yeah yeah I've always been sick. I like the infield there's a lot of chatter. Did used to go to see any of the park games on the field. Sure. Or so I did and I wore my uniform and carried my glove. I did the same thing Smokey Burgess was my favorite the underdog the chubby catcher Yeah he was great he was great at big road I saw the Yankees. I saw them beat the Yankees in that World Series game and really yes it was thrilling because you really were actually there actually at that game and it was the highest moment in my childhood in Pittsburgh. The announcer said there is a long fly ball deep into left center field is going it's going it's gone it was Bob princely. They have the the voice of. And if we split was Mazur ask you to film as a russkie right. Right out of the park you know Pittsburghers still have a if you grew up there is there still a sense of pride people when baseball fans find out I was at that game they suddenly look at me with the right knew when I was taken up to New York essentially all the big shots in New

York were offering me the town ok baby the town is yours what do you want it's all open anything. What do you want to do when I go out I didn't know what to say. And I knew the pirates were playing the Mets that night in the National League playoffs and we all went to the ballgame. Great I bet they love that they had a good time I was amazed they knew how to act to a ballgame they put on the T-shirts and went to the ballgame and got hot dogs and just acted like regular people. You're right it was the group I was determined you know that then washing spinach keep you keep you in a safe place or aura or a real place there's a. Well I'm a working mother I mean how can my life not be real. It's hard I mean it's I'm not complaining at all. You know well I'm not talking about but it's hard being a working mother it's just that you know it's hard for me not to to I'm not going to canonize your maps will it not not but because you wrote this these books that have been a big part of my life and the rock collecting. You really got me in the American childhood among many things because we

share that growing up in Pittsburgh. This is just something I'd like you to read from the writing life which is this. And to hear that feel OK I mean read it and if you don't want it in we won't put it in we just wanted you to have something in there about writing if there's something else in there that you feel as. If I mean the airplane is my favorite. And you also don't have to remember here some feel here something OK about writing it's more amusing. OK. You. How long are they gonna like this room. Well we're going to take this on the road I want to make I want to do this. I mean we have you know now for like 45 minutes and you know no world will I mean will be but there somewhere. I mean I would like to see this be archival. You know and while we have you here who knows what we're going to you know what would take an edit

out and use you know this is the kind of thing that you know every school and library should have so it should go well beyond. It's true. Yeah but you know I know we do. There was one and then it's like OK I just I was going to ask you about bills and there's a book on you know the group of writers who talked about spirituality and how you felt that was covered but maybe that's too long that's I didn't write it. I suggested people for it. It was a series of talks at the New York Public Library right. And I've given one new previously years after American childhood on you know writing memoirs and he was doing this talk and so I suggested a great many people which he then got but I didn't read it I was too busy. I've been talking tonight with Annie Dillard

and I am an unabashed fan. We've been talking about many things she's given a reading from the living. Her epic novel novel her epic novel which the whole thing you know when I go OK they make me say that any day that you are writing. OK. Would you I mean talk about the one I just threw. Let me do it what you did again it may be just what you do you have that thing where you go to bed. You write the habit the intro just in terms of the Connecticut voices any Dillard at no or whatever the current noteworthy is don't you. OK. OK so what are you going to do to you know you have to do is say. OK you can just you can.

I'm Nancy Cobb My guest tonight on Connecticut voices has been. Annie Dillard and it's been a pleasure having her with us. Did you know. OK. And he wanted to sing a little. Ear. Yeah. Oh God. Now there's only one take do interview with me which is with the audio pros library. I sells like hotcakes. Yeah I've heard it. It's great I was in a furious

temper with this person. You were so strong in that interview that I could feel it here but it was a very powerful night Hamill's Obviously I don't know about 40 minutes or so I was in it or I don't know I I don't know. I get. Four five four five years ago on Cape Cod and I was tightly miked and I was completely claustrophobic and we were at odds very badly at odds from the very beginning. The interviewer just by just by the physical stuff or just out of everything I don't know we just bad karma. Yeah bad karma was really wanted her out of there immediately. What I you know what that's the first time now I it's interesting because I got that out of the library I listen to in the car and it just stopped me dead in my tracks one day. As soon as your voice came on because I thought Whoa what a powerhouse of a voice I don't know what I expected your voice to be like but it was that low resonant voice and it was really a strong it you were strong in your view I mean the the undercurrent of anger worked it didn't it didn't hurt it.

But I read this I took you in that I find your powerful very powerful stuff which is. You. Know.

You hear. Me. You never know.

Eat. Shit. Load was loaded. Because the load. The Heat. Load. O o o o o o o. It was. The week.

The land. Of the old. With thing. She told

me it was a. Big. Scene when you're seat is doing. To. Keep digging. You are the weak. You're listening.