Pilgrim at tinker creek book6/9/2023 ![]() ![]() The book raises questions about the horrors and beauties of nature, and the power of the present moment in a world that’s constantly being created. She comes across as audacious, inquisitive, and hilarious, chasing wood ducks and sleeping alone without a tent under a moonless sky. In its chapters, she spends a lot of time sitting on a sycamore log over the creek, watching a praying mantis lay eggs or seeing a giant water bug sucking up a frog’s body (leaving behind its crumpled skin). ![]() She won the 1975 nonfiction Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book describing her explorations in the Virginia valley where she lived. One of the first women to defy this stereotype and write her way into the male-dominated canon was Annie Dillard. “Here, in the wilderness, a man could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity.” ![]() “The mythic frontier individualist was almost always masculine in gender,” notes environmental history professor William Cronon in a 1995 New York Times Magazine article. ![]() She’s one of relatively few female writers in an American tradition that dates back to Henry David Thoreau. In her memoir, Wild, Cheryl Strayed describes what it was like to be a woman hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, where a fellow traveler dubbed her “the only girl in the woods.” Strayed wasn’t just a rarity on the rugged PCT. ![]()
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