The Writing Life

Both the story Paul Glenn tells Dillard and her observations of his work deal with the theme of following the work when inspiration strikes. Dillard observes all of Glenn’s potential influences that led him to try the technique, like “his study of abstract expressionist Mark Tobey’s canvases” or “the mistiness of the Pacific Northwest” (84). She relays he had been working to perfect his new technique for six months, despite not definitively knowing what he would use the color-dipped paper for. He was simply “following the work wherever it led” (85) and learning along the way—the same way she thinks a writer should.

Glenn’s anecdote about Ferrar Burn within Dillard’s anecdote illustrates the necessary endurance an artist needs during times of difficulty. Like Ferrar paddling against the tide, Glenn feels like “he was rowing to the north and moving fast to the south” (87), despite his best efforts. Glenn is firm that he needs to “just keep at it” and hopes “the tide will turn to bring [him] in” (88). Dillard’s inclusion of Glenn’s anecdote reveals the impact it had on her, as it demonstrates that other artists share her ideas about perseverance.

Dillard repeats the phrase, “That island haunts me” (83,89), to impart the strong memory she has of the place—one mostly of fear, madness, and strangeness. Everything about the island appears extreme: its location, its weather, the coldness of its ocean. For example, despite the freezing water that could kill a man in 10 minutes, she once “saw two twenty-four-man war canoes” full of singing, bare-chested paddlers (88). For her, the sight was akin to seeing the phosphorescent green foam of a winter storm that made her “[weep] on the shore in fear” (88). Regardless of the fear the island gave her, Dillard willingly chooses to return to the island every summer because the environment confronts her with important subjects. Dillard never names the island in the book, but contextual clues imply that she is speaking of Lummi Island, which has a history of housing artists off the coast of Washington.

Dillard compares life on the island to “writing’s solitude” on “the brink of the infinite” (88). The image of having “one foot in fatal salt water and one foot on a billion grains of sand” illustrates the diverging possibilities of both writing and life on the island (88). Writing can offer the writer seemingly infinite possibilities like grains of sand, but there is also the danger of it offering nothing—like plunging into the ocean’s abyss. This concept explains why a writer may fear following the work wherever it goes, because one of the places it can lead is to bleak nothingness. Dillard insists on perseverance and courage in the face of difficulty, however, in an attempt to comfort the fear a writer—like her younger self—may feel when beginning a project.

Dillard equates the haunting memory of the island to how the Dinka tribe believe memories are “quick with substance” (87). The memories of the island’s infiniteness appear as a nagging outer presence that Dillard cannot exile from her work. Regardless of her intentions while writing, the personified infinity “required her to represent it” (89). The final passage of Chapter 6 blends natural imagery with the mechanical, computerized imagery of writing. When she scrolls on her “blank monitor screens” she is also “scrolling up and down beaches” (89); she dips “pens into ink” like “dipping paddles into seas” (89). These successive images exemplify the intrusive, external presence of the island that Dillard cannot help but write about.