And her head jerked in spasms, making a splattering noise her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. In the piece, “A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan,” flaps into the flame of Dillard’s candle, sticks in the wax, and ignites. She read an excerpt to the writers at Pacifica Graduate Institutes’ conference at the Miramar Hotel Santa Monica. More than a decade later, Dillard reread the book in a camp tent and included her thoughts in a brief nonfiction narrative, “Holy the Firm.”

“The Day on Fire,” James Ramsey Ullman’s novel about the life of 19th-Century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, inflamed Dillard’s lust for words at age 16. So it really shouldn’t surprise when, back at her hotel, the woman best known for the year she spent meditating on the banks of Tinker Creek hears a mariachi band, does a little two-step and sings along to “Cielito Lindo.”

“Let’s try something exotic!” Dillard says-something she can’t readily find back in Middletown, Conn.: Indian or Japanese or Korean or Mexican would be wonderful!īlocks later, over a dinner of mediocre Thai, Dillard focuses for a bit on her novel, and literature again rises in exultation.īut as the author talks books and writing, her image as an ethereal artiste evaporates-the word and the world integrally intertwine. It’s five days BR-Before Riot-and Los Angeles beckons the hungry author with all its vaunted multiethnic charm. Darned if she doesn’t gawk with undignified enthusiasm at the wild colors spilling from all those trendy shops. Shouldn’t this avatar of artistic integrity move with the delicacy of a dandelion caught in a brutish wind?īut darned if she doesn’t bop along in the currents of jazz sweeping out of the Third Street Promenade’s cafes. Shouldn’t this high priestess of literary commitment affect a detached hauteur as she strolls among Santa Monica’s hoi polloi?

But on the night before her reading, The Conscience of Serious Writing behaved poorly.

Pilgrim at tinker creek sparknotes