Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Themes

When Dillard decides to spend a year chronicling life at Tinker Creek, she's ready to experience the glory of nature. She sees a cute frog in the water and starts observing… only to see the frog...

It doesn't get much more isolated than living alone in a cabin in the woods. Taking her cue from Thoreau, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard nestles up to the creek to, as she says, "see what I co...

At its heart, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a meditation on man's (or woman's) ability (or lack thereof) to live in harmony with nature. Sure, on the surface it's all walking in the woods and observin...

How many ways can living things bite the dust? Um, a lot. The brutal truth is that if you're an insect, muskrat, or fish, the odds are against you—there are all kinds of parasites just waiting to...

Dillard's pilgrimage to Tinker Creek comes from a desire to keep what Thoreau called "a meteorological journal of the mind." Thoreau hoped that by cataloguing the visible, he could understand the i...

Tinker Creek is a kind of church—if you don't mind your church being full of muskrats and predatory insects—and Dillard asks lot of big questions about God in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The bigge...

One of the things that makes the narrator of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek so endearing is her childlike fascination with, well, almost everything. Frogs? Check. Bugs? Check. Snakes? Check—as long as s...

When it comes to exploration, Dillard owns. This is a woman who's not afraid to brush a spider off her coffee cup or sleep alone with the windows open, even when a tomcat barges in and claws her fa...