The Writing Life

Dillard illustrates the brutality of Lummi Island’s environment and its permanence in her memory. She once met with her neighbor, the artist Paul Glenn, who was in the middle of testing a new technique that he felt inspired to perfect. Dillard returns to the island the next summer and asks Paul about his progress, to which he tells her an anecdote about another islander, Ferrar Burn. Ferrar tried to haul an eight-foot Alaskan cedar log with a rowboat, but he was pulled southward by the tide all night before the current changed and brought him to his home. Paul feels he is being similarly pulled back by his work, but he remains hopeful that his tide will change.

Dillard compares her memories of the island to how the Dinka tribespeople understand memory as external entities. The sense of being on the “brink of the infinite” on the island haunts her and seeps into her drawings and writings no matter how much she tries to keep it away (88). She illustrates the strangeness and harshness of the island’s waters, but also the fearlessness of the islanders. For Dillard, writing is also like being on the brink of the infinite because at once it can lead to endless possibilities, but it can also lead to nothingness.