Happy 70th Birthday to Annie Dillard (nature writer - essayist)

from WRITER's ALMANAC (American Public Media dot-org; Garrison Keillor):
April 30 is the birthday of Annie Dillard, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1945). She began writing poetry in high school, and then studied English in college. After writing a master's thesis on Thoreau's Walden, she moved to a cabin in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. There she wrote poetry and also kept a daily journal of her observations of nature and her thoughts about God and religion. She wrote in old notebooks and on four-by-six-inch index cards, and when she was ready to transform the journal into a book, she had 1,100 entries. "By the time I finished the book, I weighed about 98 pounds," Dillard said. "I never went to bed. I would write all night until the sun was almost coming up."  The result, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was published in 1974, and Annie Dillard received her first literary award the following year: the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. She was only 29 years old. She has published collections of essays and of poetry, as well as an autobiography. Her most recent work is a novel, The Maytrees (2007). When it comes to writing, she says: "Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark."