This work, a collection of essays on the natural world during a year spent in the Blue Ridge valley of Virginia, reflects the author's interactions with her wilderness surroundings. The author takes us through a year of on-foot explorations through her own landscape, bringing anecdotes, curiosities, and insights about all she observes and experiences. In the summer, she stalks muskrats in the creek and thinks about wave mechanics; in the fall, she...

This personal narrative surveys the panorama of our world, past and present

Late in the 19th century, surveyors, miners, farmers and other new settlers struggle to make a new life among the Lummi and Nooksack Indians in the settlement at Whatcom on Bellingham Bay near Puget Sound.

Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. Hands-off, he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems. Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers...

Dillard describes the working life of a writer. She probes and exposes, examines and analyzes, as she recounts what the actual process of writing feels like.

In recognition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the author herself