Place Matters

While reading Annie Dillard's "The Writing Life", I found myself constantly comparing her writing to the writing of Scott Russell Sanders in his "Writing From the Center". Our coursepack is focused upon place and the difference it makes. As I tried to look beyond the physical place in which both writers were situated, I could not help but recognize the emotional state, or place, that they were stuck in. Their emotional situations were very different, and yes, they shadowed their physical environment, however as I reread I found much more. Sanders was constantly referring to masculinity, power and detachment of an author. He wrote as though the author was always in control of the detachment in which they placed himself or herself. According to Sanders, place was what you made of it and from there you find your center. Dillard, on the other hand, is in a very low emotional state and feels as though the common state of the author is "so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all" (bottom of pg. 12). She is alone no matter where she goes, while Sanders needs to displace himself to be alone. These conflicting ideas have so much affected their content and style of writing that their definitions of "place" don't seem to match. A few important things I have noticed about Annie Dillard are her addiction to writing no matter how high or low she is, the way she expresses this feeling is through the bird on page 8, and she never connects to anything she writes because she firmly believes the page controls the writer. This is a chaotic description of Annie Dillard's place that seems so far from Scott Russell Sander's place in the center of the county, the center of the Midwest, and in the center of a family.