Your Space, Your Place

As I finished reading Chapter 3 from Annie Dillard's, The Writing Life, I instantly thought of how different this reading was in comparison to Sanders "The Writing Center." At the start of this chapter, Dillard admits that her place on the island, in her little one room cabin, overlooks a beautiful scene of the beach. However, she seems instantly bored of this place. She even says the beauty is grand, but she is used to it. She does not care where she works because she "does not notice things" (pg.3).

One part of her work that shocked me was when Dillard stated that the life of the writer is not only "colorless" but colorless to the sense of deprivation. This seems so depressing. She almost begins to 'poke fun' at writers sitting in small rooms, surronding themselves with other writers and recalling the real world. Isn't she doing the same thing in her small cabin? To her, the writer is locked away. This is extremely different than Sanders view. I feel as if Sanders would reply to this by saying that Dillard does not endorse and pay enough attention to place. But, she later says society shuns writers. "Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all" (pg.7). It is here where she seems to contradict herself because isn't she sunning herself from society by staying in her one room cabin? Yet again, she contradicts herself by saying she cannot work without the company of others. I can't help but wonder if she planned on driving her readers crazy with her continuous contradictions.

Where Dillard says society shuns writers, Sanders claims writers shun society. Sanders actually seems overly excited about place in comparison to Dillard. He said that rather than abandon our messes, we must move in loops, out and back again and explore (The Writing Center). Place mattered to him, and not just one place, but anyplace fascinated him as he thought of the possibilities that that place could bring a writer.

Dillard seems bored with place; place does not affect how she writes and it is as if place makes it harder to work. She is lazy, tired and not motivated. "This morning, as on so many mornings, I lacked sufficient fuel for liftoff" (pg. 6).

I do not feel that all hope of "place" is lost for Dillard. At the end of the chapter she seems to have an "awakening" as to why her life as a writer 'went wrong.' She realizes she was too far removed from the world and that her work was "too obscure, too symbolic, too intellectual . . . it was not available to people" (pg. 8) and more importantly to readers.