Christianity Today September 26, 2026 6 min signal 2026-09-26

When Annie Dillard met James Kilgo

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

September 25, 2026

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Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source images: Rawpixel / Facebook / Leigh Vogel / Getty

When James Kilgo published Deep Enough for Ivorybills in 1988, reviewers compared it to Annie Dillard’s 1974 nature memoir Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Dillard herself saw the kinship. In the afterword to a book she edited, Modern American Memoirs, she recommended Kilgo’s book. Ivorybills also appears on “The Annie Dillard Log,” a long (and fascinating) list of books Dillard has recommended over the years.

When Ivorybills came out, Dillard wrote to Kilgo to express her admiration, and that letter began a correspondence that lasted for years, until Kilgo’s death in 2002. Dillard died last week.

But as near as I can tell, Dillard and Kilgo met only once. The story of that meeting is one Kilgo loved to tell, and one I loved to hear. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in high school. One of the bonds I had with Kilgo—who was my teacher at the University of Georgia—was our shared admiration for Dillard. Pilgrim was one reason I wanted to become a writer.

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The story makes more sense if you know that Kilgo and Dillard were of the same generation. Kilgo was born in 1941, Dillard in 1945. But by the time they reached middle age, you probably wouldn’t guess that by their appearance. Kilgo had a balding head and a greying beard, smoked a pipe, and—though fit and lively—often wore seersucker suits to class, or sometimes tweedy sport coats and khaki pants. In short, he looked like the college professor he was. He taught English literature and creative writing at Georgia for 33 years.

Dillard, on the other hand, famously sprang onto the literary scene as a prodigy. She published Pilgrim when she was in her late 20s, and she looked even younger. Her blond hair did not show gray. It was possible to mistake her for an undergraduate until she was well into her 40s. Profiles of her from the 1990s commented on her youthful appearance. In a 1999 Boston Phoenix article, the reporter wrote that her “platinum-blond hair, piercing blue eyes, wind-rouged cheeks and … wide smile [were] strikingly beautiful even from a block away.”

Jim Kilgo knew nothing about these descriptions of Annie Dillard in 1988, when Ivorybills was turning Kilgo into a literary celebrity and reviewers were comparing their work.

One afternoon, Kilgo sat in his office in Park Hall on the University of Georgia campus. He was grading essays, and he barely noticed when a woman with blond hair stopped by his open door to read the notices he taped there. When the woman lingered, Kilgo finally looked up and said, “May I help you?”

She responded, “Are you Dr. Kilgo?”

“Yes.”

“And you teach this 20th-century American novel class?” She pointed to the class description taped to the door.

“I do,” Kilgo said.

“Well,” the woman drawled, “Is there a lot of readin’ in that class?”

In his telling of the story, Kilgo always emphasized—with a smile—the way she pronounced “readin’”.

“Yes,” Kilgo answered. “It’s a novels class, so there will be plenty of reading.”

“What about writin’?” she persisted. “Will we have to write a lot of papers?”

“Well, yes,” Kilgo answered, doing his Southern gentlemanly best not to show a rising annoyance. “This is an upper division course. For English majors and grad students. There will be several essays required for this course.”

The woman pressed further. “Long papers?” she asked.

At this point, Kilgo said, he was losing his patience. He answered, “Young lady, if these are your primary concerns—the amount of reading that’s required or the number of essays you’ll have to write—this might not be the course for you.”

The woman could maintain her façade no longer. She broke out a wide smile, held out her hand, and said, “Jim, I’m Annie Dillard.”

Every time I heard Kilgo tell that story, he would stop here and laugh hard. The joke was on him, but he never failed to find it funny, even if it was at his own expense, and even after many retellings.

And it was funny. It was the kind of subtle, sly, deadpan practical joke Dillard told in her novel The Maytrees. It was the kind of humor Kilgo relished. His own books were full of warmth, eccentric characters, and humor that was the result not of joke-telling but of real-life situations.

This story sprang immediately to mind when I heard Annie Dillard died last week on September 15, at age 81, at her home on Cape Cod, overlooking a cove that was the setting for The Maytrees.

I never learned what Kilgo and Dillard talked about after meeting in Park Hall so many years ago. Kilgo never said, at least not to me, except to note that she was delightful and they ended up spending several hours together.

One other thing Kilgo and Dillard shared, at least when they met, was their Christian faith. At the time, both were committed, practicing Christians. Kilgo spoke to me often about his faith. He was one of the few openly Christian professors on the faculty of the English department at Georgia. When he died in 2002, his family was gathered around him, praying and singing hymns.

Dillard’s faith was more complex, more troubled, more fraught. She was born into liberal Protestantism, converted to Catholicism as an adult, and by the end of her life had more or less rejected both. In a 2020 article for the theologically liberal magazine The Christian Century, she said, “I identify as a Christian.” She also said she enjoyed reciting the Nicene Creed, the historic statement of the core doctrines of the faith. She added, though, “I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.”

That is hardly a ringing testimony for biblical Christianity. Still, her 1977 book Holy the Firm is one of the most beautiful mediations on the grace, mercy, and mystery of God I have ever read.

Now they are gone. I miss them both. One I knew both through his books and as a mentor and friend. The other I knew only through Jim Kilgo’s story, and through her books. But oh, my, what books they made. And those books, thanks be to God, remain.

Warren Cole Smith heads Ministry Watch.

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