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Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles

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Phillip Dampier:
Annie Proulx gave an interview on the Bookworm program on KCRW Santa Monica.  It was an interview done before the film achieved pop-culture status and gives insight into the characters in the film and Proulx's feelings about the movie and how the characters continue to haunt her in life.

http://www.heathledgercentral.com/media/AnnieProulx.mp3

--Edited to change title for merging similar threads. --Lynne

Shakesthecoffecan:
I was googling the newspaper in Casper the other day to see what I could find about the appearance of Annie Proulx and Judy Shepard there, sadly I don't think they covered it. I did however find some interesting articles and thought I would start a thread here where they could be posted.

Strange that she was called to be a juror in the trial of one of Matthew Shepard's murderers.

Shakesthecoffecan:
Author says she didn't think story would be published
By STEVEN BARRIE-ANTHONY
Los Angeles Times Friday, December 16, 2005



HOLLYWOOD -- E. Annie Proulx is sipping coffee at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and talking about literary ghosts.

She has struggled for years to get Ennis and Jack out of her head. These are the two leads who fall in love in Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain," male ranch hands whose secrecy and self-denial is bleak and heartbreaking and -- to anyone who has experienced homophobia and its ramifications -- disquietingly familiar.

Proulx, 70, in town recently for the premiere of Ang Lee's film adaptation of "Brokeback Mountain," says that while she was "blown away" by the movie, she doesn't welcome the return of Ennis and Jack to the forefront of her consciousness.

"Put yourself in my place," the author says. "An elderly, white, straight female, trying to write about two 19-year-old gay kids in 1963. What kind of imaginative leap do you think was necessary? Profound, extreme, large. To get into those guys' heads and actions took a lot of 16-hour days, and never thinking about anything else and living a zombie life. That's what I had to do. I really needed an exorcist to get rid of those characters. And they roared back when I saw the film."
The story bubbled forth from "years and years of observation and subliminal taking in of rural homophobia," says Proulx, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Shipping News," also was adapted for the screen. She remembers the moment when those years of observed hatred began taking form. It was 1995 and Proulx, who lives in Wyoming, visited a crowded bar near the Montana border. The place was rowdy and packed with attractive women, everyone was drinking, and the energy was high.

"There was the smell of sex in the air," remembers Proulx, who lives in Wyoming. "But here was this old shabby-looking guy. ... watching the guys playing pool. He had a raw hunger in his eyes that made me wonder if he were country gay. I wondered, 'What would've he been like when he was younger?' Then he disappeared, and in his place appeared Ennis. And then Jack. You can't have Ennis without Jack."

Proulx didn't think her story would ever be published. The material felt too risky; Ennis and Jack express their love with as much physical gusto as any heterosexual couple, and it happens in full view of the reader, without any nervous obfuscation. The backdrop is that wide expansive West that bore forth John Wayne and the Marlboro Man -- but here the edges of the mythos fray, and the world becomes chilly and oppressive.

The story was published in the New Yorker magazine in 1997, and screenwriter Diana Ossana read it one night when she couldn't sleep."It just floored me," Ossana says, speaking after a screening of "Brokeback Mountain." She ran downstairs to show it to her writing partner, who happens to be Larry McMurtry ("The Last Picture Show," "Lonesome Dove") and suggested they turn it into a screenplay. "I've known (McMurtry) for 20 years," Ossana said, "and this is the first time I've heard him say yes to something I suggested, without an argument."

The following day the screenwriters sent a letter to Proulx, asking to option the story with their own money. Proulx agreed.

"She trusted us more than she should have," McMurtry says. "She trusted us not to make the story unless we could make it right."

Proulx, for her part, found their enthusiasm "interesting" but thought to herself, "this is not going to happen." She had never considered "Brokeback Mountain" to be a cinematic possibility -- it pushes too many buttons, challenges too many norms. "Never, never, never, never, no," she says, at the Four Seasons, shaking her head. "Uh-uh." Then, three months later, Ossana and McMurtry sent her their screenplay, a spare and unfailingly faithful rendition of the story. The divergences grow organically from what's on the page, and the rest is as Proulx wrote it, nearly verbatim.

"I thought it was good," Proulx says. She had a few quibbles, mostly about language -- some of it seemed to her more Texas than Wyoming -- but those were worked out in the next and final draft. It made sense for the screenplay to stick closely to its source, Proulx says with her typical candor. "This was a strong story. It had a very solid framework, it had terse, good language. It would've been hard to change that without maiming everything."

The rest happened slowly, and Proulx had little involvement, retreating into Wyoming and her writing, trying as best she could to banish Ennis and Jack from her mind. Lee initially turned down the project to direct "The Hulk," then signed on again afterward. Casting the two leading roles was particularly difficult, Ossana says.

The movie, like the story, does not pull any punches. The sex is just as graphic, the critique of rural homophobia just as angst-ridden and raw. Proulx doesn't pretend to know how the movie will play with audiences, but she likes that her message will be broadcast through such a popular medium.

"There are a lot of people who see movies who do not read," Proulx says. "It used to be that writing and architecture were the main carriers, permanent carriers, of culture and civilization. Now you have to add film to that list, because film is the vehicle of cultural transmission of our time. It would be insane to say otherwise, to say that the book is still the thing. It isn't."

Perhaps true. But for many of Proulx's most ardent fans, the story is the thing.

After a screening of the film, there was a question-and-answer session with Proulx. "The story began in 1963," said a woman from the audience. "Do you think things are better now, in terms of attitudes?"

"I wish," Proulx said. "But one year after the story was published, Matthew Shepard was killed less than 30 miles from where I live. I was called to be on the jury for one of the killers."

The tough-guy Western mythology undergirding our national identity should be questioned, Proulx says, and she hopes that her story -- and now this movie -- will spur that kind of dialogue.

It seems to be happening. Bill Handley, an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California, was in the audience at the screening with the Q&A, and plans to put together a book of essays on the story and the film.

"It's a groundbreaking story, worthy of close attention," he says. "The essays will focus on a whole range of questions on sexuality, landscape, authenticity, and labor in the West. Who knows what the response to this film is going to be, and what that will tell us about the culture."

Shakesthecoffecan:
12/17/05-12/19/05

Annie Proulx tells the story behind "Brokeback Mountain"


Annie Proulx figured no magazine would touch her short story "Brokeback Mountain," the tale of two Wyoming cowboys whose romance is so intense, it sometimes leaves them black and blue. But The New Yorker published it in 1997, and it went on to win an O. Henry prize and a National Magazine Award. Now the movie version is a leading Oscar contender, with starring performances from Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist.

In a telephone conversation with the Associated Press from her home in Wyoming, Proulx, a 70-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winner, declined to discuss the origins of her two roughneck lovers, citing an upcoming book written with screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Instead, she spoke about homophobia, her fascination with rural life, and the process of making Twist and Del Mar live and breathe.

AP: You've said "Brokeback Mountain" began as an examination of homophobia in the land of the pure, noble cowboy.

Proulx: Everything I write has a rural situation, and the Wyoming stories, in the collection Close Range, which includes "Brokeback Mountain," did contain a number of those social-observation stories—what things are like for people there. It's my subject matter, what can I say?

AP: Were you trying to accomplish something specific with this story?

Proulx: No. It was just another story when I started writing it. I had no idea it was going to even end up on the screen. I didn't even think it was going to be published when I was first working on it because the subject matter was not in the usual ruts in the literary road.

AP: You've said this story took twice as long to write as a novel. Why?

Proulx: Because I had to imagine my way into the minds of two uneducated, rough-spoken, uninformed young men, and that takes some doing if you happen to be an elderly female person. I spent a great deal of time thinking about each character and the balance of the story, working it out, trying to do it in a fair kind of way.

AP: How did you feel about seeing it on the big screen?

Proulx: It was really quite a shock because I had had nothing to do with the film. So for 18 months, I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea if it was going to be good or frightful or scary, if it was going to be terribly lost or sentimentalized or what. When I saw it in September, I was astonished. The thing that happened while I was writing the story eight years ago is that from thinking so much about the characters and putting so much time into them, they became embedded in my consciousness. They became as real to me as real, walk-around, breathe-oxygen people. It took a long time to get these characters out of my head so I could get on with work. Then when I saw the film, they came rushing back. It was extraordinary—just wham—they were with me again.

AP: What did you think of the performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal?

Proulx: I thought they were magnificent, both of them. Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist...wasn't the Jack Twist that I had in mind when I wrote this story. The Jack that I saw was jumpier, homely. But Gyllenhaal's sensitivity and subtleness in this role is just huge. The scenes he's in have a kind of quicksilver feel to them. Heath Ledger is just almost really beyond description as far as I'm concerned. He got inside the story more deeply than I did. All that thinking about the character of Ennis that was so hard for me to get, Ledger just was there. He did indeed move inside the skin of the character, not just in the shirt but inside the person. It was remarkable.

AP: Would you characterize the story as groundbreaking?

Proulx: I hope that it is going to start conversations and discussions, that it's going to awaken in people an empathy for diversity, for each other and the larger world. I'm really hoping that the idea of tolerance will come through discussions about the film. People tend to walk out of the theater with a sense of compassion, which I think is very fine. It is a love story. It has been called both universal and specific, and I think that's true. It's an old, old story. We've heard this story a million times; we just haven't heard it quite with this cast.

AP: Have you gotten any response from gay organizations?

Proulx: No. When the story was first published eight years ago, I did expect that. But there was a deafening silence. What I had instead were letters from individuals, gay people, some of them absolutely heartbreaking. And over the years, those letters have continued and certainly are continuing now. Some of them are extremely fine, people who write and say, "This is my story. This is why I left Idaho, Wyoming, Iowa." Perhaps the most touching ones are from fathers, who say, "Now I understand the kind of hell my son went through." It's enormously wonderful to know that you've touched people, that you've truly moved them.

AP: Is that why you write?

Proulx: It's not why I write. I had no idea I was going to get any response of this sort. I wrote it from my long-term stance of trying to describe sections of rural life, individuals in particular rural situations and places, well, first the places. That it came out this way—it just happened to touch certain nerves in people. I think this country is hungry for this story.

AP: Why?

Proulx: Because it's a love story and there's hardly much love around these days. I think people are sick of divisiveness, hate-mongering, disasters, war, loss; and need and want a reminder that sometimes love comes along that is strong and permanent, and that it can happen to anyone.

AP: Do you think straight men will watch this movie?

Proulx: They are watching this movie. Of course, why wouldn't they watch it? Straight men fall in love. Not necessarily with each other or with a gay man. My son-in-law, who prides himself on being a Bud-drinking, NRA-member redneck, liked the movie so much, he went to it twice. Straight men are seeing it, and they're not having any problem with it. The only people who would have problems with it are people who are very insecure about themselves and their own sexuality and who would be putting up a defense, and that's usually young men who haven't figured things out yet. Jack and Ennis would probably have trouble with this movie.

AP: Do you think Jack and Ennis will come back?

Proulx: They're not coming back. There's no way. They're going to stay where they are. I've got other things to write. (Sandy Cohen, AP)

Shakesthecoffecan:
December 2005
John Detrixhe
features
An Interview with Annie Proulx

One doesn't need a research assistant to learn that Proulx doesn't care to do interviews. Proulx is a scholar and an artist, and she has won more awards than is civilized to list here (including the Pulitzer, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner). But one thing she's not is an entertainer. She's not a star, even though she could be if she wanted, and, possibly, if publishers got what they wanted.
It's this reluctance that makes her words so gratifying. There's a certain guilty thrill in listening to Proulx speak, when one knows that she would rather be in Wyoming, where she lives, or Newfoundland, where she owns a home. And she would probably be happiest if she were in either of those places writing, instead of giving a lecture in Chicago or responding to the media. Still, one senses that Proulx rarely does what she doesn't care to do, and when she answers a question it is only because she is willing, and not because she necessarily cares how you will react to her answer.

Proulx speaks quietly and precisely, without an accent, and there's a warmth to her voice that contrasts with the remote, unforgiving locales in which she feels most comfortable. Proulx's fiction reflects what she finds most interesting, and her characters are flawed, lonely and burdened, and her landscapes are ignored, remote places that are so vivid and personal as to be characters in their stories.

Proulx was a presenter at this year's Chicago Humanities Festival. She discussed her work with me after her presentation at Harold Washington Library.


I know you do a lot of research for your stories, and I was wondering at what point the research is finished and it's time to move forward with the story?

First of all, I never feel that it's finished, but you have to stop somewhere. There's no end to the amount of things that one should know about a place, especially when you begin to have contradictory opinions on geological formations and so forth. And I find that kind of thing very, very interesting, but not terribly useful in terms of story writing.

A little bit goes a long way.

Haruki Murakami recently told students at Tufts University that physical exercise is a sort of foundation for him for writing. Is there any sort of structure or routine outside of writing that you see as fundamental to your writing?

Actually, walking and hiking is extremely useful for some reason. One is able to untangle characters and plot lines and so forth more easily when walking. Driving does the same thing for me. I find driving, in Wyoming, not anywhere else, very conducive to clear thinking. Or useful thinking, I should say. [Laughs.] Not necessarily clear.

As is probably often mentioned, geography and environment almost seem like characters in your stories. How do you balance the physical realm of your stories against the character development? Or do you even try, and the stories come out the way they come out?

Right. One should reflect the other, for me.

I've read that when you're working on a project, you're writing sometimes sixteen hours a day. Do you still find time to read during those times?

When I'm ending a project I'm writing sixteen hours a day. Most of the time -- I have no time for writing. I hardly write at all. If I get fifteen minutes a day it's a small miracle. I just have time for a sentence here and there, and I keep hoping that sometime in the future I'll have time to write again. But generally I don't, I just don't have the time.

I read omnivorously, I always have, my entire life. I would rather be dead than not read. So, there's always time for that. I read while I eat, and our whole family did. We all had very bad manners at the table. All of our books are stained with spaghetti sauce, and that sort of thing.

I read that when you were young you picked out books by the color of their covers.

[Laughs.] Yeah, when I was in grade school and was allowed to go to the public library. I think that whole business began when I picked out [unintelligable Charles Whitney, Bounty], which had a beige cover, and I loved the book. It seemed to me that probably beige-covered books would all be good. So for a long time I only took out books with beige covers. And one, whose author's name I've quite forgotten, the title was Campus Shadows, about a medical student who contracted some frightful illness himself and was in the hospital bed and was going blind because nobody realized that they should put drops of water into his eyes. His eyes were getting dry and he couldn't see anything.

Something that's stayed with me for sixty years.

I spoke to a male writer whose protagonists are mostly women, and he said he does it for the challenge of writing from the female perspective. In your stories that I've read, the protagonists are male characters. Do you do this for a challenge, or do the stories write themselves that way?

No, it's for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I'm writing about rural communities. In rural communities there is a division of labor. Women are in the house doing household things, generally. Men are outside doing the interesting things, generally. Once in a while you'll find women out there running ranches or flying planes or whatever.

So there is that natural weight toward the male side, if you're going to write about rural places. The other reason is because I was the oldest of five girls, and there were no boys in our family, and I always wished there had been. And the third reason is because I like men. Men are very interesting to me.

So put those three together and there you are. Challenge has nothing to do with it. And I suspect that whoever told you that he writes about women because it's a challenge is lying. He likes women.

Your latest novel takes place in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, and I was particularly interested because I grew up in West Texas and --

Where?

In Midland. Well, near Midland. A small town called Fort Stockton.

Okay, yeah.

I had a creative writing instructor in college, in Milwaukee, and I wrote a story set in West Texas, and I didn't have much landscape in it because I didn't think anyone would be interested. And the instructor told me the exact opposite, that there's beauty in it. That touched me, because it seemed like nobody had ever said anything nice about where I grew up.

Right.

Especially people from Texas.

I found that about the whole panhandle. People in Texas would say, "What are you writing about?" And I'd tell them I'm working on something set in the panhandle. "Oh the panhandle! Uggh!" Texans in particular really loath the panhandle.

That's been my experience.

I think it's a great place. I miss it badly.

Roger Gatham said in the January 2003 Chicago Sun-Times review of That Old Ace in the Hole, "Proulx loves to create highly eccentric characters to go with her highly marginal countrysides." First off, there's no such thing as "highly marginal," and I wondered if you would feel like they were marginal countrysides? Perhaps in an economic sense, but I thought that might not be your perspective.

Yeah, this fellow must be a city person.

I read that you wanted That Old Ace in the Hole to be about a windmill repairman? Or a person who works with windmills?

Yeah, I did. I wanted to write about a windmill repairman, that was going to be my central character. But I had to know a lot about windmills, and I'm here to tell you that you don't know a lot about windmills unless you grew up in the trade. [Laughs.] I had heard that there was a school of windmill repair at Los Cruces, in New Mexico, at the university. So I called them up one day and said I was interested in taking the windmill repair course. There was a long silence on the other end of the wire, and the person I was speaking to said "What windmill repair course?"

I had come across this note in a book on windmill repair, that there was such a course, so I read it out, "It says here you have one." And she said, "We haven't had one for years and years." And sure enough, I hadn't checked the publication date of that book, which was 1970s. There was no more windmill repair course.

So then I made appointments with various windmill repair persons in the panhandle area, and I got stood up a couple of times. Guys said they would meet with me and talk about it, and I could go out with them on repair jobs. But then they'd never show. Finally I did go out with one fellow, and on an incredibly windy day -- not a great day for climbing up on windmills. I was down at the bottom of the windmill, and he was up at the top. I'm not sure what he was doing at this point, but he dropped one of this tools which he had to have, and the only way he could get it was if I brought it up to him. It was quite a tall windmill, and as I say, it was very windy. So I climbed up and brought it up to him. Had quite a good view of the surrounding fields. [Laughs.] That was as close as I got to windmill repair.

Windmills have pretty much been replaced anyway by diesel pumps, for pumping irrigation water out, but the windmill was very important in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. It's not important now, though lots of places you still see them. So I had to change things, and make my windmill repairman an old guy who just worked on the leftovers from yesteryear. He couldn't play a central role in the book.

That's why the story shifted, because they don't give the windmill-repair courses in Los Cruces anymore!

Did you ever feel like your work might be defined by Shipping News, and now it seems there's a lot of attention being given to Brokeback Mountain? I guess it's awfully early to say, but do you think your work might be defined by Brokeback Mountain?

It's starting to look that way, yeah. It's odd, but that's how it is. Actually, that story was to be one of three or four stories about offbeat and difficult love situations, but I never wrote any of the others. I just wrote that one.

I had to get away from it. It just got too intense, and too much on my mind. That's when I wrote the book [That Old Ace in the Hole], but I may have to write the other stories just to clear my mind, as it were. And also because I conceived of that particular story as one of a set of stories. As it is right now, it stands out rather like a sore thumb in comparison to the rest of the work, so I think I have to do those other stories.

Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana prepared the screenplay for Brokeback. Did you work with them at all on that, or was it completely in their hands?

It was in their hands. I think Diana called me one day and we talked for a couple hours on the telephone. I pretty much stayed out of it. Mostly because I was busy with something else, and because I'm not a movie person. I'm not a screenplay writer. There's certain rhythms and certain shape to the screen that's just different from short stories or novels.

I know enough not to go butting in. Also, I really hate the tendency that many writers have when their stuff is made into a film, that they are in there, they want to do everything. They want to direct, they want to choose the actors, they want to do the screenplay -- they just want to control it. And, I understood very well that that's not a good thing, because it's different.

You answered some of my questions earlier, when you spoke about adapting a novel for a movie, in which you have to cut away, and a short story, which must be flushed out. I have a friend who went to the Toronto Film Festival and saw Brokeback Mountain, and she loved the way certain parts were filled in to make a feature-length story.

Well, I liked it, too. I thought that what they did was really quite wonderful. It really enriched the story. Instead of a little canoe, it became an ocean liner.

I also thought it was interesting when you were talking about Ang Lee's treatment of your story, how he brought the necessary thoughtfulness to the story.

He sure did.

Are you surprised that that particular story has been singled out for so much attention?

Yeah. I am. Especially eight years after it was written. It's because film is very important in our culture, the moving image is dominant. And for many writers, too, it's only validated if it's made into a movie. That's just the way it is, at this time.

So, yes, I am surprised.

You said earlier that you were pleased with Heath Ledger's performance. Did you feel that way about the whole cast?

The whole cast was magnificent. There wasn't anything not to be thrilled with, in anyone's performance. They were all extraordinary. And by singling out Heath Ledger, I didn't mean to slight Jake Gyllenhaal in the least, because he's an extraordinarily versatile, quicksilver, accomplished actor. Really, quite marvelous. And I think he went from Brokeback to Jarhead, and that is the kind of jump that is, like, "Oh, really?" And he did both with ease. Very expert ease.

All of the actors were just superb.

I get the sense that you are a high-profile writer who writes in spite of being a high-profile writer. Do you feel that the level of attention you have received works against what you want to be doing?

It's a pain in the ass, frankly. Media attention and interviews and all that kind of stuff. Not you --

I understand.

The way that publishing has gone in the last couple of decades, that's what it is now. That's part of the job. When I first started writing I hated that, I hated that attention. I was rude and unpleasant and uncooperative. And just didn't like doing it. But, there's no getting away from it. It is now part of the writing job. Publishers and media people have made writers into, kind of, star things.

Which is too bad. If I had my druthers, and usually I do have my druthers, on this at least, just to live a private life and get on with the writing. Not have to trot around and gibber. [Laughs.] It's part of the scene.

I was chatting about this with Charles Baxter a couple of hours ago. He laments, too, the sudden, or the intrusive, star thing. It's not what writing is about. Most writers are very reclusive, and it doesn't sit easily. It's difficult.

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