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Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
Shakesthecoffecan:
‘Brokeback’ author keeps focus on Wyoming
By Pam Mellskog
The Daily Times-Call
BOULDER — One man showed up in the Carhartt jacket and western-style shirt worn by Heath Ledger, star of last year’s movie “Brokeback Mountain” — a controversial film based on a short story by Annie Proulx about a homosexual relationship set in Wyoming.
But the 600-member audience needed to wait to ask the award-winning author about her work and how that translates in film.
The Center of the American West presented Proulx on Wednesday night at the University of Colorado at Boulder as its 2006 Distinguished Lecturer to share an original talk about the American West.
She read a section that ultimately got axed from “Red Desert,” a new book of essays she and others — including a geologist, an entomologist, a paleontologist and an archeologist — wrote to unveil that remote spot in southern Wyoming. The University of Texas Press will publish the project next year or early in 2008.
Proulx called the 69,000-square-mile area “one of largest unfarmed areas in the lower 48 states … and it’s disappearing before our eyes” as the energy industry tries to plumb it for natural resources.
The three-year book project began when a photographer friend asked the author to write something to introduce the images. But after several weeks of fruitless research, Proulx, 72, suspected the Red Desert was a place that deserved more of a legacy.
“No books. Nothing. Absolutely zero,” she said of her trolling the University of Wyoming’s stacks.
Even the federally funded Wyoming Biodiversity Database turned up nothing on the Red Desert, she added.
“Nobody had ever bothered to write about this large place, ever … except those who wrote about the scenic wonders,” the Wyoming resident said. “This was meat on our table.”
The Sierra Club Web site refers to the Red Desert as “one of the last great undeveloped tracts of high elevation, cold desert in the United States. The area includes red-bottomed desert lakes dotted with bright green greasewood, barren areas of sheet erosion and painted badlands, volcanic necks and cones, shifting sand dunes with buried ice deposits and fossil beds from an ancient inland sea.”
The book looks at the area’s natural history. But Proulx’s work addressed the historical background — namely through the eyes outlaws either rustling livestock or hiding out there between 1875 and 1895.
After that, she said, railroad tracks and telegraph lines improved transportation and communication enough to ruin the way of life rustlers such as Butch Cassidy made notorious.
When audience members asked if her three-year Red Desert project inspired her to write fiction with film possibilities rooted in that place, Proulx said “yes and no.”
“Turning a novel into a 90-minute film … there’s lots of cutting as well as the overriding Hollywood ethos of happy endings and all that crap,” she said of her experience watching that process with her novel, “The Shipping News.”
But her short story “Brokeback Mountain,” from the story collection “Close Range,” proved “thrilling” on screen, she said.
“Brokeback Mountain was very different,” Proulx continued. “There wasn’t enough material. … I really think it would better for Hollywood to stick to short stories. Making a novel into a film is essentially a destructive deed.”
Lynne:
About Annie Proulx:
"Around this time last year, the movie "Brokeback Mountain" caused considerable uproar. The film was based on Annie Proulx's short story from the collection, "Close Range." Her work is mesmerizing. The reader is immersed in the gritty lifestyle of Wyoming; everything about her stories is stripped down and raw. The flavor of her stories is unlike much of what is on the shelves, and it is impossible not to savor her characters who are consistently craggy, weird, real, and perceptive."
The article lists some other good book gift ideas also ...
http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article.php?date=2006-12-08§ion=4&id=5
Lynne:
Our favorite writers reveal their favorites
Which novel is Madison writer Lorrie Moore's most favorite of 10 favorite works of fiction?
If you've read any of her books, you won't be surprised to discover Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" tops her list, followed quickly by Joyce's "Dubliners" and Homer's "Iliad."
Let's see. . . . Moore, who is renowned for her fine, cerebral yet humane short stories, seems to be taken by the classical literature of the heart. Her list goes on to include "The Decameron" by Giovanni Boccaccio, Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde," Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre," "Washington Square" by Henry James and "Middlemarch" by George Eliot.
Buy a link hereAll giants of past centuries. But there, in 10th place, representing contemporary literature, is Alice Munro's "Open Secrets."
Moore is among 125 authors who reveal their literary loves in "Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books," a compilation by J. Peder Zane, the book editor of the Raleigh News & Observer.
The book, out from Norton this month, makes interesting reading, slicing and dicing lists several different ways, even giving us a "Top Top Ten" list compiled by assigning points to each ranking on individual lists.
Annie Proulx starts with Homer's "The Odyssey" and "Wheat That Springeth Green" by J.F. Powers but toward the end she lists Orhan Pamuk's "The Black Book" and the haiku of Matsuo Basho. Proulx grumbles to Zane, "Lists, unless grocery shopping lists, are truly a reductio ad absurdum."
Maybe, but these are great fun. Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon, Anita Shreve, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Norman Mailer, - they're all making lists. The leading favorites? Shakespeare, with 11 titles, and William Faulkner and Henry James with six titles each.
Zane wanted to do a book of favorites because he wished one existed to help him as a reader, he told me recently at a meeting of the National Book Critics Circle, on whose board we both serve. He describes his book as "part Rand-McNally, part Zagat's, part cultural Prozac" and says it will take "the anxiety out of bibliophilia by offering a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the world's best books."
I don't know about anxiety. But I promise readers that they will get a kick out of the "Top Top Ten" list. It starts with Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and ends with "Middlemarch."
[email protected]
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=557330
Lynne:
From http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/2/8/101326/6334 :
The Feb. 8 Jackson Hole News & Guide reports that a judge has again chastised the Bush administration for violating federal law when it overturned the Clinton-era Roadless Rule. And she has issued an order protecting 52 million acres of federal roadless forest lands nationwide from roads or surface disturbance related to energy development.
"Though it's likely that feds and states will continue to litigate this good idea to death (why?), I'm going to celebrate by tucking into this great new volume of essays on the topic from intrepid roadless defenders Wildlands CPR just received at my office: A Road Runs Through It. "Road-ripping," writes Annie Proulx in her foreword, "is a meaningful ritual that seeks to reestablish the correct order of the world." Amen."
A link to A Road Runs Through It: Reviving Wild Places edited by Thomas Reed Petersen: http://www.powells.com/biblio/1555663710?&PID=25450 contans this synopsis:
"Roads have become an important concern in re-wilding talks in North America. Not the highways, but the 500,000 miles of roads built in federal forest lands to access natural resources and abandoned when the resources--timber, coal, or other minerals--were removed. This important book features a collection of essays by some of today's finest nonfiction writers, including Peter Matthiessen, David Petersen, Stephanie Mills, Phil Condon, and many more. They explore the devastation, carnage, loss of wildlands, and uselessness of the modern system of roadworks through public lands, and give ideas about how to preserve what road-less wildlands we have left. All royalties from the book will be donated to Wildlands CPR, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reviving and protecting wild places by promoting road removal, preventing road reconstruction, and limiting motorized recreation."
Here is a review -
http://www.orionmagazine.org/pages/om/07-1om/Reviews.html#petersen
which explains 'road-ripping' as "the removal of roads from public wildlands".
Front-Ranger:
This is very good information, Lynn. Thanks for posting this!!
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