Author Topic: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles  (Read 77310 times)

Offline Phillip Dampier

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Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« on: February 10, 2006, 03:44:54 am »
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
« Last Edit: February 10, 2007, 06:16:19 am by Lynne »
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Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Annie Proulx Articles
« Reply #1 on: October 26, 2006, 11:02:05 am »
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.
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Author says she didn't think story would be published
« Reply #2 on: October 26, 2006, 11:03:54 am »
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."

"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Advocate Article
« Reply #3 on: October 26, 2006, 11:09:50 am »
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)

"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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« Reply #4 on: October 26, 2006, 11:12:06 am »
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.
« Last Edit: February 10, 2007, 06:16:56 am by Lynne »
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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The Classic "Play it as it lays"
« Reply #5 on: October 26, 2006, 11:14:12 am »
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Blood on the red carpet

Annie Proulx on how her Brokeback Oscar hopes were dashed by Crash

Saturday March 11, 2006
The Guardian

 
Ain't no Mountain high enough ... Ang Lee with his Oscar for best director. Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/AP. More photographs
 
On the sidewalk stood hordes of the righteous, some leaning forward like wind-bent grasses, the better to deliver their imprecations against gays and fags to the open windows of the limos - the windows open by order of the security people - creeping toward the Kodak Theater for the 78th Academy Awards. Others held up sturdy, professionally crafted signs expressing the same hatred.
The red carpet in front of the theatre was larger than the Red Sea. Inside, we climbed grand staircases designed for showing off dresses. The circular levels filled with men in black, the women mostly in pale, frothy gowns. Sequins, diamonds, glass beads, trade beads sparkled like the interior of a salt mine. More exquisite dresses appeared every moment, some made from six yards of taffeta, and many with sweeping trains that demanded vigilance from strolling attendees lest they step on a mermaid's tail. There was one man in a kilt - there is always one at award ceremonies - perhaps a professional roving Scot hired to give colour to the otherwise monotone showing of clustered males. Larry McMurtry defied the dress code by wearing his usual jeans and cowboy boots.


Article continues

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The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit awards the day before. (If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit choices.) We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - excuse me - Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.
After a good deal of standing around admiring dresses and sucking up champagne, people obeyed the stentorian countdown commands to get in their seats as "the show" was about to begin. There were orders to clap and the audience obediently clapped. From the first there was an atmosphere of insufferable self-importance emanating from "the show" which, as the audience was reminded several times, was televised and being watched by billions of people all over the world. Those lucky watchers could get up any time they wished and do something worthwhile, like go to the bathroom. As in everything related to public extravaganzas, a certain soda pop figured prominently. There were montages, artfully meshed clips of films of yesteryear, live acts by Famous Talent, smart-ass jokes by Jon Stewart who was witty and quick, too witty, too quick, too eastern perhaps for the somewhat dim LA crowd. Both beautiful and household-name movie stars announced various prizes. None of the acting awards came Brokeback's way, you betcha. The prize, as expected, went to Philip Seymour Hoff-man for his brilliant portrayal of Capote, but in the months preceding the awards thing, there has been little discussion of acting styles and various approaches to character development by this year's nominees. Hollywood loves mimicry, the conversion of a film actor into the spittin' image of a once-living celeb. But which takes more skill, acting a person who strolled the boulevard a few decades ago and who left behind tapes, film, photographs, voice recordings and friends with strong memories, or the construction of characters from imagination and a few cold words on the page? I don't know. The subject never comes up. Cheers to David Strathairn, Joaquin Phoenix and Hoffman, but what about actors who start in the dark?

Everyone thanked their dear old mums, scout troop leaders, kids and consorts. More commercials, more quick wit, more clapping, beads of sweat, Stewart maybe wondering what evil star had lighted his way to this labour. Despite the technical expertise and flawlessly sleek set evocative of 1930s musicals, despite Dolly Parton whooping it up and Itzhak Perlman blending all the theme music into a single performance (he represented "culchah"), there was a kind of provincial flavour to the proceedings reminiscent of a small-town talent-show night. Clapping wildly for bad stuff enhances this. There came an atrocious act from Hustle and Flow, Three 6 Mafia's violent rendition of "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp", a favourite with the audience who knew what it knew and liked. This was a big winner, a bushel of the magic gold-coated gelded godlings going to the rap group.

The hours sped by on wings of boiler plate. Brokeback's first award was to Argentinean Gustavo Santaolalla for the film's plangent and evocative score. Later came the expected award for screenplay adaptation to Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, and only a short time later the director's award to Ang Lee. And that was it, three awards, putting it on equal footing with King Kong. When Jack Nicholson said best picture went to Crash, there was a gasp of shock, and then applause from many - the choice was a hit with the home team since the film is set in Los Angeles. It was a safe pick of "controversial film" for the heffalumps.

After three-and-a-half hours of butt-numbing sitting we stumbled away, down the magnificent staircases, and across the red carpet. In the distance men were shouting out limousine numbers, "406 . . . 27 . . . 921 . . . 62" and it seemed someone should yell "Bingo!" It was now dark, or as dark as it gets in the City of Angels. As we waited for our number to be called we could see the enormous lighted marquee across the street announcing that the "2006 Academy Award for Best Picture had gone to Crash". The red carpet now had taken on a different hue, a purple tinge.

The source of the colour was not far away. Down the street, spreading its baleful light everywhere, hung a gigantic, vertical, electric-blue neon sign spelling out S C I E N T O L O G Y.

"Seven oh six," bawled the limo announcer's voice. Bingo.

For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays.

"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Re: Annie Proulx Articles
« Reply #6 on: October 26, 2006, 11:16:17 am »
At close range with Annie Proulx
Pulitzer prize-winning writer shares insights in short story, film adaptation of 'Brokeback Mountain.'

By Matthew Testa

12.7.05

As brisk ticket sales to Saturday's screenings of "Brokeback Mountain" and related events suggest, not even Teton County is totally immune to being star struck. Although in this case, the buzz seems well justified, as none other than Director Ang Lee ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon") is expected to be the Jackson Hole Film Institute's guest of honor. "Brokeback"-related events start Friday evening with a forum on what it's like for men and women of alternative sexual orientations to grow up or live in Wyoming, and continue with screenings and Hollywood-type parties on Saturday.

"The phones have been ringing off the hook," said Todd Rankin of the JHFI, the local arts nonprofit that scored the special screening for the valley, and the group that will reap the proceeds from the event. Film-fanatics have been calling from throughout Wyoming and from as far away as Boise. "We'll be sold out," he predicted.

The film "Brokeback Mountain" originated as a short story by Wyoming author E. Annie Proulx, whose Pulitzer prize-winning novel "The Shipping News" was also adapted to the screen. The story appears in Proulx's first of two collections of Wyoming tales, "Close Range," and is considered by many critics to be the book's standout piece. In this interview, filmmaker Matthew Testa asks the author about living and writing in Wyoming, her thoughts on the story, the movie, and the controversy surrounding the film.


Planet Jackson Hole: How did you come to write "Brokeback Mountain"? What inspired the story?

Annie Proulx: "Brokeback Mountain" was/is one of a number of stories examining rural Western social situations. I was trained as an historian (French Annales school), and most of my writing is focused on rural North American hinterlands. The story was not "inspired," but the result of years of subliminal observation and thought, eventually brought to the point of writing. As I remarked in a 1999 interview with The Missouri Review, Place and history are central to the fiction I write, both in the broad, general sense and in detailed particulars. Rural North America, regional cultures, the images of an ideal and seemingly attainable world the characters cherish in their long views despite the rigid and difficult circumstances of their place and time interest me and are what I write about. I watch for the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them.

PJH: Did it surprise you that, of all the pieces in your Wyoming collection, "Close Range," it was the story of a hidden love affair between cowboys that was adapted into a major Hollywood film?

AP: Diana Ossana, Larry McMurtry's writing partner, read the story in The New Yorker shortly after it was published eight years ago and urged Larry to read it. They both wanted to make a film from it even though the material was strong and risky. They optioned the story from their own pockets, most unusual for screenwriters. I was doubtful that it actually would get to the big screen, and, in fact, it took years before it did.

PJH: I think it's clear to anyone who reads "Brokeback Mountain" that above all it's a wrenching, starcrossed love story. It is about two cowboys, but it seems inaccurate to call it gay literature. How do you feel about the film being assailed as gay agitprop emerging from liberal Hollywood? Did you ever intend for the story to be controversial?

AP: Excuse me, but it is NOT a story about "two cowboys." It is a story about two inarticulate, confused Wyoming ranch kids in 1963 who have left home and who find themselves in a personal sexual situation they did not expect, understand nor can manage. The only work they find is herding sheep for a summer ­ some cowboys! Yet both are beguiled by the cowboy myth, as are most people who live in the state, and Ennis tries to be one but never gets beyond ranch hand work; Jack settles on rodeo as an expression of the Western ideal. It more or less works for him until he becomes a tractor salesman. Their relationship endures for 20 years, never resolved, never faced up to, always haunted by fear and confusion. How different readers take the story is a reflection of their own personal values, attitudes, hang-ups. It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, world view and thoughts. Far from being "liberal," Hollywood was afraid of the script as were many actors and agents. Of course I knew the story would be seen as controversial. I doubted it would even be published, and was pleased when The New Yorker very quickly accepted it. In the years since the story was published in 1997 I have received many letters from gay and straight men, not a few Wyoming-born. Some said, "You told my story," some said "That is why I left Wyoming," and a number, from fathers, said "Now I understand the hell my son went through." I still get these heart breaking letters.

PJH: It's hard to think of "Brokeback Mountain" and not be reminded of the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepherd in Laramie, even though your story is set in the '60s and the Shepherd killing happened just a few years ago. Wyoming is the Equality State ­ where independence, neighborliness and a live-and-let-live attitude abound ­ but there's also a bitter dislike of interlopers and change. Which is it? Is Wyoming generally a tolerant or intolerant place in your experience?

AP: Matthew Shepherd was killed a year after "Brokeback Mountain" appeared in The New Yorker. Yes, Wyoming is called the Equality State (a reference to women's suffrage rights granted in 1869, the world's earliest rights to women to vote and hold office), but today it is also the state where women get some of the lowest salaries in the United States for doing the same work as men, where ranch women often do outside work, raise the kids, manage the account books and much more, but often have little say in running things, do not inherit the ranch if there is a brother or son ­ despite the 1869 legislators' act "to protect Married Women in their separate property, and the enjoyment of the fruits of their labor." Independence? How many Wyoming people depend on agricultural aid, social security, pension checks? How many small business people fight monopoly instead of competition? How many residents actually garden, put up preserves, make theirown clothes, hunt for the freezer, repair their own cars, build their own houses? Some few, of course, still do, and they are in that older rural tradition and therefore quasi-independent; such people can be found wherever there are country people ­ people "with the bark on," as Remington called them. Neighborliness is also a general rural quality in many parts of the world, in the American West based on early settlers' need to help each other out or perish. I admire people who work hard, know how to fix things, tackle big jobs, lend a helping hand, all common rural Wyoming qualities. I respect ranchers, many of them under great duress, men and women who preserve landscape and cultural elements of the state. Although today only a miniscule percentage of the state's income comes from ranching, ranch life remains the ideal for many here, and that's a pretty good ideal to have and hold. Although there is generally a live-and-let-live attitude in the state, there are also bigots, mean people, haters, drug addicts, poachers, wife-beaters, kid-neglecters, embezzlers as in every other place in the world. Wyoming also has the highest suicide rate in the nation, especially among elderly, single men. The state is hardly perfect and we should not pretend it is some noble utopia. It is a complex place in its geography and its residents' psychologies, both tolerant and intolerant ­ as all of us are.

PJH: It would be difficult to find two screenwriters better suited to adapt your story to the screen than Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Part of their job was to expand on major events in the lives of your characters that, in the short story, you describe with amazing economy in just a sentence or paragraph. Did the screenwriters consult with you during the process?

AP: Beyond some early questions, Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry did not consult with me while they were working on the screenplay. But I trusted them with the story, especially Larry McMurtry, whose ear and eye for Western America is equaled by none. I would likely have said no to any other screenwriter(s) who approached me on this story.

PJH: I imagine it's difficult to entrust your fiction to other artists for adaptation. Did you read any drafts of the screenplay before it went into production, or do you find it best to turn a story over entirely and walk away?

AP: Yes, of course it is difficult. I did read several versions of the screenplay. [McMurtry and Ossana] sent me a first draft as soon as it was done and I noted a few infelicities. The question of whether or not it is better to walk away or butt into the screenwriters' work is an individual choice. Since I don't write screenplays, and since films are different in pacing and structure than stories or novels, I let the experts do their work. I had enough work on my plate to keep me busy and felt no need to interfere.

PJH: Are you interested in writing screenplays, either original ones or adaptations of your own fiction?

AP: I doubt I could write screenplays ­ and I am not tempted.

PJH: Have you seen the film? How much does it resemble your original vision of the story ­ its landscapes and characters, themes and dramatic moments? Do you feel it accurately represents Wyoming?

AP: I have seen the film. It resembles the written story very closely, and the McMurtry-Ossana enlargement is seamless. I do feel it accurately represents Wyoming some decades in the past. It is not clear ­ to me, at least ­ what the current character of the state is. Some think Wyoming is changing, becoming more aware and tolerant of diversity and differences in people, and there is evidence to support this view. Some think it will not ever change.

PJH: You've described yourself as passionate about getting details right, particularly details of place like local vernacular, landscape and regional culture. Are you bothered at all that the film was shot in Canada rather than Wyoming? Would you like to see more film production brought to Wyoming?

AP: I had hoped the film would be shot in Wyoming, and, in fact, Ang Lee and I looked at places in and around the Big Horns. But the decision was not mine to make. The film was shot in Canada because, I was told, Wyoming did not have an infrastructure (read big city Calgary with daily air service and hotels) that could support a film crew. The production designer, Judy Becker, toured Texas (where some of the story is set) and Wyoming, making notes so that the selection of landscape shots in Alberta would match what is on the ground in Texas and Wyoming. Except for a scene in which horses are moving through a forest with deep ground moss, the landscapes very much fit Wyoming. Of course I would like to see more film production brought to Wyoming. I think the state is missing a good opportunity to diversify economically. Some years ago New Mexico, then quite a poor state, decided that they would offer film companies interest-free loans if they would make their films in New Mexico. The offer was attractive and since then many films have been shot in New Mexico. The average film brings millions of dollars into a state, from housing, meals and lodging, extras, transportation, local consulting and so forth. Since then many other states have set up loan situations to attract filmmakers to their locales. It is good that we are seeing more realistic and representative backgrounds in film. I think there are great opportunities here for Wyoming, and not only with film, but with all the arts.

PJH: It seems there could be no other name for this story than "Brokeback Mountain" ­ it conjures a remote, sublimely beautiful place, but it's also an ominous name, suggestive of physical harm and disfigurement. Is it a real place? How did you find the name?

AP: Brokeback is not a real place. There is, on a map I once saw, a Break Back Mountain in Wyoming which I have never seen, but the name worked on several levels and replaced half a dozen more pedestrian names I had been trying out.

PJH: You've now published two short story volumes set in Wyoming. Is there something about the state that lends itself to the short form rather than the novel?

AP: I've also written a collection of short stories set in rural Vermont ­ "Heart Songs," the old name for country-western music. Sometimes good story material just isn't enough for a long novel, or it fits my state of mind to work on a story instead of a longer work. Mostly I use the short story form for working with strong material or humor. I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.

PJH: I've read you're a lover of coffee shops and yard sales ­ places where you can listen in on conversations, picking up on local dialects, aphorisms, story ideas. With your increasing notoriety, is it hard for you to stay anonymous in Wyoming so that you can move about unobtrusively as a writer?

AP: I don't love coffee shops, but I used to drive across the North American continent once a year, usually by back roads, and stopped at many cafes along the way where I did sometimes hear interesting things. One can hear equally interesting conversations in line at the grocery store and post office. Yard sales have been good places to find old books for me, especially valuable as so many small secondhand bookshops are disappearing. No, it is not difficult to move around Wyoming anonymously. Women of a certain age are invisible. And most Wyoming people don't give a damn whether you write novels or knit mittens.

PJH: I understand that some Wyoming folks have criticized you for being a relative newcomer to the state, someone not "local" enough to write about the West. Does this kind of talk faze you at all? Is it always the role of the writer to be something of an outsider, an observer, anyway?

AP: The innocent belief that only people who have been born and brought up in a place can know it well enough to write about it is more folklore than fact. It might seem logical, but it is not the way literature works. Certainly there have been many outstanding regional American writers, but the outsider's eye is invaluable in writing and art, and most American literature has been written by outsiders, including much Western material: Walter Van Tilburg Clark ("The Ox-Bow Incident," "Track of the Cat") came from Maine, Owen Wister ("The Virginian") came from Pennsylvania, Theodore Roosevelt ("The Winning of the West") from New York, Jack Schaeffer ("Shane") had never been west of Toledo when he wrote his novel of the Johnson County war. There is room for both kinds of writers ­ local people and "outsiders." Outsiders certainly do not stop local people from writing whatever they wish. There's a little thing called "freedom of speech" which applies to writing.

PJH: What drew you to Wyoming as a place to live and write? Where does your interest in rural places and people come from?

AP: All of my fiction, with the exception of "Heart Songs," has been written in Wyoming. Both Wyoming and the Texas Panhandle attracted me as interesting places both for landscape and American history. I was trained as an historian and much of my story material is drawn from real historical events, sometimes reset in other periods. My mother was a painter and from her, I and my four sisters learned to use brush and pencil from the time we were children. We all have an eye for landscape and place. Moreover, one of my ancestors, Joseph Maria La Barge, from Assomption in Quebec and later St. Louis, was in Wyoming in 1825 with Ashley's fur trappers. He got himself scalped on the little stream near the Wyoming town that today bears his name, and although Clymer says he perished, he returned to St. Louis and lived a long and happy life until he cracked his head on a curbstone. His sons were history, one of them, Joseph LaBarge, the captain of the Yellowstone. My people on my mother's side have been in New England since 1635 (the original land they owned was given them by Squanto and until very recently remained in the family since colonial times), and on my father's side, in Quebec since 1637. I feel that I, along with all other writers, am free to write about any place in the world, but I have an especial interest in North America. I have always lived in rural places and wouldn't have it any other way. I have a deep affection for Wyoming. I also have a deep affection for history and the fascinating multiplicity of its various masks and guises, especially in the creation of western and national myths. In travels across the country decades ago I recognized Wyoming as my place to write. The long sight lines and landscape that called me to walk and explore it loosened ideas, created images and even sentences and phrases. I would have moved here much earlier than 1995, but I had a responsibility to my mother in New England. Six weeks after she died I came to Wyoming.

PJH: Films have a way of romanticizing even the harshest rural settings, but you resist that sentimentality in your writing. Even in "Brokeback Mountain," where the eponymous hilltop is a refuge and sanctuary for Jack and Ennis, it is the ruggedness of the land and the bitter cold that drives the characters together. Do you think this idea was maintained in the film? How do you experience the Wyoming landscape ­ as inviting, forbidding, or both things at once?

AP: The characters Jack and Ennis are poor ranch kids ­ autochthonous ­ native, born to the soil, part of the place. Their lives are hard in multiple ways. Neither they nor their stories have sentimental qualities. My writing is not sentimental and neither is Ang Lee's film. The Wyoming landscape, like human behavior, is extremely complex, and I think the basic basinand- range topography, the mix of high plains, forested mountains, desert, highways and dirt roads, with all that such varied landscape can mean psychologically, is expressed in both the story and the film.

PJH: What are you working on now?

AP: I, with a number of other people, am working a history of Wyoming's Red Desert region, a history of human activities and wildlife from Native American times to early white settlers, a look at the Cherokee Trail and the great diamond hoax, at horse-catching and oil exploration, at teepees and homesteads, big ranches and at least one utopian colony. We are examining reports of the last vestiges of native bison in the area, Thornburgh's march down to the site of the Milk Creek battle, desert elk and thumper trucks, present-day poachers, Finnish labor history and the UPRR. Geology and hyrodology from Lake Gosiute to coal mines are part of the picture. We are concerned with Irish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, with mine explosions and gumbo roads, with sagebrush, insects, an old horse-catcher found sitting dead on a rock, Ora Haley, Wiff Wilson, "Doc" Chivington, outlaw hideouts, mystery fences, archeology and rock images. In addition I am working on a new novel set mostly in the North American northern forests and New Zealand.


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Former Jackson resident Matthew Testa is a writer, director and television producer. He holds an MFA in directing from the American Film Institute and is at work on several projects, including a feature film set in Wyoming. He lives in L.A. and New York.
__________

"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Charlotte Observer
« Reply #7 on: October 26, 2006, 11:26:36 am »
Posted on Fri, Sep. 15, 2006

Proulx: `Brokeback' was tough
Author tells of difficulty gaining right mind-set for tale of gay cowboys
JERI KRENTZ
Reading Life Editor
Annie Proulx's story about two cowboys who discover their love for each other was the hardest of her stories to write, the author told a gathering at Davidson College on Thursday night.

It was harder than her novels; harder than all of her other short stories put together, she said.

"To move from an elderly female into this mind-set was not easy," she said. "For six months, I worked on it solidly."

The story, "Brokeback Mountain," was turned into an Academy Award-winning movie last year. The film added some scenes that Proulx said she didn't like, and some that she did. "But the fact is," she said, "the film touched a lot of people. It changed some minds. And I feel lucky it happened that way."

Proulx, 71, appeared at Davidson to give the annual Joel Conarroe Lecture, one of the college's top literary events. Book-lovers filled a sold-out performance hall; many carried copies of Proulx's novels, which include "The Shipping News," winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize.

At a news conference before her lecture, Proulx said she didn't expect "The Shipping News" to win such praise.

"I was all prepared for savagery and cruelty of every description," she said. "No one was more surprised than I was (when it won the Pulitzer)."

Proulx began her evening talk by discussing her current writing project -- a book about Wyoming's fragile Red Desert, due to be published in spring 2008. She read an essay about wild horses, followed by a humorous short story about three men who seek refuge at an old man's house on a cold Wyoming night.

When she finished, she took questions from the audience. One listener asked if Proulx, who lives in Wyoming, thinks it is necessary for writers to live in one place for a long time before they write with authority about the area.

"I feel it's necessary to have a good firm grip on the geography before you start sashaying around writing about it," she said. "You owe it to the story."

Someone else asked about her evolution as a writer, and Proulx described how she "painfully and slowly" wrote her first stories, then began to send them out. "To my amazement, they got published."

She also described her love of writing, of playing with words. "The sheer act of making something come out of your head and onto paper was a fine thing to me."

How did you get into the mind of a 19-year-old gay cowboy, one person asked.

"We have some secrets," Proulx answered. "If you're going to write fiction, you have to learn how to do that."

The author admitted she felt unnerved standing in front of a large crowd. She described herself as "intensely withdrawn" and said she likes to spend her days walking or fishing or sitting in a corner scribbling.

Still, she seemed to be enjoying her visit.

"This is the only place I've ever been," she said, "where everyone is happy."

"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Re: Annie Proulx Articles
« Reply #8 on: November 09, 2006, 01:39:54 pm »
Salt Lake Tribune:

Annie Proulx on love, homophobia and cowboys
It took the 'Brokeback Mountain' author time to get inside the minds of Twist and Del Mar
By Sandy Cohen
The Associated Press
Article Last Updated:06/05/2006 04:46:05 PM MDT


LOS ANGELES - 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 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.
   AP: Were you trying to accomplish something specific with this story?
   Proulx: No. It was just another story when I
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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.
   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.
   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, . . . 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 portrayal by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall?
   Proulx: I thought they were magnificent, both of them. Jake Gyllenhall'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 Gyllenhall'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.
   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.
   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 . . . 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 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? . . . 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.
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline twistedude

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Re: Annie Proulx Articles
« Reply #9 on: November 10, 2006, 01:37:02 am »
Out on runway number 9
big 707 set to go
but I'm stuick here on the ground
where the cold winds blow.
You can't jump a jet plane
like you can a freight train
so I'd best be on my way
in the early morning rain.
"We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?" --"Nine Lives," by Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Wind's Twelve Quarters

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Re: Annie Proulx Articles
« Reply #10 on: December 02, 2006, 03:56:34 pm »
‘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.”
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Lynne

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Annie Proulx's Books Touted as a Perfect Holiday Present
« Reply #11 on: December 15, 2006, 05:37:14 am »
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&section=4&id=5
"Laß sein. Laß sein."

Offline Lynne

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What are Annie Proulx's Favorite Books?
« Reply #12 on: January 28, 2007, 07:38:26 pm »
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
"Laß sein. Laß sein."

Offline Lynne

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Annie Proulx Contributes Foreward to "A Road Runs Through It"
« Reply #13 on: February 10, 2007, 05:57:58 am »
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".
"Laß sein. Laß sein."

Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #14 on: March 09, 2007, 12:24:48 am »
This is very good information, Lynn. Thanks for posting this!!
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Lynne

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An Early Interview w/Annie Proulx from THE MISSOURI REVIEW
« Reply #15 on: November 29, 2007, 09:52:57 pm »
Thanks very much to Oregondoggie to emailing me this interview with Annie Proulx - it's older, after BBM was published but before the movie was made, but I think it gives a lot of insight into her writing process in general. --Lynne


Interview with Annie Proulx
by TMR Staff
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Interviewer: Your stories and novels cover a lot of ground, historically and geographically. Accordion Crimes, for example, is set all over the United States and spans much of the twentieth century. Postcards concerns World War II and post-World War II America. Can you talk about that?

Proulx: Place and history are central to the fiction I write, both in the broad, general sense and in detailed particulars. Rural North America, regional cultures in critical economic flux, the images of an ideal and seemingly attainable world the characters cherish in their long views despite the rigid and difficult circumstances of their place and time. Those things interest me and are what I write about. I watch for the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them.

Interviewer: Even your novels and stories that aren't strictly historical all have a sense of history and place somehow going together and being at the center

Proulx: Much of what I write is set in contemporary North America, but the stories are informed by the past; I like stories with three generations visible. Geography, geology, climate, weather, the deep past, immediate events, shape the characters and partly determine what happens to them, although the random event counts for much, as it does in life. I long ago fell into the habit of seeing the world in terms of shifting circumstances overlaid upon natural surroundings. I try to define periods when regional society and culture, rooted in location and natural resources, start to experience the erosion of traditional ways, and attempt to master contemporary, large-world values. The characters in my novels pick their way through the chaos of change. The present is always pasted on layers of the past.

Interviewer: You studied history at the University of Vermont and Sir George Williams University, now Concordia University, in Montreal. Was there a particular approach to history that most interested you?

Proulx: I was attracted to the French Annales school, which pioneered minute examination of the lives of ordinary people through account books, wills, marriage and death records, farming and crafts techniques, the development of technologies. My fiction reflects this attraction.

Interviewer: Had you already decided to write fiction during your university years?

Proulx: No, while I was studying history I had no thought of writing fiction and no desire to do so.

Interviewer: Was there any pivotal moment that propelled you toward writing fiction?

Proulx: The pivotal moment was not a moment but a slow, slow turning. I left graduate school and the study of history to live in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom with a friend. We were in a remote area with limited job possibilities; I started writing nonfiction, mostly magazine journalism and how-to books, for income. At the same time I began to write short fiction, mostly stories about hunting and fishing and rural life in northern New England, subjects that interested me intensely at the time. Almost all of these stories were published in Gray's Sporting Journal, then a new and strikingly beautiful quarterly concerned with the outdoor world in the same way Hemingway's Nick Adams stories are about the outdoor world, the primary weight on literature, not sport. There was an intense camaraderie and shared literary excitement among the writers whose fiction appeared in Gray's, something I have never encountered since. It may have been that the struggles to get paid by Gray's created a bond of shared adversity among the writers; it may have been the genuine pleasure in being part of this unusual publication that valued serious outdoor writing in contrast to the hook-and-bullet mags. It is hard to overestimate how important Gray's was for many of us. Without it I would probably never have tried to write fiction.  I continued writing short stories in a desultory way for the next five or six years. When my youngest son left home for school in the late 1980s, for the first time in my life I enjoyed long periods of unbroken time suited to concentrated work and began my first novel, Postcards.

Interviewer: In your latest book, Close Range: Wyoming Stories, you have returned to the short story. Can you talk about the differences between that form and the novel?

Proulx: The construction of short stories calls for a markedly different set of mind than work on a novel, and for me short stories are at once more interesting and more difficult to write than longer work. The comparative brevity of the story dictates more economical and accurate use of words and images, a limited palette of events, fewer characters, tighter dialogue, strong title and punctuation that works to move the story forward. If the writer is trying to illustrate a particular period or place, a collection of short stories is a good way to take the reader inside a house of windows, each opening onto different but related views, a kind of flip book of place, time and manners.

Interviewer: Interesting analogy. Speaking of which, your fiction sometimes seems to ride on a magic carpet of metaphor. How do you do it?

Proulx: Metaphors are a complex subject. What is involved in constructing them seems not so much a matter of seeking similitude or trying for explanation or description as multilevel word and image play. Metaphors set up echoes and reflections, not only of tone and color but of meaning in the story. The use of running metaphors in a piece all related in some way to indigestion or water or loneliness or roller skates, or with a surrealistic or violent cast will guide the reader in a particular direction as surely as stock can be herded. For me, metaphors come in sheets of three or four at once, in floods, and so metaphor use often concerns selection rather than construction. There are private layers of meaning in metaphor that may be obscure to the reader but which have beyond the general accepted meanings of the words resonance for the writer through personal associations of language, ideas, impressions. So the writer may be using metaphor to guide the reader and deepen the story, for subtle effects but also for sheer personal pleasure in word play.

Interviewer: It sounds like it's a natural mode of thought for you.

Proulx: I was very young, about three years old, when introduced to metaphor, and I remember the first sharp pleasure I felt in playing what seemed a kind of game. I was with my mother in the kitchen of our small house. Classical music came out of the radio, I have no idea what, some sweeping and lofty orchestral statement. I was not consciously listening until my mother, who was a skilled watercolorist, said, "What does this music make you think about, what do you see?" Immediately I translated the music I heard into an image. "A bishop running through the woods," I answered. I had no idea what a bishop was but liked the word for its conjunction of hiss and hiccup. What the music made me see in my mind's eye was a tall, glassy, salt-cellar figure, ”the bishop,” gliding through a dark forest dappled with round spots of light. The connections of perception between the sounds of the music and the image of trees / slipping figure / broken light had been made. Thereafter, and forever more, I found myself constantly involved in metaphoric observation.

Interviewer: Do you have a standard operating procedure in the way you work? Do you start with place, or history, or character and story, or is it different with each book?

Proulx: Where a story begins in the mind I am not sure, a memory of haystacks, maybe, or wheel ruts in the ruined stone, the ironies that fall out of the friction between past and present, some casual phrase overheard. But something kicks in, some powerful juxtaposition, and the whole book shapes itself up in the mind. I spend a year or two on the research and I begin with the place and what happened there before I fill notebooks with drawings and descriptions of rocks, water, people, names. I study photographs. From place come the characters, the way things happen, the story itself. For the sake of architecture, of balance, I write the ending first and then go to the beginning.

Interviewer: What's your approach to research?

Proulx: The research is ongoing and my great pleasure. Since geography and climate are intensely interesting to me, much time goes into the close examination of specific regions' natural features of the landscape, human marks on it, earlier and prevailing economics based on raw materials, ethnic background of settlers.

Interviewer: Where do you go for that kind of information?

Proulx: I read manuals of work and repair, books of manners, dictionaries of slang, city directories, lists of occupational titles, geology, regional weather, botanists' plant guides, local histories, newspapers. I visit graveyards, collapsing cotton gins, photograph barns and houses, roadways. I listen to ordinary people speaking with one another in bars and stores, in laundromats. I read bulletin boards, scraps of paper I pick up from the ground. I paint landscapes because staring very hard at a place for twenty to thirty minutes and putting it on paper burns detail into the mind as no amount of scribbling can do.

Interviewer: Have you ever fallen in love with one of your characters?

Proulx: I have never fallen in love with one of my characters. The notion is repugnant. Characters are made to carry a particular story; that is their work. The only reason one shapes a character to look as he or she does, behave and speak in a certain way, suffer particular events, is to move the story forward in a particular direction. I do not indulge characters nor give them their heads and "see where they go," and I don't understand writers who drift downriver in company with unformed characters. The character, who may seem to hold center stage in a novel, and in a limited sense does, actually exists to support the story. This is not to say that writing a character is like building a model airplane. The thoughtful and long work of inventing a believable and fictionally "true" person on paper is exhilarating, particularly as one knowingly skates near the thin ice of caricature.

Interviewer: I'm curious about Loyal Blood in Postcards. What was his germ?

Proulx: The character Loyal Blood leaped complete and wholly formed from a 1930s Vermont state prison mug shot. A friend gave me a small stack of postcards sent out by the Windsor Prison warden's office in the 1930s to alert various sheriffs around the state to escapees. I knew nothing of the man on my postcard, but his face was arresting and the character jumped forward at once. The story's genesis was sparked by a small stack of state fire marshal's reports during the Depression. There were a number of dismal accounts of farmers burning down their houses and barns for the meager insurance money. They had nothing else. From this desperate arson, with its roots in the global economic slump, emerged the story.

Interviewer: Economic desperation is a common theme in your work.

Proulx: The failure of the limited economic base for a region, often the very thing that gave the region its distinctive character and social ways, is interesting to me. I frequently focus on the period when everything - the traditional economic base, the culture, the family and the clan links - begins to unravel I have taken a fictional look at this situation in northern New England, Newfoundland and Wyoming. In Heart Songs I began to examine the decline of the small dairy farms that had been the backbone of northern New England's economy since the late eighteenth century, but which began to break down after the Second World War and finally collapsed in recent decades as moneyed outsiders poured into the state. Postcards continued and enlarged on this theme, taking as its landscape the sweep of country from New England to California. The character Loyal Blood denies his natural calling as a farmer. He picks up a dozen different regional occupations on his long journey westward, an ironic and miniature version of the American frontier expansion westward. There is a subtext on the tremendously important rural electrification program. The novel was concerned with what happens when a region has only one economic base and it goes under - the breakup and scattering of families, the subdivision of land, the outflow of old residents or the new position they adopt as service providers to the rich moving in. A population shift of moneyed second-home owners began to replace seventh-generation farm families.

Interviewer: We see a similar concern in The Shipping News, as well as in Close Range.

Proulx: If all you have is fishing and the fish stock begins to collapse from overfishing, destructive pressures, foreign and domestic policies, etc., what happens to the fishermen who have no other way to make a living? Relocation, government programs and the like. The Shipping News caught a Newfoundland fishing outport on the edge of the abyss. A few months after the novel was published, the Canadian government proclaimed a moratorium on cod fishing, and the traditional culture and economy quickly began to dissolve as thousands of out-of-work Newfoundlanders streamed onto the mainland, an exodus that continues. In Close Range, a collection of short stories set in Wyoming, the focus was again on rural landscape, low population density, people who feel remote and isolated, cut off from the rest of the world, where accident and suicide rates are high and aggressive behavior not uncommon. Fifty percent of the University of Wyoming's graduation class must leave the state to find work. Again I was interested in looking at a limited economic structure - cattle ranching and extractive industries. What happens when the coal and oil run out, when the beef market falls away, when there are few chances outside the traditional ways of life? On a more intimate scale the stories explore human relationships and behavior, the individual caught in the whirlpool of change and chance.

Interviewer: In Accordion Crimes you add another layer to the issue of economic struggle by focusing on the immigrant experience in particular.

Proulx: I was interested in the American character, unlike that of any other country - aggressive, protean, identity-shifting, mutable, restless and mobile. I wondered if the American penchant for self-invention was somehow related to the seminal immigrant experience, in which one had to renounce the past, give up the old culture, language, history, religion, even one's birth name, and replace the old self with American ideals, language, a new name and new ways. The novel looked at several generations of nine ethnic families through the medium of the immigrant's instrument, the accordion.

Interviewer: Do you believe that the ethnic variety of our nation, despite the "melting pot" history is somehow forgotten or underappreciated?

Proulx: A major aim in writing Accordion Crimes was to show the powerful government and social pressures on foreigners that forced them into the so-called melting pot. The social pressures were enormous, and the cost of assimilation was staggering for the immigrants; their lives were often untimely truncated. They did not belong, they were ridiculed outsiders, they worked at the most miserable and dangerous jobs. They gave up personal identification and respect. The successes went to their children, the first generation of American-born. These American children commonly rejected the values, clothing, language, religion, food, music of their parents in their zeal to be 100 percent American. Hence the widespread disdain in America (nowhere else) for the accordion. Canada allowed its immigrants a large measure of cultural autonomy, and ethnic enclaves and settlements grew up in many regions, the so-called ethnic mosaic that contrasts with the melting-pot symbolism. Ironically, it is Canada that is plagued now by a separatist movement.

Interviewer: Does that imply that although the melting pot was responsible for suffering in the first generation of immigrants, it was the best thing for the nation?

Proulx: My thinking does not sort out this way- "best," "worst," etc. The so-called melting pot is a vivid phrase that represented a dominant, narrow and forceful attitude in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That social and cultural attitude had no tolerance for ethnic, cultural or linguistic diversity. Immigrants had to become "American" in order to succeed here. Many of them did not and could not conform to the American ideal, and they lived their lives in sometimes dangerous backwaters. It isn't a question of whether or not it was the best thing for the nation or no. It was what it was, an expression of the American national character in that period. It was different in Canadian, not better or worse, but different.

Interviewer: I can't resist asking you one question about your experience with Hollywood. I understand that your experience with making The Shipping News into a movie has been a little frustrating.

Proulx: I sold the film rights to The Shipping News several years ago and so have no influence on, connection with or input into the fate of the novel in Hollywood's fumbling hands. It was important to me during the option negotiations to plead that the film be made in Newfoundland, and the studio signed a letter of intent to that end. The seesaw history of the work since then, the inaccurate reports, the gossip, the confusion, is best learned from other sources than me. I am out of the loop.

The film rights of the short story "Brokeback Mountain," the closing story in the new collection Close Range, were optioned by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, who wrote an exceptionally fine screenplay. What happens next with it remains to be seen.

Interviewer: You have won numerous literary prizes, including the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. How has all the recognition affected your work?

Proulx: I don't think prizes have affected me as much as they have my publisher. It is pleasant to have one's work recognized and praised, and prizes certainly have an effect on the way the body of work is perceived, and on one's income, but for me, when the manuscript of a story or novel is completed I am done with it and on to new work. I have a feeling of detachment for awards, perhaps because they come a year or more after publication, perhaps because it is difficult to believe that the work is considered prizeworthy. I am critical of my writing and tend to see the flaws and weaknesses. The best time for an award would be the instant one finally makes a stubborn paragraph or sentence lift its own weight off the page.

Interviewer: How important to you are the responses of your readers?

Proulx: Response of readers . . . depends on which readers you mean. Readers come in a highly variable assortment:  critics, other writers, old friends, fans, reading groups, adversaries, error-chasers, punctuation mavens, clever scholars, those who deeply understand the territory of the book or story, those who don't get any of it.  Probably I value the response of fellow writers most highly because they understand the work of making fiction. But fine letters have come from every kind of reader, and I am grateful for them.

Interviewer: What, above all else, do you want your readers to take away with them after reading your works?

Proulx: The novel should take us, as readers, to a vantage point from which we can confront our human condition, where we can glimpse something of what we are. A novel should somehow enlarge our capacity to see ourselves as living entities in the jammed and complex contemporary world.

Interviewer: You have been criticized by some for overemphasizing the bad luck and failure of your characters, for not finding the mitigating factor in their lives, if only in the way you frame their stories

Proulx: It is difficult to take this as a serious criticism. America is a violent, gun-handling country. Americans feed on a steady diet of bloody movies, television programs, murder mysteries. Road rage, highway killings, beatings and murder of those who are different abound; school shootings, almost all of them in rural areas, make headline news over and over. Most of the ends suffered by characters in my books are drawn from true accounts of public record: newspapers, accident reports, local histories, labor statistics for the period and place under examination. The point of writing in layers of bitter deaths and misadventures that befall characters is to illustrate American violence, which is real, deep and vast.

Interviewer: The rural farmers of Heart Songs, the unlucky owners of the accordion in Accordion Crimes, the fatalistic westerners in Close Range: they're on the ragged edge, and often, too often, some critics would say, they fall off.

Proulx: Immigrants to this country suffered unbelievable damage, both psychological and physical. Rural life, too, is high in accident and, for many, suffused with a trapped feeling, a besetting sense of circumstances beyond individual control. Real rural life, enlivened with clear air, beautiful scenery, close-knit communities and cooperative neighbors, builds self-reliant, competent, fact-facing people; but it is also riddled with economic failure, natural disaster, poor health care, accidental death, few cultural opportunities, narrow worldviews, a feeling of being separated from the larger society. Literary critics who live and work in urban and suburban milieus characterized by middle-class gentility and progressive liberalism are rarely familiar with the raw exigencies and pressures of rural life.

I am reminded of the uproar of disapproval over historian Michael Lesy's 1973 Wisconsin Death Trip, the author's gathering of newspaper accounts of nineteenth-century economic failure, madness, hoboes, suicide and murder in company with the extraordinary photographs by Charley Van Schaick. Real lives, real events, which displeased the many critics who denounced the book's darkness as distortion of history. One protesting group got out a rival collection of photographs entitled Wisconsin Life Trip, showing happy families, picnics, affection and peace. There is something in us that wants to believe in sweet harmony against all evidence.

Since I am often accused of writing darkly, I might add that although I am not immune to the flashes of humor and intense moments of joy that illuminate our lives, I am in deep sympathy with Paul Fussell when he describes seeing his first dead in Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, " . . . and suddenly I knew that I was not and never would be in a world that was reasonable or just."

Interviewer: Do you think that serious fiction, by definition, ends unhappily?

Proulx: No, of course not. I would like to get beyond this happy / unhappy-ending discussion, which seems to me to have more the character of trap than open door. It is very difficult to know what is "happy" or "unhappy." I wrote The Shipping News in direct response to the oft-repeated criticism that Postcards was "too dark." Ah, I said to myself, a happy ending is wanted, is it? Let us see what we can do. The "happy" ending of Shipping News is constructed on a negative definition - here happiness is simply the absence of pain, and so, the illusion of pleasure. I was quite surprised when readers and critics alike rejoiced in what they perceived as a joyful upbeat. The label "happy" is comparative, subjective, sometimes deliberately illusory, sometimes, as in Shipping News, ironic or not what it seems. In working endings for stories and novels I try simply for a natural cessation of story. Most of my writing focuses on a life or lives set against a particular time and place. This is the nature of things, and, though it sounds simplistic, this is what shapes my view of the past and present, both as related to my personal life and the lives of characters. One is born, one lives in one's time, one dies I try to understand place and time through the events in a character's life, and the end is the end. The person, the character, is one speck of life among many, many. The ending, then, should reflect for the reader some element of value or importance in the telling of this ending among the possible myriad of stories that might have been told.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This feature was originally published in Volume XXII, Number 2, 1999 of The Missouri Review.
"Laß sein. Laß sein."

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #16 on: July 20, 2009, 01:32:10 pm »
Annie Proulx speaks at a literary festival in Cork County, Ireland:

http://www.southernstar.ie/article.php?id=1400

and reveals that she is now living in Albuquerque, NM, but still writing about Wyoming.
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #17 on: July 20, 2009, 01:44:42 pm »
Annie Proulx speaks at a literary festival in Cork County, Ireland:

http://www.southernstar.ie/article.php?id=1400

and reveals that she is now living in Albuquerque, NM, but still writing about Wyoming.

Come to think about it, wasn't there a post somewhere a long time ago about her house in Wyoming being for sale?

Maybe the vast sadness of the northern plains finally got to her--or the Wyoming winters.  :-\
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #18 on: March 17, 2011, 05:11:00 pm »
Have just discovered that Annie Prouix is in Dunedin and gave a talk at the Public Library last night. There apparently was an article in Saturday's paper but as I was away on a camp, I asked my neighbours to take the paper. However even then the talk was booked out.
http://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/152331/teller-cold-land-tales-warms-audience

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #19 on: June 28, 2011, 06:12:03 am »
Interview from 2009 focusing on AP´s book on Wyoming´s Red Desert.


The desert that breaks Annie Proulx's heart
Wyoming storyteller gives an unvarnished view of the Red Desert


High Country News
Feature story - From the April 13, 2009 issue by Emma Brown



Annie Proulx does not love the Red Desert in southern Wyoming. That's what she says, anyway, though she's spent the last six years writing and editing a nonfiction book about the place.

"I think it's dangerous to love the desert," says the writer, who is known for telling brutal stories about rough, out-on-the-edge places and the people who live in them. "Because it's a heartbreaker to see what's happening to it. You know -- to watch its destruction."

We are sitting at a narrow table in her living room, two coffee cups on saucers between us, Wyoming sun bending through a wall of windows that look out on the North Platte River and a limestone cliff that captures each day's shifting light. Proulx breathes, taps her fingertips, and leans back.

The Red Desert, which lies just west of her home, is a 6 million-acre swath of federal, state and private land generally left off lists of the state's scenic highlights. To most people, it's just the Big Empty that flanks Interstate 80 for a hundred miles or so between Rawlins and Rock Springs -- a sagebrush ocean where the wind blows hard enough in winter to overturn semi trucks. From the road, it appears poorly named. There is little red to be seen, especially during the long hours of Wyoming's midday, when the sun flattens everything from here to the horizon into shades of brown and gray-green.

In recent years, a fever for oil and gas drilling has gripped the region. Roughly 5,000 wells have been drilled here, according to conservationists, but in the last four years, the Bureau of Land Management has approved or begun the approval process for 15,000 more. Where once there was wide quiet space and herds of cows and sheep and antelope and elk, now there are three-story drilling rigs and squat well pads, half-dug pipeline ditches snaking off to the horizon, invasive weeds, truck traffic, dust plumes.

There may be no better place than this one -- stark, little-known and shaped by a long human history of work and habitation -- in which to reconsider what makes a particular piece of land worth saving. And there may be no more fitting writer to do that reconsidering than the fierce and unsentimental outsider, Annie Proulx.

Proulx, 73, writes about rural people and places with spare language and severe grace. She started her career late, publishing her first book of stories at 56 and almost immediately winning literature's biggest honors, including the PEN/Faulkner Award (for her first novel, Postcards) and the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize (for her second, The Shipping News).

She did not go looking for the Red Desert. She came to know it largely by accident, and not even her own accident. In the mid-1990s, a vacationing Boston photographer named Martin Stupich bicycled up Green Mountain on the desert's eastern fringe. On the way down, drunk on altitude, fatigue and wide spaces, he hit a boulder field at full speed, went flying and broke his femur.

After doctors repaired his leg, Stupich convalesced on the couch of a friend who told him stories about the desert: its rainbow-colored badlands and screaming silence; its bands of wild horses; its century-old emigrant trails, scraped tracks still visible through the sage. He left Boston, moved to Wyoming, started carrying his camera into the desert and -- because Wyoming is the kind of thinly populated, conservative state where artists and writers tend to find each other -- made Proulx's acquaintance through a mutual friend. Over lunch one day in 2002, he asked whether she would be willing to write a preface for a book of his desert images.

She thought it would take two weeks, maybe three, to do this favor for her friend -- read some of what had been written about the Red Desert, and cobble together some introductory prose.

But when she examined the University of Wyoming's library, she found nothing. Further searching through the university's collection of rare books and manuscripts turned up only two records: an 1898 survey of forage plants and a photograph taken 51 years later of a locomotive buried in snow. The largest unfenced region left in the Lower 48 had managed, somehow, to dodge historians and ecologists and nearly every other sort of storyteller. The mystery of it was delicious, and what had begun as a favor became an honest fascination.

The Red Desert has never been a mystery, however, to petroleum geologists, who have long known there is recoverable natural gas here. Now, thanks to a boom fueled by the climbing cost of energy and the Bush administration's permissive policies, the place was changing fast. What was being lost? Nobody really knew. A preface would hardly suffice.

This is the story Proulx tells -- that writing about a third of Red Desert: History of a Place, a new 400-page biography of the region, was a task inspired by curiosity rather than love. That the end result, including Stupich's photographs and contributions from a dozen Wyoming scholars on the desert's history, geology, hydrology, plants, animals and insects, is more an elegy than a plea for conservation.

"My whole life and everything I do," she says, "is motivated by curiosity -- finding out who was here, what they did, what this means, why the snow drifts in the lee of sagebrush in leg-o'-mutton-sleeve shapes, why the skies are the way they are, which animals come to the flowing springs, that sort of thing."

She speaks measuredly, enunciating every syllable. "I find it intensely interesting," she says of the desert: int-er-est-ing. "But, no," she says. "I don't love it."

The Red Desert's boundaries have never been fixed; ask five people where they are, and you'll get five different answers. But it's generally agreed that the desert's heart is where the Continental Divide splits and rejoins, creating a basin whose waters never escape to a sea. A few hardy aspens grow in the crooks of low mountains, where snow tends to linger, but otherwise the land is treeless. The soils are streaked white with the alkali and salts that render the little creeks that go nowhere bitter and undrinkable.

"Sage-brush, eternal sage-brush," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson when he traveled by train through the desert in 1879. "Over all the same weariful and gloomy colouring, grays warming into browns, grays darkening towards black; and for sole sign of life, here and there a few fleeing antelopes … Except for the air, which was light and stimulating, there was not one good circumstance in that God-forsaken land."

Despite Stevenson's impressions then and those of most interstate travelers now, the desert is not all barrenness. You just have to get off the highway, preferably with someone who knows where he is going, and then the emptiness gives way to folded badlands and basins; thigh-high hills crawling with ants bearing sand grains like tiny Incan slaves; hidden springs, sometimes soapy and sometimes salty and sometimes, improbably, filled with frogs; badger holes and ferruginous hawk nests more than a meter across, clinging to cliff sides; fossilized tortoise shells littering dry washes like broken purple pottery.

Conservationists have tried and failed to protect this place for more than a century, starting in 1898, when a Lander hunter proposed the Red Desert as a winter game preserve. The dream now is a national conservation area, a level of protection that would preclude drilling. But that would require congressional action, and there is little momentum for such a bill in a state where exporting energy is considered a patriotic act.

There have been a few victories, however. Five years ago, Wyoming environmentalists rallied behind the Red Desert and got national attention. Just over a year ago, the state designated 180,000 acres of Adobe Town -- a place where a high wide plateau south of Interstate 80 breaks away into a jumble of mudstone hoodoos that huddle together somewhat humanly, like awkward cocktail partygoers -- as "Very Rare and Uncommon." The designation protects Adobe Town from the mining of various minerals, but does nothing to limit oil and gas drilling. Now, many conservationists are directing their limited resources toward staving off drilling in the picturesque Wyoming Range, south of Jackson Hole.

This is how we often value places: Beauty and unspoiltness are what make them worth protecting. But that approach frustrates Proulx. She calls it calendar-minded.

"There is an air of unreality about many efforts to protect the Red Desert, perhaps because (conservationists') reasons for wanting to save the area seem to be largely based on beauty, solace of the wild and exquisite ephemeral qualities," she says.

The desert, after all, has always been a peopled place, "strategically located so that railroad, emigrant, telegraph, sheep and cow had to cross or inconveniently skirt the area," writes Proulx in her chapter on the area's military forts. "It is dotted and crisscrossed with pipelines, power lines, stone cairns, thousands of miles of rough roads, new roads constantly added, transmission towers, stock tanks, airstrips, the remains of horse traps and juniper corrals, and the ruins of old stage stations and ranches."

Even the desert's arroyos were built in part by people -- by successful fur trappers. Creeks, once kept narrow and watered by beavers' sediment-trapping dams, now flood when it rains, cutting the steep-sided gullies we take for granted as characteristic of the landscape.

By framing the desert in its history, Proulx puts aside the notion that the desert should be maintained as it is because it has always been this way, or because there is virtue in its seeming virginity, or because it is a church. It is worth attention because we hardly know what is here. Entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood spent a mere 36 hours sampling insects in the field for his contribution to Red Desert, which makes him the world's leading expert on the region's arthropods. He estimates there are 5,000 species, dozens of which have never been described.

One late October day, I head toward Adobe Town with Erik Molvar, a hiking-guidebook-author-turned-environmentalist whose group, the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, is the loudest anti-development voice in the desert. On the way, we cross a cattle guard that caught the hoof of a wild horse last year; the bleached skeleton is still there, its hoof wedged in the metal bars, its skull smiling eerily several feet away. "Have you ever noticed," he asks, "that most of Marty's photographs have signs of people in them?"

It's true. Martin Stupich's 50-some photographs make up the first third of Red Desert, and perhaps only a quarter of them are the sort that might grace a calendar -- the sharp-angled tumble of the Ferris Mountains, a sweep of clouds in a wild sky, the unkempt manes of feral horses.

The rest are less about untrammeledness than the ways in which people have confronted this difficult landscape while trying to make a living, starting with an image of handprints worn into sandstone by early hunter-gatherers. The name of a gold-seeking emigrant, Milo J. Ayers, was carved into a rock along the California-Oregon-Mormon Trail in 1849. There is a photo of a day-glo-colored cooling pond at the Jim Bridger Power Plant in the central desert; an aerial view of the coal mine that feeds that plant; another aerial of long straight lines etched into the earth by the heavy trucks used for seismic oil exploration.

Molvar finds that choice to embrace industry curious. He is putting together his own Red Desert book, a coffee-table enterprise that will include his own images and those of several other landscape photographers. "There won't be any signs of human impact," he explains. "It'll be more celebrating the beauty of the place."

The argument Stupich's photographs begin to make, and that Proulx and the others continue in writing, is a radical departure from Molvar's coffee-table book, from most books that argue for a landscape's protection. It is the difference, perhaps, between studying a place and imagining it.

Hanging on Proulx's wall is a photograph taken by Stupich that serves as a reminder of their first trip together into the Red Desert.

In it, their friend and colleague, blue-eyed archaeologist Dudley Gardner, grimaces as he aims a gun at an antelope crumpled on the ground. It had been hit, Proulx believes, by one of the speeding gas company trucks that passed them earlier that day, and it was still struggling.

"We tried calling 911 and the sheriff and the Game and Fish office and so forth, and because we were in a dead spot we couldn't reach anybody," she says. "What else were we going to do, just leave it there, dying, slowly? And the heat was terrible."

In the same way that Stupich refuses to photograph Red-Desert-the-unpeopled-fiction, Proulx  refuses to write about Wyoming-the-dream -- Yellowstone geysers, the Tetons at sunset, rugged cowboys riding the range. That people should be so caught up in prettiness and myth is a kind of ignorance, and it maddens her; she traffics in Wyoming-the-reality -- "full of poor, hardworking transients," as she writes in her second of three volumes of Wyoming short stories. "Tough as nails and restless, going where the dollars grew.

Proulx moved to Wyoming from Vermont in 1994 and right away went about challenging the notion that you can't know the West -- or write about it -- unless you were born and raised here. Close Range: Wyoming Stories, the collection that includes "Brokeback Mountain," came out in 1999 to acclaim from critics who invariably used words like "gritty" and "hardscrabble" and "flinty" to describe Proulx's characters -- people as trapped in the terrible dramas of their small lives as in the boom-bust cycles endemic to rural places in general and Wyoming in particular.

She lives alone six miles from Saratoga, a ranch town flanked by hay fields and blessed with a view to the east of the Snowy Range. The road to town becomes impassable in snow, she says, so she spends winter months in warmer places -- this year, Albuquerque. She moved here two years ago from Centennial, 40 miles to the southeast -- a nice town, she says. But she had to belong to a homeowners' association there, and that was an unsustainable arrangement. This is a woman who admitted 15 years ago in an interview to "throwing a knife at (and thank God missing) someone I thought I hated."

"I'm not a good person for rules and regulations on how I live," she says, walking slowly, hands in pockets, toward the North Platte, which flows through her property.

Proulx wears a simple white linen shirt and no makeup and keeps her salt-and-pepper hair cropped short. She is still getting to know this new home, all 640 acres of it, and keeps a pair of binoculars close at hand. She is always looking up at the sky. "Ospreys you are not very likely to see on this stretch of river, because we have two sets of eagles," she says. "Each raptor seems to have a territory that's respected by the others."

This is what her stories are built on -- research and close observation of place. "Landscape is the driving force for everything that I write," she says. "It was for the Red Desert book and it is for all of the fiction. Place comes first -- what is this place, what makes it this way, what is the geology, what is the prevailing climate, what's the weather like, how do people make a living, what grows here, what animals are here. All of this stuff I do first, and then the stories just are there because the place dictates what happens."

Red Desert, which went on sale in December, comes on the heels of Fine Just The Way It Is, Proulx's final book, she says, of Wyoming stories, published in September. The title is taken from a typically clipped declarative used by a rancher in the book to describe Wyomingites' aversion to change. The stories are set largely in and around the Red Desert, and their darkness and stripped-down characters grow out of the country's harshness and history. In one story, Hi Alcorn, a failed Red Desert farmer desperate for work during the Great Depression, goes to work for a man named Fenk, catching wild horses in the desert, driving them to a railhead in Wamsutter, selling them off for chicken feed. The job sickens Hi:

    "Fenk had a dozen tricks to slow chicken horses down on the drive to the railroad. He would catch a horse, make a slit in a nostril, run a length of rawhide through and tie it closed, reducing the animal's oxygen intake. Or he would tie two horses together, or tie one to a broke saddle horse. A few got a big metal nut tied into their forelocks, the constant hit of the sharp-corner nut causing enough pain to slow them down. The ones who moved too quickly with front hobbles got side hobbles. And obstreperous horses that continued to fight to get free despite everything he gutshot."

Every detail is true, Proulx says, gleaned from the memoirs and journals of people who made their living this way.

In the story, Hi quits in disgust and goes to work in the coal mines. He misses, however, "riding up on ridges and mesas to spy out bands of wild horses, plodding through the sand dunes, seeing burrowing owls in a prairie dog town.  …" He joins Fenk for a last horse-trapping drive and suffers a kick from a rearing buckskin that busts his leg.

Joking and laughing all the way home, he assures his wife he's fine and will be back for dinner after a visit to the hospital. But by the time Fenk gets him to the doctor, Hi's not laughing anymore: A blood clot has killed him.

"Life," Proulx says, elbow resting on the table, her chin tucked into its crook, "is not really happy for most people. There are fleeting moments and ecstatic times, but by and large life is not a joyride. There are lots of problems, lots of difficulties to be solved, especially for rural people."

In 1973, Proulx  had passed her comprehensive exams at Montreal's Sir George Williams University, now Concordia, and was well on the way to earning a doctorate in history when she dropped out in favor of a life in rural Vermont. There, she raised three sons (she has married and divorced three times) mostly on earnings from freelance writing, including how-to books like The Fine Art of Salad Gardening and Making the Best Apple Cider.

In those years, Proulx, a lifelong, voracious reader, wrote fiction when she could, publishing a story or two a year in magazines like Gray's Sporting Journal and Esquire. "I did it in snatched moments, working on a paragraph while sitting in the dentist's waiting room, stuff like that," she said in a 1993 interview with The Independent. When one of Proulx's magazine editors took a new job in book publishing, he encouraged her to write a collection of stories and helped secure a contract. The result, Heart Songs and Other Stories, published in 1988, earned critical praise and marked the start of Proulx's life as a full-time fiction writer.

But she never lost her academic undergirding and her interest in the intersection between ecology, economy and history; even now, asked to name writers she admires, she plucks a decidedly scholarly volume from the thousands of books in her home library.

"This is a hugely important book," she says of History and Ecology: Studies of the Grassland, by James Malin, a Kansas historian. "It's badly written -- he wasn't a writer -- but the information in it and the outlook is first-rate." Malin believed a region's human history was largely determined by the environment, and so he wrote as much about rocks, insects, fire, weather, animals and plants as he did about people. "An ecological approach to history -- I'd have to say that's my approach, too."

She's working on what she calls "a little book about this place," her home -- "a mix of history, bird and animal observations, soil and water, rare plants, archaeology, fence problems, the rigors of house construction, things that went right and others that did not, conservation efforts -- something between a memoir and a close examination of place."

But she's not part of what she calls the Annie Dillard school of writing. (Dillard is the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and other lyrical, eco-spiritual books.) "I don't see nature as a healing force," she says. "I'm probably more objective than that."

It is an unromantic way of interpreting the world and is, perhaps, what has allowed Proulx to live alone for years in far-off spots without succumbing to solitude. "Women generally spend most of their lives in other people's company," she says. "First, you're a child with your parents and siblings, and then you're married with children of your own. Eventually, in some cases, that all goes away, and then you're either free to do something or you're lonely. And I'm not lonely."

That toughness is a hallmark. So is a certain clear-eyed honesty, says prominent Western historian Patty Limerick, a friend of Proulx's. Limerick's husband died four years ago. "When you are widowed," she tells me, "people are in varying degrees of comfort in your company because you represent everything that people don't want to be thinking about. She would be on my short list of people you want to be with in that situation. Sometimes you find yourself trying to be reassuring to the people you're with. With her, you are just an afflicted human being, but also a human being who's moving on."

It's a sort of generosity -- that unvarnished, unsentimental version of things. The same generosity, perhaps, that permits Proulx to find value in and anticipate heartbreak for a place she doesn't love.

Days after talking with her, I drove through black night past a lit-up drill rig a few miles south of Wamsutter, a center of Red Desert drilling. Countless other rigs were strung like Christmas lights along the horizon, and then, through my car window, a different and sudden sort of light: the green trail of a shooting star.

My eyes fixed there, on the glowing blackness left by a far-off burned-out meteorite. And then I looked back at the rig, heard the generator's hum.

Proulx won't plead for conservation, but her documentation of the Red Desert is one long and quiet argument for recognizing what is here, the whole bruised entirety of it. The desert is a place complicated by history -- at once ruined and beautiful, worth defending from change and yet always changing.

When the gas is gone, there will be wind. Companies are already planning turbine farms in the desert -- which will kill birds and bats, which will need roads, which will give southern Wyoming a sudden space-age skyline. This is how it's always been in the Red Desert: one industry after another, booming and then busting, leaving behind its scars and artifacts.

"It's not going to be saved. It's not possible to save it," Proulx says, matter-of-factly. "This is Wyoming; it's an energy state. The best we can hope for is that part of it not be given over to oil and gas extraction. We'll see how that one goes," she says. "I'm not holding my breath." 

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #20 on: June 28, 2011, 09:33:23 am »
What a great interview! A little of everything...except not enough about Brokeback Mountain:P I obtained Red Desert when I was in Laramie this spring. It's a beautiful and comprehensive book. I've set my sights on seeing the Flaming Gorge this summer or fall.
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #21 on: June 28, 2011, 09:58:28 am »
Yes, indeed, what a great interview! I feel now that I know Annie Proulx better than I ever knew her before.

I didn't realize there were still wild horses in Wyoming. How nice!  :)
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #22 on: August 23, 2011, 11:25:55 am »
Just finished reading an interview between AP and Michael Silverblatt, who anchors a radio book show in Santa Monica, CA. The interview was included in The Brokeback Book, by William Handley.

She was describing the experience of writing Brokeback Mountain, which took six months, double the time it usually takes her to write a novel. "...once I got started on it I was really compelled by something. Let's just say that a strange hand came from above and was guiding the pen part of the time. There was something in the story that was larger than I had thought it would be in the beginning--and I don't know what it is. THere's a universality there that--I don't know where it came from. It just came. It just happened."

This is a wonderful interview and I will post a few other quotes. Silverblatt is quite perceptive.
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #23 on: August 23, 2011, 01:38:17 pm »
Just finished reading an interview between AP and Michael Silverblatt, who anchors a radio book show in Santa Monica, CA. The interview was included in The Brokeback Book, by William Handley.

She was describing the experience of writing Brokeback Mountain, which took six months, double the time it usually takes her to write a novel. "...once I got started on it I was really compelled by something. Let's just say that a strange hand came from above and was guiding the pen part of the time. There was something in the story that was larger than I had thought it would be in the beginning--and I don't know what it is. THere's a universality there that--I don't know where it came from. It just came. It just happened."

This is a wonderful interview and I will post a few other quotes. Silverblatt is quite perceptive.


Oh, that sounds like Annie hasn't figured out the 60 000 dollar question either.
Why?
Why are we like this (there's a thread of the same name by Katherine)?
What is it in this story that grabbed hold of us?

After 5+ years, I haven't figured it out for myself, at least not completely. It just is.
At least the not-knowing doesn't drive me crazy anymore. I made peace with the "Why?" question and acceptance grew over the years.

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #24 on: August 23, 2011, 01:41:07 pm »
Here's a little more from the interview, Chrissi, that might provide some insight to you.


During the interview, he talks about the differences between his reactions to the story and the movie, saying, "...there was kind of a movie-sadness sauce that somehow got ladled over the material, whereas the story is written in somewhat of the stoic way of these men." Because of her writing style his "emotions just leaked out through me unawares. It came as a real startlement to me." (I think his Ennis-like way of articulating this really must have endeared him to AP.)

Annie responded that she had hoped it would work this way so that "for the reader what's inside is necessary to complete the story and fill it out and put the meaning in it."

Here's a little about Michael Silverblatt.

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #25 on: August 23, 2011, 01:52:39 pm »
I think the hand from above is a good way to describe it. As I go through life dealing with questions about the existance of something greater than ourselves in the universe, Brokeback Mountain is one of my pieces of evidence there is something. I am not sure what it is. My mind makes up stories about the spirit moving to cause her to creat it. The muse being employed to whisper in her ear.

And then again it may be as simple as this: the story she told was the truth. It was a universal truth of love being stated eloquently and precise for the first time on such a level. The fact too that it was a classic form that is somewhat neglected in the modern world (being a tragedy) it effected is in a way that our souls were needing.
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #26 on: August 23, 2011, 03:37:54 pm »
And then again it may be as simple as this: the story she told was the truth. It was a universal truth of love being stated eloquently and precise for the first time on such a level. The fact too that it was a classic form that is somewhat neglected in the modern world (being a tragedy) it effected is in a way that our souls were needing.

Sure enough, friend Tru. The story was a classic tragedy, and also a Western, which is the crucible by which we in America create our myths. And it reached out to us at just the right time when our collective souls hungered for this message. Thank you for your thoughts.
"chewing gum and duct tape"

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #27 on: August 23, 2011, 03:55:57 pm »
I think the hand from above is a good way to describe it.

Maybe you summoned the "hand from above" when you wrote that, and it shook the whole East Coast!!
"chewing gum and duct tape"

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #28 on: August 24, 2011, 01:19:53 am »
Just one last quote from the interview:

Annie Proulx: "Brokeback Mountain itself, the idea of using the mountain as--what they call in science fiction a wormhole, where two characters go in and they come out differently--and this was a thing I wanted to play with from the beginning, and I think it worked."

...

"when I was working on the story... I was near tears myself many, many, many times--which I found a bit frightening. And yet I never could cry. And in eight years I haven't been able to., but I have been thinking that one day I will be able to. I'll get around to it. But I can't right now. The whole question of a large love that comes out of nowhere and just slams you to your knees--happens."

"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #29 on: August 24, 2011, 10:27:01 am »
Maybe you summoned the "hand from above" when you wrote that, and it shook the whole East Coast!!

Seriously, I clicked "Post" and the office started shaking!
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #30 on: August 24, 2011, 12:59:33 pm »
Seriously, I clicked "Post" and the office started shaking!

 :o
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #31 on: August 24, 2011, 03:52:56 pm »
it effected us in a way that our souls were needing.

I love how you phrased this, Truman!

It rings very true to me. For some reason - and I, like Chrissi, still don't know the reason but that doesn't bother me so much any more - we were ready for the impact Brokeback had on us. Something deep within us responded to something we perceived on the screen or in the book. The doomed love story? The bottled up emotions and self hatred? The closeted lives?The regret and missed opportunities?  The fear of being who you are? The tragedy of it all? The beautiful scenery? The music? The excellent performances? Probably all of it and so much more.

Yes, I think we needed Brokeback and the impact it had on us. It opened up something we had within us, but weren't aware of, or couldn't express. Brokeback served as a catalyst.

Since I didn't see it until 1½ years after it played in the theaters, I sometimes wonder what would have happened had I seen it those 1½ years earlier. Would it have been the same? I'll never know, and it doens't really matter.
The main thing is that I did see it; and what has happened since that day never ceases to amaze me.

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #32 on: August 24, 2011, 03:56:31 pm »
The whole question of a large love that comes out of nowhere and just slams you to your knees--happens."

Replace 'love' with 'movie', and there is Brokeback for us!


Lee, thank you so much for posting these very interesting quotes by AP!!

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #33 on: August 24, 2011, 04:59:15 pm »
She seems to have passed through the stage where all the attention was coming at her about Brokeback and she has gained some perspective. I am glad of it.
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10 writing lessons from Annie Proulx
« Reply #34 on: October 13, 2011, 04:59:32 pm »

http://michellerafter.com/2011/10/12/10-writing-lessons-from-annie-proulx/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed


10 writing lessons from Annie Proulx
By Michelle V. Rafter on October 12, 2011 | 2 Responses
   

Annie Proulx was 53 when her first short story collection was published.

She started writing after her kids were raised and out of the house, because that’s just how you did it back then, Proulx told the audience at a Literary Arts lecture in Portland recently.

Even though she waited until a relatively advanced age to start writing, Proulx, 76, was always a reader. When she was young, she choose which books to read based on the color of their covers. She read constantly, as did the rest of the her family. At dinner they’d all have books, she told the audience.

Being a reader helped when Proulx went back to school later in life and went on to become a prize-winning author of Shipping News, short stories including “Brokeback Mountain,” and her latest, an autobiography about her Wyoming home called Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place. That’s just one of the things I learned during her lecture – to be a writer, you have to be a reader.

Here are some other lessons on the art and craft of writing I picked up from listening to and reading Proulx:

1. It doesn’t matter where you start. Proulx didn’t launch her writing career with fiction. Like a lot of other writers, she started small and worked her way up. Some of her first pieces were articles for horticulture magazines, then books on rural living. Her inspiration for writing fiction came from feelings of “looking for some unspecified place, something out there,” she says. “I think everyone has those feelings, but it’s difficult to know how to get them on the page.”

2. Let the place drive the story. Proulx is the first to say that place informs her writing more than character, more than plot, more than anything. That’s apparent in her 2008 collection of Wyoming short stories, Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3. If there’s a protagonist in her tales, is the land, which remains a steady force – at times beautiful or malevolent – as people come and go. By her own admission, Proulx tends to fall in love with places, and then write about them. She liked Newfoundland so much after a vacation there she bought a cabin and spent seven or eight summers there before making it the setting of The Shipping News. She had similar experiences with Texas Panhandle and Wyoming before writing stories set there. “It’s a dangerous habit,” she says.

3. Interviews are optional. When asked at the Literary Arts lecture whether she does background interviews for her books, Proulx said simply: “No.” With one exception. For Accordian Crimes, a collection of related short stories set in Texas, Proulx did interviews to understand how accordians were made and repaired.

4. Learn to love research. Proulx is researching her next book, which has to do with trees and forests, a project that so far has taken her to Canada, Indonesia and New Zealand. Proulx loves research, and says if you write, you better like it too.

5. Take your time. Proulx’s not one to rush a book. She’s a quarter of the way into writing the forest book, and doesn’t expect to finish until 2014, or after. “It’s going to take a while,” she says. But when she’s done, she’s done and editors don’t have to do much to her manuscripts. “There aren’t many changes,” she says. Not everyone has the sort of time of a prize-winning and highly compensated novelist does when it comes to finishing projects. My takeaway from this: whatever you’re working on and whatever your timeline, give yourself leeway to get it right.

6. Don’t look back. Proulx doesn’t spending a lot of time reflecting on past accomplishment. “I’m not a person who looks back or analyzing my writing,” she says. Instead, she prefers to concentrate on what she’s working on now.

7. To do good writing read, a lot. Her love affair with books didn’t stop when Proulx started writing. When she built Bird Cloud, her home in Wyoming, she says she finally got a house with enough room for all her books. How many does she have? At any given time, she’s got eight or 10 stacked on her nightstand. “It’s like oxygen and the air to me,” she says.

8. Follow that editor. When Proulx had worked with at Esquire left for Scribners, she followed him, a move that eventually that led to the publication of her first short-story collection. My takeaway: editors are your friends. When you have a good working relationship with one, especially one who appreciates and champions your work, it pays to go where they go.

9. It’s OK to have favorites. Asked which of her stories she likes best, Proulx mentioned “Tits Up in a Ditch,” a contemporary story from Fine Just the Way It Is about a Wyoming girl who joins the Army to get away from the series of setbacks that’s shaped her life only to encounter more of the same, a tale as tersely told and tragic as “Brokeback Mountain,” and bleakly beautiful for it.

10. Inspiration takes many forms. Proulx doesn’t mold characters after any real-life people, and when pressed, says only that it’s possible she draws inspiration from what’s happening around her. For example, the characters of Ennis and Jack in “Brokeback Mountain” may have sprung from some unconscious desire to counteract the “John Wayne, right-wing” mindset where she lives in Wyoming that cowboys can only be and act a certain way, she says. “I realize stories I’ve written are contrary to the culture and have a touch of the corrective about them,” she says. “I’m not saying that’s how it is, I’m saying, perhaps.”


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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #35 on: September 09, 2012, 08:57:12 am »
I realise that this may not be the best thread to ask about this, but I'm not too sure where to post.

Would anybody happen to know the name of a legal team associated with Annie Proulx? I'm not asking for contact details or anything confidential, I would just like the name. I wish to just check something.

Thanks :)

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #36 on: September 10, 2012, 04:16:07 pm »
Hi Kitty, I think I can find this out for you. I will get back to you soon.

I'm curious...I assume you have read the book Close Range or the story Brokeback Mountain which is the last story in the book? Have you read other works by Annie Proulx? Just wondering.
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #37 on: September 12, 2012, 09:31:08 pm »
Hi Kitty, I think I can find this out for you. I will get back to you soon.

I'm curious...I assume you have read the book Close Range or the story Brokeback Mountain which is the last story in the book? Have you read other works by Annie Proulx? Just wondering.

Hello, kitty...are you there?
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #38 on: September 13, 2012, 03:32:32 pm »
Lee, I think Kitty may be a bit preoccupied atm. Her mother is very ill.

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #39 on: September 28, 2012, 12:27:29 am »
Lee, I think Kitty may be a bit preoccupied atm. Her mother is very ill.

Sure...enough.
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #40 on: October 07, 2012, 02:25:27 pm »
I have got a copy of Close Range and have read the short story. I read Postcards in high school but I don't remember too much about it.

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #41 on: January 27, 2013, 09:10:45 am »
Just bumping this up. I'd still like an answer to my question if anybody has it :-*

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #42 on: January 30, 2013, 04:03:04 pm »
I spent an hour looking for this in my "Brokie cabinet" in my bedroom. I didn't find it. I found the agency reps for Heath, Michele, Ang, Diana and Larry, Jake, and Anne, but I didn't find Annie's legal reps. I remember they're in NY but that doesn't help you much.

I did have a wonderful trip down memory lane, sifting through letters, receipts, memorabilia from the 2007 Brokeback BBQ, the 2008 and 2009 Roundups, all the planning we did for Alberta in 2010 (which didn't happen), the Memorial service for Jackie and Heath that was held in Denver in February of 2008, all the get togethers with Denver Brokies over the years, the visits by Pete, Eric, Luigi, Amanda, and Meryl, and the service for Rodney in Kansas City and his ashes scattering way up on Brokenback in 2011.  :'( :) :-*
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #43 on: January 30, 2013, 05:13:26 pm »
I spent an hour looking for this in my "Brokie cabinet" in my bedroom. I didn't find it. I found the agency reps for Heath, Michele, Ang, Diana and Larry, Jake, and Anne, but I didn't find Annie's legal reps. I remember they're in NY but that doesn't help you much.

I bet Louise would be able to answer Kitty's question about Annie's legal reps; didn't Louise get a "cease and desist" letter from them?

Louise doesn't seem to come around here much more. Too bad. I hope wherever she is and whatever she's doing she's healthy and gainfully employed.
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #44 on: February 10, 2013, 03:40:10 pm »
So they're in New York? That does help to narrow it down considerably :)

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #45 on: February 10, 2013, 05:17:31 pm »
I'm not sure it's wise to go looking for lawyers. Seems to me that's a little bit like looking for trouble.  ;)
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #46 on: February 11, 2013, 09:39:27 am »
I'm not sure it's wise to go looking for lawyers. Seems to me that's a little bit like looking for trouble.  ;)


I agree.  Kitty, considering the fact that you're currently writting fan fiction based on Annie Proulx's characters, why would you want to contact her lawyers?

It's like shooting yourself in the foot.


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #47 on: July 01, 2015, 09:44:02 am »
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

Does anybody have this interview? I would really like to download it and add to my collection on my computer.
I know it's available online here (http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/bookworm/annie-proulx) but it's imposiible to download it.
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #48 on: July 01, 2015, 05:48:12 pm »
I also tried to download it with no luck.  :-\
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #49 on: November 12, 2015, 08:50:35 pm »
I was reading a New York Times interview with Annie Proulx from back in 1994, when Brokeback Mountain was just a twinkle in her eye. One of the things she said was:

"Nobody notices older women. It's assumed that they're just there."

Does she mind being invisible? "Oh, God, no," she said. "This is great, this is great! Especially when your main desire in life is to find out things and overhear. I can sit in a diner or a cruddy little restaurant halfway across the country, and there will be people in the booth next to me, and because I'm a woman of a certain age they'll say anything as if no one were there."
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #50 on: November 12, 2015, 09:45:53 pm »
haahaha...I'm sure most people would see that as a negative, funny she does just the opposite.


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #51 on: August 22, 2016, 04:15:57 pm »
During her latest interview, Annie Proulx said something I can really relate to:

‘Like many  older women, I have discovered the absolute luxury of living alone, and being master of one’s time – important if you are a writer. Freed  from the tyranny of table and closet, there  is time to observe and think. If one longs for company, there are friends and relatives. Nothing and no one could persuade me to give up voluntary solitude.’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/exclusive-interview-brokeback-mountain-writer-annie-proulx-on-he/
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #52 on: August 22, 2016, 04:44:44 pm »
What does she mean by the "tyranny of [the] closet"? Not having to do laundry?  ???
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #53 on: August 22, 2016, 05:30:52 pm »
What does she mean by the "tyranny of [the] closet"? Not having to do laundry?  ???

Perhaps it means having to dress up for others.

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #54 on: August 22, 2016, 07:03:57 pm »
What does she mean by the "tyranny of [the] closet"? Not having to do laundry?  ???

Perhaps it means having to dress up for others.

That would make sense, Paul, a lot more sense than freedom from doing the laundry!  :laugh:

So, then, does "freed from the tyranny of the table" mean she doesn't have to worry about her weight and waistline? 

I was looking at the whole sentence and thinking that the important point was time being her own--because she didn't have to cook for anyone else. That is, in general, older women who find themselves living alone no longer have to cook or wash for other people.
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #55 on: August 22, 2016, 11:37:16 pm »
Perhaps it means having to dress up for others.

Yes, I think so. One of the burdens of being asked out, is that you have to put together an outfit. . .shop, try on, purchase, launder, dry clean, iron, accessorize, etc. etc. It's exhausting!
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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #56 on: August 23, 2016, 08:38:43 am »
That is, in general, older women who find themselves living alone no longer have to cook or wash for other people.

Yes, I think that's exactly what she means.

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #57 on: August 23, 2016, 11:29:14 am »
I love living alone!  :)


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #58 on: November 30, 2017, 01:25:33 pm »
"At this year's National Book Award, lifetime-achievement winner Annie Proulx gave a moving reminder to hope for happy endings, even though we live in Kafkaesque times."

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAumjyLTbs0[/youtube]

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #59 on: December 01, 2017, 08:07:11 pm »
thanks for the video, Paul!


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #60 on: December 02, 2017, 01:40:14 pm »
We sure could use some happy endings in this world!

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #61 on: December 03, 2017, 11:05:43 am »
keep the faith, they will come


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

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Re: Annie Proulx - Interviews & Articles
« Reply #62 on: December 03, 2017, 02:46:44 pm »
Hope you're right, Chuckie!

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