An Interview with Annie Proulx

By Pamela Ravenwood

There certainly isn’t anything predictable about Annie Proulx’s writing. And for those who admire her ability to spin a great tale in works such as Shipping News, Postcards or her recent release Bad Dirt-Wyoming Stories, now is your chance to hear her reading such stories in person. During the Northern Arizona Book Festival, April 15-17, this Pulitzer Prize-winning author will be one of the featured guests.

In staying with the unpredictable, don’t expect your typical happy-ever-after ending during her readings. Very rarely does Proulx’s writing stray from the more raw side of life; nor rural living. But for Proulx, she is calling it as she sees it.

"I find that real life is full of tragedy and misfortune, mixed with humor, endurance and courage," she said. "I like to think my characters reflect all of these qualities related to rural living."

It’s not that Proulx despises rural life, matter-of-fact she prefers it. Having lived in Vershire, Vermont (population 400) for eleven years and currently living near Centennial Ridge, Wyoming, yet another small town, Proulx seeks a solitude necessary for the intensity she requires in her writing. "Wyoming’s long sight lines and open landscape are conducive to thinking and writing," she said.

Place is deeply important to Proulx. Place is where most of her writing starts and it is her inspiration. Everything from its geography, climate and weather to the way people live and behave are just grist for her writing mill. Living in Wyoming, Proulx said she has made herself a student of the area’s geology, botany, western history, stream flow and water rights as well as its topography.

And although this author was born in Connecticut, she isn’t quite as foreign to the Cowboy State as one might guess. The town of LaBarge, Wyoming is named after an ancestor on her father’s side, Joseph Maria LaBarge, a fur trader from the 1820s. "Although I lived in New England much of my life, after my mother died, I was free to live where I wanted –Wyoming," she said.

Despite criticisms of her ‘mordant humor’, few can turn a phrase like Proux. Not only has she won the Pultzer Prize but also the PEN/Faulkner Award, and she was the first woman to even do that for her book Postcards. Depictions like "in the southwest they saw rival billows in fantastic patterns, as though a paper marbler had worked through them with his combs making French curls, cascades and winged nonpareil fountains," don’t just come from Proulx’s imagination. She is a life student of the obvious and the arcane. She recognizes and records life’s smallest details, something her mother, an artist, taught her. For Proulx, creating prose is almost more important than plot. "Language and its permutations, shadings, variety and shimmering promise are more important to me than plot. I tell stories and plot may be secondary to plot."

When telling her story, Proulx also likes to give her characters memorable names. Francis Scott Keister and Gay Brawl are just a few of her off-the-wall monikers.

"Unfortunately, in this country there is a tendency to think that white Anglo-Saxon names, particularly those of the original New England settlers, are the norm," she said. "They are not. Moreover, I have always disliked stories and novels with those bland, over-used names which are hard to remember from one page to another. So I use names that stick in the reader's mind and reflect various quirks and ethnicities."

Building a writing career using her fascination for detail and turning findings into magazine articles helped Proulx support her three boys. In the 70s she started a small newspaper. It wasn’t until later in life, her early fifties, that she became a novelist. After her children were grown, Proulx said she threw a sleeping bag and some clothes in her old truck and hit the road, learning about the land through experience. She still drives a truck and can often be found in her jeans and a t-shirt, says Dan Shilling, former Arizona Humanities Council Director. "Winning the Pulitzer Prize for Shipping News certainly hasn’t gone to her head. I think she will always be the same Annie."

As for being successful, unlike many authors who suggest writing about what you know, Proulx proposes the opposite. Writing about what you know, she said, lacks imagination. She also adds, "live a vigorous, inquiring life; learn languages; travel; keep notebooks; listen to regional language and phraseology. Read what you have written aloud, being attentive to weaknesses and flat passages. Try and cultivate what Hemingway once called the writer’s best help, the "built-in shit detector." Learn to recognize when your writing is awful and fix it."

And last but not least, as her writing conveys … please don’t be predictable!