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INTERVIEWERYour characters have memorable names—Wavey Prowse, Leetil Bewd, Flyby Amendinger, Beaufield Nutbeem. Where do these names comes from? Do you have them in mind when you start a story?
PROULX Sometimes they come halfway along, sometimes names get changed six or seven times. I keep a book full of names and keep adding to it. At one point the singer Jim White, who had an album I like called Wrong-Eyed Jesus, made me a list from the newspaper and there were some fascinating names there. But I don’t think I’ve used any of them. They were a little over-the-top whereas mine are quite common and modest.
INTERVIEWER
Ribeye Cluke is a common name?
PROULX Well, it depends on where you hang. You’ve been going around with the wrong people. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there were four or five Ribeye Clukes from your state.
INTERVIEWER Do you ever feel like you should go the opposite way and have a few John Smiths in there?
PROULX No, the reason I put out-of-the-ordinary names on characters is because the John Smiths of the literary world make me sick—Bob and Bill and Joe and Nancy and Sandy and Fanny and so forth. I started using distinctive names as a mnemonic device for readers.
INTERVIEWER You’ve had several names yourself. Your first stories are credited to E. A. Proulx, but now it’s just Annie Proulx. Why did your name change?
PROULX When I first started writing stories and trying to place them in the outdoor magazines, they insisted that it be E. A. Proulx so the guys who read these magazines wouldn’t think it was a woman writing them. Sexist editors. The ones who suggested it were from a small Vermont publication, and I got back this awful letter, full of bad spelling and clumsy syntax, suggesting that I should change my name to initials. Very tiresome. I went along with it, and then it became E. Annie, and then finally I got sick of writing E so it just got dropped.
INTERVIEWER The earliest of the Vermont stories that ended up in your first collection, Heart Songs, appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal. How did you start writing for them?
PROULX Well, in those days I was an ardent fisherperson and bird hunter. And any stories to do with blood sports or the outdoors—hook-and-bullet stories—went in men’s magazines. Stories like, “I Was Attacked by Eighteen Lynxes,” or whatever. So when Gray’s came along everybody who was even faintly literate and involved in outdoor stuff was thrilled. It was beautifully produced, the illustrations were top-notch, and there was good writing in it. After the magazine first appeared I bought an issue or two and finally subscribed to it. One of the writers that I knew suggested that this was something I could do. I wrote something, sent it to them, and they published it.
For the late eighties they paid magnificent sums of money. They paid a thousand dollars for a short story, which was big bucks then. But there was a group of us who wrote for them and hardly ever got paid because they kept running out of money. I swapped a story for a canoe at one point. It was a three-way deal where Gray’s ran an ad for Mad River Canoes, I got a canoe, and they erased the cost of one story. It worked out pretty well—I think the canoe was eleven hundred dollars. I named it Stone City after one of the stories Gray’s published.
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INTERVIEWERIn one of your stories there’s a character who returns to New England from Wyoming, and he finds it “stifling.” Do you feel that way when you return to the East?
PROULX I would say yes. It’s small and once you’ve gotten used to wide plains and long sightlines, it’s annoying to have everything folded in on you. Boxlike shrubbery and cloistering trees. Clawing, leafy, shade-producing, sight-obliterating things that are everywhere. It makes me uneasy.
INTERVIEWER
Did you grow up wanting to be a writer?
PROULX No. I never thought of myself as a writer. I only backed into it through having to make a living. And then I discovered that I could actually do it. I thought there was some arcane fellowship that you knew at birth that you had to belong to in order to be a writer.
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INTERVIEWER Postcards won the PEN/Faulkner award, and The Shipping News won the Pulitzer. Did the awards change things for you?
PROULX This is a country where awards are invented every day because that’s how readers and publishers and others keep a list of what one should and shouldn’t read. People don’t choose books by covers, they choose them by the gold thing that says, winner of the Blue Shark Award, or whatever. So the awards did a great deal, especially the PEN/Faulkner, because I was the first woman to get a PEN/Faulkner. And then I guess the thrill of awards, like the thrill of traveling, sort of fell away. I’ve moved into a different category of people who have won awards but don’t necessarily have to win one now. Which is all right with me.
INTERVIEWER
Were you surprised at the popularity of The Shipping News?
PROULX Yes of course—your second novel is supposed to be an absolute dud. I was sort of counting on that. Most of the novels have been enjoyable to write either because of the subject or the research. I wrote that one because I was madly in love with Newfoundland, so for me it was a joy. I bought a place in Newfoundland and used to go up there every summer for years.
INTERVIEWER The people in the fictional town of Killick-Claw get an encyclopedia and they’re shocked to see Newfoundland in it. Were your neighbors in Newfoundland shocked that you’d written about them?
PROULX Most rural people are angry when I write about their places because they’re not presented in great glowing hosannas. I don’t say that they’re the greatest places on earth. They can’t bear any kind of criticism. They know they’re in the best place in the world, but I don’t seem to realize that. It infuriates them. There were lots of people in Newfoundland who hated the book because it wasn’t all sweetness and light. The same way the Wyoming stories infuriated people because it wasn’t all about wonderful things. If you want to write about bad things you have to write murder mysteries. But I don’t.
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INTERVIEWER
One of your Wyoming stories, “The Half-Skinned Steer,” was selected by John Updike as one of the best stories of the century. Do you think of it as one of your finest stories?
PROULX No. I think he had to include something. He said later that he found it a depressing story, and so he had to include it. But with these collections, there’s usually somebody behind the name that’s on the cover that’s doing a big general selection and then the person that’s on the cover narrows that down.
INTERVIEWER
Is there one short story that you’re proudest of?
PROULX I don’t have a favorite, but I think “Tits-Up in a Ditch” is probably my strongest story.
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INTERVIEWER
You’ve said that the characters of Jack and Ennis from “Brokeback Mountain” were the first two characters that started to feel “very damn real” to you. Has it happened again since then?
PROULX That was true of a number of the characters in Fine Just the Way It Is. But I think it happened with “Brokeback Mountain” because it took me so long to write that story. It took at least six weeks of steady work, which is not my usual pace. So yeah, they got a life of their own. And unfortunately, they got a life of their own for too many other people too.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean?
PROULX I wish I’d never written the story. It’s just been the cause of hassle and problems and irritation since the film came out. Before the film it was all right.
INTERVIEWER Did people object to the fact that gay characters were in the center of a story about Wyoming?
PROULX Oh, yeah. In Wyoming they won’t read it. A large section of the population is still outraged. But that’s not where the problem was. I’m used to that response from people here, who generally do not like the way I write. But the problem has come since the film. So many people have completely misunderstood the story. I think it’s important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience, but unfortunately the audience that “Brokeback” reached most strongly have powerful fantasy lives. And one of the reasons we keep the gates locked here is that a lot of men have decided that the story should have had a happy ending. They can’t bear the way it ends—they just can’t stand it. So they rewrite the story, including all kinds of boyfriends and new lovers and so forth after Jack is killed. And it just drives me wild. They can’t understand that the story isn’t about Jack and Ennis. It’s about homophobia; it’s about a social situation; it’s about a place and a particular mindset and morality. They just don’t get it. I can’t tell you how many of these things have been sent to me as though they’re expecting me to say, oh great, if only I’d had the sense to write it that way. And they all begin the same way—I’m not gay, but . . . The implication is that because they’re men they understand much better than I how these people would have behaved. And maybe they do. But that’s not the story I wrote. Those are not their characters. The characters belong to me by law.
INTERVIEWER Did you get the same sort of reaction to your characters when The Shipping News was made into a film?
PROULX No, I haven’t had the same sort of problem with anything else I’ve ever written. Nothing else. People saw it as a story about two cowboys. It was never about two cowboys. You know you have to have characters to hang the story on but I guess they were too real. A lot of people have adopted them and put their names on their license plates. Sometimes the cart gets away from the horse—the characters outgrew the intent.
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