Annie Proulx

[Lyle (Mooska)]

There's a Somewhere in Time fan club? 
I like the book better, because it's set in the Hotel del Coronado.
(Where Frank Baum wrote the Wizard of Oz!

[Ellen (tellyouwhat)]

I saw Annie Proulx in Kyle, TX on Friday night.  She did a reading at the Katherine Ann Porter Center (the house where KAP grew up, restored)  I have a few pics but I'm having trouble getting them posted tonight.

A lot of people showed up -- this is located within easy driving distance of the University of Texas in Austin.  I saw one of our forum friends there, Ohiomyown.   

Annie P. seemed a little more relaxed than she did in the New Yorker panel (see comments above).  She read from her memoir, which will be available for purchase in January.  She read three selections, it sounds really wonderful and interesting.

One person asked her to comment on her experience at the Academy Awards, and the somewhat bitter piece she wrote about the experience in "The Guardian."  She said she really believed Heath Ledger should have won best actor, that he had really pulled the character of DelMar out of his guts.  She mentioned how hard it was to lose Heath Ledger.

I asked her about the ending to "Shipping News" -- saying I had just read the book and thought the ending was happy, although I had heard she said it isn't a happy ending.  She said -- "It's the illusion of a happy ending."  Just because the characters aren't experiencing pain, is that really happy?

(Heck, I'll take it!  Illusion or not!)

It was a wonderful night in Kyle, TX.

[BayCityJohn]

Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and the short story Brokeback Mountain, celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center’s restoration with a public reading and book signing in Kyle. Proulx spoke of the letter she recently received in the mail from a rodeo performer who appreciated Heath Ledger’s attention to detail in the portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in the movie Brokeback Mountain. Proulx addressed the fact that she doesn't like to read fiction unless forced or paid and spoke on familial ties to Wyoming.
 

JG: Do you care to comment on the article (Annie Proulx: Blood on the red carpet) you wrote about Brokeback Mountain’s Oscar losses?

AP: Before the Academy Awards, I was going to write a piece for the Guardian about the Academy Awards and I expected, and they expected, it was going to be about the gowns. I was very disappointed that Heath Ledger did not receive the much-deserved award and I know that he had pulled the characterization of Ennis Del Mar out of his gut. I think he had called on his gay uncle to help him with a lot of his scenes. I felt very highly of Heath. It was a great tragedy when we lost him.

more...

http://star.txstate.edu/content/qa-annie-proulx

[Nikki]

I made a copy of Proulx's article in the Guardian when it first came out,  "Blood on the Red Carpet."  It was so Annie Proulx -- I loved it.

[Ellen (tellyouwhat)]

So Annie Proulx is continuing her book tour-- She was in my town (Dallas) Friday night.  I went to see her with a couple of non-forum friends.  We had to buy tickets!  And to my surprise, a very large auditorium was full.

She was very entertaining and feisty, despite saying she had been battling the flu "It has to end sometime" she said.

Someone asked her about her favorite reading.  When she was a child, she said, she liked "Mutiny on the Bounty," which had a tan cover, so for a while she would look for all the tan books in the library, and was disappointed in quite a few of them.

Then, she said, she picked out books for their colors -- blue meant books about the ocean, green meant forests and land, red meant human turmoil and warfare, brown meant complication -- and so on.

I think she was pulling our legs.

She was great!  

I bought her memoire.

[tfferg]

A very warm review of Bird Cloud by Sydney novelist, Delia Falconer

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/intellectual-property/story-e6frg8nf-1225994300325

[foreverinawe]

BIRD CLOUD by Annie Proulx

A review by foreverinawe

Recently, I bought Bird Cloud online, $18 with shipping. It arrived in the morning, and by 9 pm I had finished it. God help me, I'm that way with just about anything that woman writes.

Yesterday, as I was checking email, I got an urge to read some of the online reviews about the book. I guess I wanted to see if others had reactions similar to my own. Maybe there were some subtleties I had missed.

Was I in for a shock.

Nobody panned it and most praised that familiar Proulx vernacular and style. But I did not find one review that understood what her book was about.

Oh, they all got that it was essentially a three-part memoir, her immigrant forebears, the construction of her dream home, and finally a one-year study of the wonderful wildlife surrounding Bird Cloud (but especially one pair of bald eagles, and another pair of golden eagles, who lived on her escarpment.)

Sprinkled here and there she seemed to make small asides into stories about Native Americans, Wyoming scalawags, geology, meteorology, other things. Some reviewers described these as unnecessary distractions. The reviewers missed the point entirely.

What Annie wrote about was the same paradigm that permeates all her writing. People and plants and animals are all the products of the locale that spawns them. It molds and stains them as surely as their genes, and no adult every truly outgrows the locale that informed them. We are all shaped by geography.

She tells about her own family's history, and how their New World environment set the limits of their growth and understanding. She tells about her own early life and how she responded to rural culture and landscape. She tells the same about Utes, Hopi, Crow, Sioux, pioneers and settlers, and the struggles of people to wrest their living from the land around them. All their human impulses, hopes and dreams and the implacable soil and wind and rain and cold that ultimately defined their lives.

Unnecessary distractions? Gimme a break!

Early in her story, when she describes to the reader the beauty of the place she named Bird Cloud, she says, pensively, that she will probably end her days here. But then she adds, reluctantly, "But I'm not sure." Still, she builds her house, hoping for the best.

The three year construction of her dream house -- essentially a gigantic library with a few bedrooms and a nice kitchen --  is itself a study of one person's battle with their environment. The environment this time includes modern building materials, architects, engineers, builders, governmental agencies, and an entire section, 640 acres, of gorgeous Wyoming land, including a mile stretch of the North Platte River and the astonishing 400 foot high plateau that rises abruptly from the far riverbank, which reflects the golden rays of the setting sun, and channels the arctic blasts of winter across her dream house.

Once again, geography informs a life.

When her house is finished she spends her first year mesmerized by the beauty she has found, the place to write without interruption, to glance out her window at those ineffable cliffs, to watch the magnificent eagles. But that winter she learns the betrayed truth. The road on which her winter survival depends becomes impassable in the winter, encrusted by 10 foot drifts; the real estate agent lied to her; the county does not clear it; nobody gets through. Bird Cloud is only a summer home.

The last large section of the book details a year in the lives of the two families of eagles that live up in the cliffs. It is almost a living metaphor for Annie's view of life shaped by geography. From finding a mate, huddling in crags swept by hurricane force arctic winds, scouring for food daily, flying joyous acrobatics in the rarified (euphoric?) air, through nest-building, mating, protecting and raising the chicks, seeing them mature and eventually fly off to independent lives...all shaped by the land, the wind, the elements of earth itself. That is the underlying story Annie is telling us.

Annie appends a two-page post script. When she returns to Bird Cloud the next spring, she finds that one of the bald eagles had disappeared. A bit later she discovers some feathers and a decomposed corpse, and realizes it is the missing eagle. It is directly beneath an electric utility line, supposedly "improved" to make it safer for wildlife. The hand of man has again touched nature.

But a short time later, the remaining bald eagle seems to have found a new mate. Annie writes, "Eagles waste no time on tears." We can all read that message.

Now she has left Bird Cloud; it is For Sale. She can't access it for six months of the year, and the other six months just aren't enough.

For lovers of Brokeback Mountain, the parallels are striking: an inchoate longing for the beauty of life, the unutterable joy of finding it, the heartbreak of losing it.

Annie, I swear.

[bentgyro]

  That was beautiful and insightful review, Foeverinawe.
  Thank you, HT

[Buffymon]

I´m in awe of your review, foreverinawe. Can´t wait to read this book.

[Ellen (tellyouwhat)]

Thank you foreverinawe, and thank you tfferg for the link to a positive review.

I haven't read the book yet, but it's on my nightstand.  A few acquaintances have sent me some bad reviews, LA Times and I think maybe Time Magazine, and the New Yorker review wasn't good either.

But I told my friends, I look up to Annie Proulx, and when I am in my seventies, if I have enough money from my writing that I can pick a location anywhere I want and build my dream house, and then things don't work out as planned -- I would probably write about it, too.

But as fia says, that's really not the point of the book, as I have always suspected.  I'm looking forward to reading it.  What I have heard her read from it has not disappointed me at all.

[foreverinawe]

I thought I had Googled all the reviews about Bird Cloud I could find, then this morning Google pops up with one I had missed: Karen Brady (of the Buffalo, NY News). How nice to read Karen.

And what a splendid caricature of Annie by Adam Zyglis!

Enjoy.

http://www.buffalonews.com/entertainment/books-poetry/book-reviews/article305172.ece

   ~~~fia

PS My thanks for your kind words about my review.

[tfferg]

Annie's forthcoming gig in Melbourne is booked out, so no chance of me hearing her in person.

[Oregondoggie]

Maybe you could hang around the stage door! 

[BayCityJohn]

Is a trip to Sydney out of the question?

http://www.cityrecitalhall.com/events/id/934/Annie-Proulx/

[Cally]

Annie's forthcoming gig in Melbourne is booked out, so no chance of me hearing her in person.

Oh! I'll be just a few miles away...