Annie Proulx: [laughs] Talk about bleak. …and there are plenty of people here whose lives are as economically fated as those you describe—including that story’s misadventure and amputation in Iraq. How much thought do you give a character’s economic status?
A great deal. One of my starting points is to know what the economic situation of the place and time is. I’m faulted for writing about men too much, but the whole setup of the rural economy is it’s a man’s world. It’s outdoor stuff, heavy lifting, woods work and ranch work and farmwork and so forth. That’s where the stories are. They’re not in the kitchen particularly. So the economic underpinnings of everything are extremely important to me—but without blatantly saying so. You just want to let it leech into the story in a subtle way. Your stories tell the truth about living without money.
I’ve never had any particular interest in writing about people with money. It would be quite an effort. I came from a family that started out as working class, and my father relentlessly clawed his way up to the middle class. So I’m pretty much aware of that. Also, he was trying to ditch his French-Canadian past. But I’m sure you know a little about that. Actually, yes. My dad was also French-Canadian and he did the same thing, in Denver.
Ah, really. In Denver, of all places. That’s a different world than where you’ve been living in Wyoming.
Not that much. It’s still a cow town. Where was he from? Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. He also clawed his way from lower class to what my mother called upper lower class. A lot of his life was like the last words in “Brokeback Mountain”: “If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it.”
That’s the rural experience in a nutshell. Hard times come, you tough it out. Good stuff comes, you put some aside. And you don’t really make a big splash. It’s just staying where you are and hunkering down when it gets difficult. That’s what the “Tits-Up in a Ditch” characters do because they must. I can think of a writer I bet you’ll like if you have not read his stuff. There are so few, and I mean really, really few, writers in this country who write about working-class people. But one of them is Dagoberto Gilb, a Tex-Mex guy who lives in Austin. His mother was Mexican and his father was German and left the family very early. His short stories are very strong. They’re not rural—urban, mostly—but it’s working class. A wonderful writer if you don’t know his work. In your story “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” we see that even if you can stand it, barely, you might still be obliterated from the landscape. The collection it’s part of is called, oddly enough, Fine Just the Way It Is.
Well, that’s said with a sardonic note. Obviously things are not fine just the way they are, but that’s the gloss that everyone in rural life puts on things. They say they wouldn’t exchange it for anything, they wouldn’t live anywhere else, they wouldn’t want their lives to be different. It’s fine just the way it is. That must have gotten under your skin.
It’s why I’m in Albuquerque right now. Permanently?
No. I’m betwixt and between. Semi-homeless. The problem with my house in Wyoming… it’s a new house and we didn’t know, because the real estate guy who sold us the property made a factual error. When I asked him if the county maintained the county road in the winter, he said, oh yeah, of course. Well, they don’t, and we didn’t find that out until the house was built. The first winter I was there, here came the big storm, and I waited for the plow and waited for the plow. [laughs] I finally ended up calling the county to say I can’t get in or out, there are 25-foot snowdrifts across that road. There was a long silence on the other end, and then I learned the bitter truth. The plow doesn’t come unless you’ve got school-age children in the house. Jesus. I got stuck hitchhiking in one of your Wyoming snowstorms once. Outside of Centennial.
I lived in Centennial before I moved to the other side of the range. OK, then you know something about it. Sudden climate violence is expected. Your books have that Peckinpah feel for quick, emblematic violence, too. Are you a movie fan, by the way?
Not really. At the moment I’m taking Spanish classes, so I go Thursday nights to the Spanish-class film and those are always interesting. My favorite film is Carlos Saura’s La Caza, made sometime in the 1960s. But gratuitous violence on film is not interesting to me. There’s so much heavy stuff that happened in real life in the West that could not be made into a story. It’s just too horrific. There’s a woman historian who has written a history of prostitution in the West. One of the people she describes was a 12-year-old girl in a Denver house who had lost both arms and one leg in a streetcar accident. The ramifications and the possibilities of that unfortunate kid’s life are just too awful to bear thinking about. How did the madam find her? She was black, too. Not the madam, the kid. How long did she live? You start thinking about what customers she got—she couldn’t do anything. How did she get fed? From the kindness of other people there? It’s just… well, I shouldn’t have brought it up. But among the horrors in some of your stories runs a vein of macabre humor. I laughed out loud at the one where the Devil redecorates Hell.
I’ve written a number of Devil stories, scattered through the collections. I think “Hellhole” was the first one. Oh yeah, where obnoxious people are swallowed up by flaming pits.
That grew out of a conversation I was having with a game- and fish-biologist friend. He was talking about some terrible people who were a part of his professional life. Mean ranchers, outrageous poachers, all of that sort of thing. And he said, “I just wish there was something that could be done with these people.” Immediately I saw them disappearing into a hole in the ground and suggested to him that a pit straight to Hell might be quite fun. And we both laughed and went about our business. But later on I kept thinking about it and finally just sat down and made it into a story. It was my agent who suggested including those in with the heavier pieces. Probably to give the reader a little relief as much as anything else. “Hellhole” was the first story in Bad Dirt, the second volume of Wyoming stories. It was a ballsy way to open, since the previous collection had been so hard-bitten. A lot of critics complained that you had changed your style with Bad Dirt.
A lot of critics are just plain stupid. They basically are. For example, one of the favorite criticisms leveled at Edith Wharton is for Ethan Frome, which I happen to think is the best thing she ever wrote. But they say, oh, she really didn’t understand the country, she only understood the rich and the drawing-room life. What rot. Right.
She was a fine writer and Ethan Frome is perfect. There’s a little bit of that tone in the criticism of Bad Dirt. Here’s a quote from one of them…
OK, before you do that, I do not read reviews. All right. Well, I just want to get at something that critics attack fiction writers for generally: “Proulx has no love for these characters.”
This is more of the silly twaddle that self-proclaimed critics pass out. They’re usually people who are on the slow side. They’re not good readers. They’re not widely read. They’re badly educated. Book critics, you can have them. But do readers make complaints to you like this?
No. People do often come up and say, “Oh, your stories are so dark and so negative.” I decided at one point early on that I was going to play with this idea. The result was The Shipping News, in which the beginning of the story and the events all fly in the face of the ending, where happiness is shown to be the absence of pain. Frankly, it’s not my idea of the best kind of happiness, but people took it to be a happy ending. I said, “Happy ending? Yeah, I can do a happy ending.” Sometimes I’m so knocked out by your use of language that I miss plot points. I’m constantly backtracking.
I’m extremely delighted with words, and writing for me is play—play with words and arrange them so that they have resonance and meaning that can carry the burden of a story. One of my favorite stories is an early one, “Negatives,” wherein a wealthy male couple move to New England and build a glass house on a mountain. One of them is a photographer and ends up exploiting all the po’ folks in sight with his camera, a situation that builds to a pretty vicious ending. Do you think visual art is any more prone to the exploitation of people than fiction?
I do. I probably wouldn’t say that to anybody but you. Are you familiar with Shelby Lee Adams, the photographer who, controversially, only shoots Appalachian people?
Yeah. A friend of mine is a friend of his, and I’ve seen some of those writhing-snakes-and-Bibles photographs. I’m sure he doesn’t see it as exploitation. I have no idea how the people themselves feel about it. I don’t know quite how he gets them to agree, and maybe they don’t agree anymore. I know some of the Depression-era FSA subjects were very angry later in life because they were portrayed as being half-naked and filthy. So yeah, it’s there. It feeds some kind of nasty thing in human beings that likes to see others more miserable and downtrodden. That’s not what I try to do. I don’t try to exploit people and I don’t ever write about specific persons, just sort of an amalgam of hundreds of people I’ve seen, observed, known, glimpsed. In your books there’s an incessant drumbeat against the clueless outsider who moves to a rural location. The story I mentioned, “Negatives,” was in your first book, Heart Songs. You were living in Vermont at the time, the late 80s, and it’s filled with rotten New York City slickers like that. Were you writing from experience?
There were a lot of those people around. Vermont is a tiny little state. It was the second-most-rural state in the country at the time I was writing these stories, after Wyoming, which is the most rural. Sixty million people live within a day’s drive of Vermont, and it’s very, very pretty, as you know. So there were swarms of people coming in and looking for old farmhouses that they could fix up. That was lurking in the back of my mind when I was writing about those folks. In Wyoming, it’s just starting now along the southern border, people coming up from Denver or Boulder. In particular, Boulder has sort of lost its charm for a lot of people who moved there because it was so close to the Flatirons [mountains] and just a groovy rural place. But now it’s changed and they’re starting to come into Wyoming. Is that kind of delusion a product of living in a city for too long?
I’ve never really thought about it. Right off the top I would say it’s a situation where they’ve lived with possibilities. The possibility of changing occupations, of taking Sanskrit classes, tai chi, whatever. In the country you’ve got what you’ve got, and you are what you are. There isn’t that springboard for the imagination. On the other hand, some people—and again, you get all flavors—some people are driven to creativity by solitude and remoteness. There’s one story I wrote called “55 Miles to the Gas Pump,” about two characters, a man and his wife, and I think the story is two sentences long. What I was trying to do, and very few people got it, was show that in an isolated situation the imagination can flare wildly. That’s all there is to that story, the flaring imagination of two remotely dwelling persons who aren’t very fond of each other. One of whom has been murdering women and stacking them in his attic for years. So, why did you move to Wyoming?
I have a tendency to fall violently in love with places the first time I set foot in them. It was that way for me when I first went to Newfoundland, and Wyoming, too. But Wyoming was… because of the long sight lines, and because of the fact that you could walk and walk and walk—as long as you didn’t mind climbing over barbed-wire fences—it was wonderful for thinking. Stories just sort of leaped out of the air from that long view. But there’s more to it than that. I’m also enormously interested in geography and geology. I’m conscious of the earth beneath my feet and think of it often. Go mentally into the depths of molten magma. So that is bound to come out in the stories. How long did it take before you felt like a Wyomingite?
I would never want to feel like a Wyomingite. I have never lived any place where I have felt myself to be part of the place. I’m a perpetual outsider, which is fine with me. I’m comfortable with it. What brought me to Wyoming was when I was working on the novel Postcards. I wanted to go everywhere that my major protagonist had seen. So I went out West, and I needed a place where I could stay for a while and do some of the research to fill in what I didn’t know about the region. I found that there was a writer’s-retreat kind of place in Ucross. So I applied, went there, liked it very much indeed, and eventually moved. Your descriptions of the state’s locales and especially weather are poetic precision, if that’s not an oxymoron.
I’m just very conscious of landscape and the shape of the world around the characters. But, say, the snowstorm in “The Half-Skinned Steer.” It was traumatic just reading that. It didn’t just come from the imagination.
When I lived in Centennial, which I did for 14 years, because I was so close to really magnificent ski trails, I skied every single day and I skied by myself. I was out in serious storms and rude situations. But I’m still alive. I guess I just have better sense than my characters do. I always knew when to turn around. You didn’t publish your first book of fiction until you were 53 years old. Were you merely thinking about doing it all those years?
I think I had written fiction in my mind many years before I actually did put it down on paper. I always, always thought of myself as a reader, and of course I still do. Not as a writer, but as a reader. I found an Annie Proulx book at a yard sale a few years back. It’s from before your fiction writing, called The Fine Art of Salad Gardening, and it’s excellent. Later I learned that you wrote a number of how-to books back then. Is that what you originally set out to do?
No, it put food on the table. Those were all books for hire. They weren’t particularly things that I wanted to write or that I had an interest in. Although I’ve always liked gardening and always will. Even in Wyoming. I have a greenhouse there and I have the earliest ripe tomatoes on the block. Is there any urge to move on to other geographies?
Oh, of course. I’m pretty much finished with writing about Wyoming. I’m trying to finish up the last thing right now, which is something of a memoir about my house there with the drifted-in road. And then I’ll go back to fiction and it will not be about Wyoming. There’s something that I’ve been collecting material on for years that I hope to get to. It’s a novel about forests, from the Maritimes to New Zealand. [pause] I don’t know if you know Alastair Reid’s little poem called “Counting”? It goes: “Ounce, dice, trice, quartz, quince, sago, serpent, oxygen, nitrogen, denim.” And on that note, good luck.