Uncategorized | September 14, 2004

An interview with Annie Proulx, whose latest collection of short stories, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, will be published by Scribner in December, was featured in The Missouri Review 22:2 (1999). It can now be read in its entirety online.

Proulx has published four novels, Postcards (1992), The Shipping News (1993), Accordion Crimes (1996), and That Old Ace in the Hole (2003) as well as two short story collections, Heart Songs and Other Stories (1998), Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999). She received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Postcards and the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Shipping News. She currently lives and writes in Wyoming.

An excerpt:

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.

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