Annie Proulx, Close Range

Annie Proulx should be admired for her poetic style of fiction writing. With lines like "the dry socket of his heart choked" and "grief like gravel under his kneecaps," she captures my attention and inspires me to read on. Proulx came as a reminder to me that prior to my immersion into the MFA writing program at Chatham, I read fiction more than poetry (which is my concentration), but to this day I cannot write fiction. I delved into writings by Toni Morrison, Richard Wright and Edward P. Jones, all African-American Writers who create an interaction between character and place/environment in their novels, and who are such gifted, poetic writers.

I am also intrigued by Proulx's depictions of womanhood. In "The Governors of Wyoming," which is where all three of these passages are from, Proulx writes, "Bonnie stirred the kids' porridge, looked at a papaya that was shriveling on the windowsill. Why had she bought it? She disliked the womb-shaped fruits with their middles full of seeds." Proulx highlights the parallels between woman and landscape in this fragment where both are feminine, pregnant objects. She often reflects on the subjugation of females in Wyoming, sometimes metaphorically (as in the former passage), and sometimes she forms an argument merely by portraying the disempowerment, which is the case in her short story "Job History."

Although it was not an assigned reading, I took some time to read "Brokeback Mountain," which has been made into a movie since its 1999 copyright. Reading the story is surely more enjoyable, although it did not provoke tears. It is interesting how much I cry when watching movies, but only feel an internal sadness while reading. She writes, "It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he'd thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack's own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands." She is skilled in portraying imagery which will represent the feelings of these men who love each other but are not allowed to love, of a torn shirt, as these two men are torn away from each other by the expectation to be normal. She displays the importance of a shared landscape, a landscape which hides intself within the memory once it is no longer revisited physically. As many writers describe, we often return to a landscape that lies within our imagination. Typical of the relationship between these two men, Proulx craftilly chooses the title of the meeting place as Brokeback Mountain. It seems like an easy choice in depicting their love and the rough landscape, but as I am working on my fiction essay for class, I remember that writing takes time to come together so smoothly, and it takes extreme effort as well. However, place can truly inform a set of characters as well as a lovely story.