Boulder News

Center of the American West Distinguished Lecturer

Annie Proulx Discusses History and Decline of Wyoming’s Red Desert

By Jenny Shank, 11-30-06

Author photo by Karen Cipolla, courtesy of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Hundreds of people braved the snow and below-freezing temperatures last night to hear Annie Proulx deliver a talk in the packed Glenn Miller Ballroom on CU's Boulder campus. Proulx served as this year's Center of the American West Distinguished Lecturer, and shared with the audience an excerpt from a project she's been working on for several years. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist revealed that she hasn't written any fiction for three years. Instead, she has been collaborating with a group of Wyoming scientists and historians to produce a forthcoming book on the state's Red Desert.

In her introduction to Proulx's lecture, the always-witty Patricia Limerick said that the Center of the American West arranged for the snowstorm because it was an "episode of weather straight from the pages" of Proulx's fiction and it also "put in place a process of screening and selection so that the audience would be hardy, tough, and resilient Westerners." Limerick discussed the recent "Western literary Renaissance," and remarked that before the 1990's, Western writing meant only "Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour," tales of "escapist adventure." In the program for the lecture, Limerick wrote "Reading [Proulx's] work will turn the tide for people laboring under the belief that the West is either a happy, mythic locale quarantined from sorrow and consequence, or a melancholy region steeped in despair and defeat."

Proulx looked out at the crowd and declared, "This is more people than there are in the entire state that I live in." Proulx then discussed the Red Desert project in which she has been immersed for the past several years. The Red Desert, she said, "is an area of 6 to 9,000 square miles that at one time was the largest unfenced area in the lower 48 states," and that "it is disappearing at an incredible rate." She said that a friend of hers was compiling a book of photographs of the Red Desert and asked her to contribute a foreword. When she was researching the foreword, she discovered that there were no books on the Red Desert. Proulx became passionately engaged in working with a group of scholars from the Wyoming Biodiversity Database to compose a book on all aspects of the Red Desert. Proulx said that "no one knew anything about the Red Desert" and that this lack of prior scholarship "was meat on our table."

The book, which will be published by University of Texas Press in 2007 or 2008, is "more of a requiem than anything else," Proulx said, because of the increasing exploitation of the Red Desert's natural resources. Proulx worked on the history section of the book, and read an excerpt that she ended up cutting from the final volume, concerning the many cattle-rustling outlaws who ranged around the desert during Wyoming's outlaw period from 1875-95.

During the question-and-answer period, Proulx was asked if she was going to use any of the material she uncovered for the Red Desert project in her fiction. She said she came across "hundreds of fabulous stories," but that she has no "specific plans" to include them in her fiction, only "a general sense" that it will work its way into her stories. She noted that she hasn't written fiction for three years, and said, "I am looking forward to getting back to it." Another audience member asked what it was like to see her fiction turned into movies. Proulx said, "Novels and stories are what they are and films are something different. Making novels into film is very hard," because it involves "lots of cutting, as well as the overriding ethos of Hollywood and happy endings and all of that crap."

She said it would be better for Hollywood if they adapted more short stories into film, because "turning a novel into a film is essentially a destructive deed" while "making a short story into a film can be a creative and exhilarating experience." She praised the cast and crew who worked on the film version of her story Brokeback Mountain, particularly because "even though it's shot in Alberta, you can't tell it's not in Wyoming," due to the care the crew took with matching the landscape. They didn't shoot the film in Wyoming because of money and also because the state "has less than 500,000 people, few hotels or airports, and sometimes the phones don't work. That thing called infrastructure just ain't there."

At the end of the night, Patricia Limerick asked Proulx if she had any final thoughts for the hundreds of Coloradoans who had braved the inclement weather to see her. "Stay on your own side of the Little Snake," she said, naming the river on the border between Colorado and Wyoming.

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