Annie Proulx

[CellarDweller115]

Writers Institute announces 2023 fall season

Katherine Kiessling - Aug. 3, 2023


Contemporary topics ranging from artificial intelligence to state politics take center stage in the New York State Writers Institute newly announced fall season featuring more than 30 events.

Among the season highlights is the sixth annual Albany Book Festival on Sept. 23 at the University at Albany Campus Center. The event will feature Annie Proulx, whose short story “Brokeback Mountain” was adapted for the screen in 2005, and Jeff Shaara, author of “Gods and Generals” and “The Old Lion,” alongside 25 additional authors; readings; book signings and meet-and-greet opportunities; discussion panels; and virtual workshops for aspiring authors.

Johnstown native Richard Russo will kick off the fall season Aug. 29 with a reading and discussion of his newest novel “Somebody’s Fool.” The book concludes the author’s “North Bath” trilogy, which highlights blue collar life in upstate New York. Several of Russo’s works have been adapted for film and television, including “Nobody’s Fool,” “Empire Falls” and “Straight Man.”

https://www.timesunion.com/books/article/writers-institute-2023-fall-season-18272642.php

[CellarDweller115]

Annie Proulx’s Imaginative Leap

Non-heterosexual men have long existed on the social and cultural margins. Gay and bisexual male characters in literature, too, have done so for many generations. This essay explores the construction of gay masculinity in the short story “Brokeback Mountain” in relation to the “imaginative leap” that its author, Annie Proulx, undertook in order to conceptualize and represent this noteworthy form of marginalized otherness. It demonstrates that, despite the story’s various refreshing elements, “Brokeback Mountain” ultimately relies far too extensively on the logic of melodrama when telling the tale of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who fall in love in 1963 and continue their sexual relationship over the course of two decades. As a result, this story ends up positioning its two queer protagonists as enemies of the patriarchal social order and the larger society within which it so comfortably exists, implicitly perpetuating both heterosexism
and homophobia as it does its cultural work.

https://repository.tcu.edu/bitstream/handle/116099117/56549/Hart.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

[Lyle (Mooska)]

This essay's summary essentially argues that the short story should've had a happy ending, that by 1980 the times had changed enough for that to have happened for these two characters. (Tell 1998 Matthew Shepherd that. The Brokeback Mountain short story was published the year before that.)

[Jeff Wrangler]

This essay's summary essentially argues that the short story should've had a happy ending, that by 1980 the times had changed enough for that to have happened for these two characters. (Tell 1998 Matthew Shepherd that. The Brokeback Mountain short story was published the year before that.)

Times had changed? Didn't Annie herself somewhere describe Wyoming as one the nation's most homophobic state?

It never escaped me that the story still fit/fits into the stereotype of gay male romances where one partner ends up dead and the other is left alone and heartbroken.

I never quite bought what some people saw as hopefulness in that waving grass seen at the end of the film. Ennis' getting more involved in his daughter's life would not make up for the loss of Jack.

[CellarDweller115]

Cross-posted from the "film vs. book" thread.




Revisiting an interview from 2005, giving that the anniversary just recently passed.


Annie Proulx tells the story behind "Brokeback Mountain"


Annie Proulx figured no magazine would touch her short story "Brokeback Mountain," the tale of two Wyoming cowboys whose romance is so intense, it sometimes leaves them black and blue. But The New Yorker published it in 1997, and it went on to win an O. Henry prize and a National Magazine Award. Now the movie version is a leading Oscar contender, with starring performances from Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist.

In a telephone conversation with the Associated Press from her home in Wyoming, Proulx, a 70-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winner, declined to discuss the origins of her two roughneck lovers, citing an upcoming book written with screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Instead, she spoke about homophobia, her fascination with rural life, and the process of making Twist and Del Mar live and breathe.


https://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/entertainment-news/2005/12/17/annie-proulx-tells-story-behind-brokeback