illustrator: J Byron Schachner
It’s the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Annie Proulx, born Edna Ann Proulx in Norwich, Connecticut (1935).
She said, “Spend some time living before you start writing.”
Proulx was in her 50s when she started writing fiction; her first book was a collection of short stories, Heart Songs (1988).
When her editor drew up the contract, he asked if he could put in a clause that she might someday write a novel. She said: “I just laughed madly, had not a clue about writing a novel, or even the faintest desire. I thought of myself as a short-story writer. Period, period, period.” Five years later, her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Her books include Accordion Crimes (1996), Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), Bird Cloud: A Memoir (2011), and Barkskins (2016).
She said: “What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence,
‘Write what you know.’
It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow.”
When I read my Proulx books, my whole life slows down.
The depth of the writing and the feel of the images are soul touching.
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 