My Favorite Author

People often ask me to name my favorite author, and I’m sorry to report I receive few nods of recognition when I say, “Annie Proulx.” I get an aha when I mention she wrote “Brokeback Mountain,” but none of my friends and acquaintances seem to have heard of her, read her gritty yet humorous short stories or  her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Shipping News.

I dove into Annie Proulx’s work when I found out she wrote "Brokeback Mountain" which was after I had seen the movie. Since most of her work is set in the West, I read everything I could get my hands on while doing research for my novel, Never Done, a story inspired by my great-grandmother who moved to Colorado in the 1890’s.

Like Proulx, most of my writing is historical fiction set in the American West, and also like her, I try not to romanticize the past. I also avoid Western stereotypes. If you happen to be a fan of Westerns, my writing contains no Indians attacking wagon trains or land barons usurping the homesteads of poor settlers, no gunfights and no bank robberies. Instead I write about real people, some of them related to me, and how they dealt with life in remote areas without the labor-saving devices and other services we take for granted.

Unlike Proulx, I am fairly conservative when developing my characters. She would most likely say the folks in my stories are milk toast compared to the tough-as-nails people she describes. Here is one of them, a telegraph key operator, who plays a small part in her short story, “Them Old Cowboy Songs.”

His face and neck formed a visor of scars, moles, wens, boils, and acne. One leg was shorter than the other, and his voice twanged with catarrh.

Thus far, "Them Old Cowboy Songs" is my favorite Annie Proulx short story. I have read every word (over 8,000) five times or more, and the story still staggers me. You will find it in Just the Way It Is.