The Performances

Close Range: Wyoming Stories - The Short Stories of Annie Proulx
April 24, 2004
8 P.M.
St. Andrew's Church, 163 Main Street in New Paltz
Admission $7
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Even when author Annie Proulx is writing about modern-day characters, her stories seem as if they were from another time. Proulx often sets her tales in forgotten places and at a pace that is measured, intricate, and more closely aligned with earlier, quieter days.

The stories to be read by Ron and Barbara Schade are The Bunchgrass Edge of the World and Brokeback Mountain. The Bunchgrass Edge of the World tells the story of a family whose members are shaped and defined by the immensity and isolation of their hardscrabble ranch,  a story that hangs on the notion that hell hath no fury like a tractor scorned. In Brokeback Mountain two cowboys find themselves caught in a passion that they cannot explain, accept or escape from, but that is strong enough to endure everything except the world’s violent intolerance.

Annie Proulx is one of America’s finest contemporary authors. Her best-known novel, The Shipping News, won a Pulitzer Prize, and The National Book Award. She was the first woman to win a PEN/Faulkner Award (for her first novel, Postcards). Four of the stories in Close Range, including The Bunchgrass Edge of the World, appeared in various issues of the prestigious annual collection, Best American Short Stories. Brokeback Mountain won a National Magazine Award and an O’Henry Award.

Here’s how Proulx describes the way she works. “For me, the strongest influences are the varied landscapes and bare ground of the hinterlands, rough weather and rural people living lives in the pincers of damaging isolation, ingrained localisms and the economic decisions made by distant urban powers. The rush, for me, comes from the effort to put these lives on paper, and through them examine the society that draws the lines.”

If Annie Proulx has a credo as a writer, it is best expressed in this quote from a 1997 Atlantic Monthly interview. “Imagination is the human mind’s central life strategy. It is how we anticipate danger, pleasure, threat. The imagination is how our expectations are raised and formulated; it excites and ennobles our purpose in life. The imagination blocks out hunger, bodily harm, bad luck, injury, loneliness, insult, the condition of the marooned person or the orphan, grief and disappointment, restlessness, desperation, imprisonment, and approaching death. And from the imagination spring the ideas, the actions, and the beliefs that we hold… It is everything. Imagination is the central pivot of human life.” Or as the retired Wyoming rancher she quotes in the epigraph to Close Range says, “Reality’s never been of much use out here.”