Postcards from Annie Proulx

Watercolors painted by a writer I admire

Over the last few days I have been absorbed in the very pleasurable task of looking at the Pulitzer- and the National Book Award-winning writer Annie Proulx’s papers in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. I’m interested, for selfish reasons, in writers who draw. Proulx’s papers at the NYPL include several notebooks and folders of landscape drawings and journals. The one above is from a spiral Cotman Sketchbook in which on one page she has noted: “Paper doesn’t have enough tooth.” Above that notation, she has another: “Need to practice squashy brush strokes for evergreens.” Such notes interest me because they introduce me to process and are instructive about how to look at the work more closely.

Back in mid-nineties, when I was a postdoc at Yale, Jim Scott invited me to a dinner with Annie Proulx. We went to a Thai restaurant. I asked her questions about Shipping News but I hadn’t known that she was also an artist. If I met her today, I’d like to ask questions about the paper she uses and whether she sketches with her pencil first before filling in the colors. Does she add the ink last? It seems to me that she uses a very fine-tipped black pen for the final image. Proulx famously didn’t start publishing until she was in her fifties. The film Brokeback Mountain made her name familiar to people the world over. When did she start painting? What is the relation of her artistic practice to her fiction writing?

When I had met her, I believe Proulx was living in Centennial, Wyoming. Like her writing, her art is attentive to natural forms and the landscape. Although she isn’t as obsessive as Nabokov, Proulx draws the plants and flowers that catch her eye and she notes down their botanical names. I am going to read this piece of hers on climate change that someone sent me the other day. While I was focused on her art, I took note of Proulx’s journaling, particularly during her travels. One scribbled set of observations about a trip to New York had the following:

“for no-no like list:

brand names on purses, scarves, etc. + T-shirts with

feeble witticisms

No scratching labels at back

of neck on clothing”

Also, another charming discovery: a painting of the snow in Wyoming that Proulx made using diluted cafe latte: