Word: proulx
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...Annie Proulx perseveres and captures literary loot...
...years E. (for Edna) Annie Proulx, whose fine, rambunctious second novel The Shipping News won the National Book Award last week, supported herself by writing for small to middling outdoor magazines. This is very close to being impossible. The caloric content of the checks that drift in months late is only marginally greater than that of rejection slips burned in the wood stove...
...Proulx (rhymes with true) is 58, a tough, rooted Vermonter. She dropped out of graduate school years ago and fetched up in a bare cabin in the northern end of the state. She and a friend fished, hunted and foraged to feed themselves. Living that way "makes you very alert and aware of everything around you, from tree branches and wild mushrooms to animal tracks," Proulx says. "It's excellent training for the eye. Most of us stagger around deaf and blind...
...fashionable. "I believe if you get the landscape right," she says, "the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place. The story will come from the landscape." The story also comes, deviously or directly, from knocking about through one's own life, and Proulx did her share of that. She married and divorced three times and has three grown sons. But she says that the autobiographical content of her fiction is "zero" and urges young novelists to ignore the customary preachment to write about what they know. "Write about what's interesting," she says...
...obsession, she follows her own advice. Postcards, her first novel, is about rural America from World War II to the present, and research didn't take her far from home. But most of The Shipping News (Scribner's; 337 pages; $20) is set on the coast of Newfoundland. Proulx made seven trips there, learning the ways in which locals and newcomers use language, seeing how the tight community life falls apart in thin times, as the old occupations of cod fishing and seal hunting fail...