E Annie Proulx keeps moving

The writer's desk. Pic: John Freeman

Annie Proulx no longer lives in Wyoming (I may be one of the last people on the planet to know this fact but it's news to me). And she has a new novel out; Barkskins, which I shall add to the list of future-reads (university reading lists loom large in my current thinking; term starts in a week so I have other priorities).

I read those snippets of 'news' in an article, 'How The Writer Researches: Annie Proulx', in the online journal, The Literary Hub. The article is worth reading. It begins:

Annie Proulx is 80 years old and still not sure where she belongs. Standing in the atrium of her home in the Snoqualmie Valley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist eyes a photograph of the cottage she once occupied in Newfoundland, the setting of her 1993 novel, The Shipping News. “I fell in love with that landscape,” Proulx says, speaking in the tone of a woman describing an ex-lover.

“But ultimately, I did not belong there.”

After 20 years in Wyoming—several spent building a dream home she later sold—Proulx had a similar epiphany about that state. As she did about Vermont, and Texas, and New Mexico, and any number of places where she has lived. In an age of itinerary writer-teachers, Proulx’s boomerangs back and forth across North America are exceptional.

Now she’s made a similar discovery of the wooded idyll east of Seattle.

 If it's true that Ms. Proulx remains unsure about where she belongs there may yet be hope for a 'young man' like me, teetering on the brink of sixty-something. Write on Douglas. Write on.