SARATOGA, WYO. — On bridge street, few shopkeepers know the name Annie Proulx. But they sure know the title of her most famous short story, "Brokeback Mountain."
"Yuck," says a wiry older woman in the Hat Creek Gift Shop, which sells cowboy tchotchkes. "Some people are just plain strange."
"I wish I'd never written it," Proulx says at her home five miles outside town, looking out enormous windows onto the river and the limestone cliffs that define her property.
Not because of the people of Saratoga, a town she doesn't think much of. Not even because the word "brokeback" has been misappropriated, as in, "Hey, you're not goin' brokeback on me, are you?"
It's all the manuscripts, screenplays and letters sent to her by men who rewrite or serialize her story, adding new characters, endings and even successive generations.
"These cover letters," she complains, "always begin with the sentence 'I'm not gay, but . . . ' They think that just because they are men, they understand men better than I do."
The story, says Proulx, spine straight, hands slapping her knees for emphasis, "was about homophobia in a place."
So much of Proulx's hard, fine writing is about place it's a wonder more people don't try to find her. After winning the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for her novel "The Shipping News," set in Newfoundland, Proulx became a fixed star in the literary constellation, winning almost every prize a writer could win.
She has often criticized the literary establishment for knowing nothing about what goes on in America outside its cities. She hates and generally refuses interviews (especially in her home). But she has agreed to talk -- although a polite e-mail from her publicist warns that she "takes a while to warm up to people." Her ferocity is literary legend, often cushioned by the phrase "doesn't suffer fools."
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No one in Saratoga knows her name, not the woman who runs the gallery, the man who runs the print shop, the women at the Valley Women's Christian meeting or the men in Shively's Hardware store. But they know "Brokeback," and they know the piece of land she lives on.
It is a bit of heaven -- 640 acres with a mile of riverfront on the lazy North Platte. To get here you ascend from Laramie through the Snowy Mountains and the Medicine Bow National Forest. Then you're in grasslands. The yellow aspen do that shimmering dance beside the deep green of the lodgepole pines.
