"Are you kidding?"

Dear World, Before you ask Annie Proulx a question about Brokeback Mountain, please stop and consider your audience. She is, after all, there to talk about her writing, not the movie, and furthermore, she has been asked these questions a million times before. Do some research, and try to be original. I find it's a good way to approach life in general. Thanks, Patti Yeah, the other night our department co-hosted an Annie Proulx reading as part of a literary awards thing, and she read about an hour's worth of a memoir she finished writing last week (I KNOW, and it was splendid), and then there was the requisite Q&A, and I discovered that I cringe and cover my mouth whenever somebody asks a question about Brokeback Mountain. (There were four.) The question which provoked Proulx's flabbergasted response--the subject line of this post--was when a person speaking for a gender and literature class asked, "Why cowboys? Why not some other profession?" Proulx recovered nicely, and talked a little bit about the cowboy as myth, and the enduring desire to become one, and then she (rather kindly, which I could not have managed) added that in the story, as opposed to the movie, the characters were wannabes, and not actual cowboys. "It was too subtle. That's okay," she finished. Anyway! The other BBM questions were: Were they based on real people? What did you think of the controversy surrounding the movie? Why did X happen to Character Y? (If you know the story, you can probably guess the question.) I liked Proulx (I've only read three of her short stories, but I bought two of her books for the signing afterwards), though I disagreed with a couple of things she expressed. (Though she didn't say it explicitly, she views fanfiction with skepticism--again, probably an outgrowth of BBM, as she did talk about people sending her rewritten endings. Also, she believes people start writing too young, before they have anything to say. Which...eh. Though she did tie that up with, "It takes a long time to grow up in this country. You may have noticed.") It was altogether a lovely experience.