Book description
Annie Proulx, one of America's finest writers, invites us to share her
experience in the building of her new home on a rich plot of untouched,
unspoilt prairie and her pleasure in uncovering of the layers of
American history locked beneath the topsoil.
'Bird Cloud' is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming
wetlands and prairie and 400 foot cliffs plunging down to the North
Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a
bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles,
golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers,
kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She knew she had to purchase
the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she
would build on it - a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and
her character - a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.
Proulx's Bird Cloud is the story of building that house - solar panels,
a Japanese soak tub, a concrete floor, elk horn handles on kitchen
cabinets - and an enthralling natural history and archeology of the
region, inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians. It
is also a family history, going back to nineteenth century Mississippi
river boat captains and Canadian settlers, and an illuminating
autobiography. Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation
and compassion, turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to
be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for
thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts,
research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great
American writers of her time. Praise for Annie Proulx
'Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming
snowstorms' Wall Street Journal
'No one writes better about tough people in tough places' USA Today
'No ones writes about the West with the skeptical verve of Annie
Proulx' Outside Annie Proulx's books include the novel 'The Shipping
News' and the story collection 'Fine Just the Way It Is'. Her many
honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times
International Fiction Prize and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story
'Brokeback Mountain', which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was
made into an Academy Award-winning film. She lives in Wyoming.
