Taciturn Writer ‘Shipping News’ Author Remains Tight-Lipped Regarding Her New Novel ‘About Accordions’

‘This is going to be short,” E. Annie Proulx announces as she takes a seat at a meeting with the press, “and it is going to be fast.”

Proulx looks ominously at the two newspaper reporters who occupy chairs on either side of her. They have waited all day for a chance to speak to her, and although she has consented, grudgingly, to meet with them for 10 minutes, she makes it clear that she is not happy to do it. She has spent most of her good humor on earlier discussions with university students and faculty. Now her mood has changed. Her escorts look tense.

Proulx is prickly and bored, a master of the withering look and stony reply.

The reporters brace themselves. Both have read and admired her novel “The Shipping News,” and they ease into the interview, groping for questions that will not offend.

There are none.

Proulx said she dislikes the “tiresome articles” that have been written about her in the past. It is no secret that she wishes these journalists, and all others, would pack up their Bic pens and disappear.

“You really don’t enjoy this, do you?” one of the reporters asks, trying to sound sympathetic.

Proulx fixes her with a hard stare, and it seems, for several awkward seconds, as though she might not answer at all.

“Have you ever met anybody who does?” she asks finally, incredulously. “Honestly?

“This is uncomfortable, not only for me, but for most writers. Sooner or later you have to ask the question: Am I going to be a ‘lit celeb’ or am I going to go back and write? Most of us would rather write.”

“Lit celeb” or not, for better or worse, the world is curious about Annie Proulx. “The Shipping News” is her second novel, published in 1993, when she was 58 years old, and its astounding success - it won the National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize - took her life by storm.

For 19 years she had made a quiet living in rural Vermont, writing free-lance articles for small to midsize magazines on subjects ranging from chili peppers to mountain lions to the New England weather. Occasionally she would write and sell a short story, but journalism paid better, so she turned to fiction only when she had the time and inclination.

It wasn’t until she had enough stories to publish a collection, 1988’s “Heart Songs and Other Stories,” that she considered trying the longer form. In her contract for “Heart Songs” her publisher had included a clause calling for a novel at some future date. When the story collection was well received, her editor suggested that the time had come.

The result was “Postcards,” published in 1992 when Proulx was 57. It was the first novel by a female author to win the PEN/Faulkner Award. More important, it opened a new world for Annie Proulx.

“When I finally had to do the novel, I found myself very, very comfortable with it,” she says. “The luxury of it - it was like sinking into a warm bath. But up to that time it had never crossed my mind to write a novel, so I guess I sort of came in the back door.”

A year after “Postcards,” she published “The Shipping News,” the grand tale of a beleaguered newspaperman named Quoyle, whose move with his two young daughters to his ancestral home in Newfoundland is both an adventure and an epiphany, a passage into a new and better life.

The book is rich and, at the same time, remarkably simple: Quoyle finds companionship and self-worth even as the Newfoundland economy is collapsing, its fishing industry in shambles and its people forced to move away to find work. It’s all told in an odd, fragmented style that was Proulx’s attempt to mimic newspaper subheads and give the novel a “subliminal, newspapery feel.”

The success of “The Shipping News” sent its stunned author on her own adventure of sorts. With the announcement that she had won the Pulitzer, she was suddenly in demand as a speaker, and she became the subject of daunting media attention.

She grew tired of talking about herself, irascible under an onslaught of what she calls “cookie-cutter questions.”

Here, for the record, are the answers to some them:

The “E.” is for Edna. Proulx rhymes with “true.” She has been divorced three times and has three grown sons. She is a formidable woman who likes her solitude and does not suffer foolish people who intrude on it. She is impatient by nature and deeply curious about everything, from boats to upholstery to the makings of a seal-flipper pie.

“My personal inclination is to find out how things work,” she says, and she is always, always doing research. When she travels, she carries notebooks in which she writes descriptions of landscapes, people, language. It is from these small word portraits, scribbled on the run, that she later takes her characters and the worlds they inhabit.

She found Newfoundland, which is as much a presence in “The Shipping News” as any of the book’s human characters, years ago, when she went there with a friend on a fishing trip. It was foggy and cold, but she was entranced by the island’s desolate beauty. She went back again and again, filling notebooks with what she saw and heard.

By the time she started writing “The Shipping News,” she had five notebooks, indexed by category - weather anomalies, boat-building, folklore, descriptions of oceans and seas, and speech patterns.

“When I needed a certain thing, I would go to my notebooks and leaf through until I found something that was in the ballpark and then work something up,” she says. “It was a very methodical, cold approach - nothing to do with the muse descending or anything like that.”

Proulx recently moved from her longtime home in Vermont to Wyoming, where she has spent lots of time in the past few years. She is working on a new novel “about accordions” but does not like to discuss it much. There has been talk of making “The Shipping News” into a movie, but she says she will hold out until the right filmmaker comes along.

“I don’t give a damn about the movie,” she says. “I’m very, very busy writing my new book.”

She is happy that the attention generated by the Pulitzer is beginning to let up and she can clear enough time to have a schedule:

“It’s up early in the morning, usually before sunlight. Make immense amounts of wonderful coffee. Start writing, which I do with a felt-tipped pen and a large yellow pad. I write until about 11 and then do the things of life that have to be done. In the afternoon, put it on the computer, and in the evening, revise. But this so-called schedule is rare and the so-called process is rare. I write whenever and wherever I can.”

She has many stories in her head and plans to write them all. She says she feels no pressure, despite the critical reception of Quoyle and his cold, desolate homeland.

“I don’t think about ‘The Shipping News,’ ever, unless I’m talking with someone who brings up the subject,” she says. “I’m working on something different now. The minute I’m finished with a book, the minute the manuscript is finished, I’m through with it. Done. Finished. Out of my head. Gone.”