Sunday, October 19, 2014

A view of us, by them, through the eyes of them.

Ah geez, yet again another literary commentator has decided that E. Annie Proulx somehow has a Wyoming association. Wyoming authors who are really from Wyoming just can't get a break.

Proulx is famouly associated with a certain short story made into a movie which set wrote while living in Wyoming and set in Wyoming, but she's not from Wyoming, and at the end of the day was just passing through, having moved on to Seattle. Even when she lived in Wyoming she spent part of the year in Newfoundland. She is not a Wyoming author in the real sense of the word.  She was complaining about getting ignored in a fashion by locals before she left.

Not that outside people who comment on local writings care one whit about that. Or that Proulx came to prominence with The Shipping News, which is set in her native northeast.  But it does cause us to suffer the indignity of so many presentations of people who live in this state are written by people whose connection with the state is temporary or perhaps in the form of immigration to the state.  It isn't as if locals, and very long term residents, don't write.  This must be what it was like for African natives back in the day of European colonization.  I'll bet the writings by English or French colonist don't have big appreciate following in Africa, for example.

It's even worse, of course, with cinematic presentations. They're hardly ever filmed here, and the actors as a rule try to effect an accent that we don't have.

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