In this episode of The Archive Project, Annie Proulx shares her life’s journey, including her life-long love of reading, history, and the great outdoors; her reflections on being a woman in a culture where women are “denied time for reflection and meditation”; her perchance for falling in love with places; and her travels across the world in search “some half-wild place.”

Probably the most important thing you should know about me is that I am a reader, I have always been a reader, and it’ll probably be the last thing I do.”

“Gradually, I began to write—not starting with fiction, but articles for horticulture magazines, books on rural living, apple cider, and that sort of thing. And I kept looking for some half-wild place. As children, I think we often experience inchoate and unspecified longings, those childhood moods and feelings of something important that’s out there.”

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. 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. Her most recent novel is Barkskins. She lives in Seattle.