As a short-term fellow, I spent several weeks this summer sifting through Annie Proulx's papers, tracing how her body of work makes visible the usually unseen rural landscapes, communities, histories, and daily lives of "rougher" American regions. To read Annie Proulx’s work is to visit some of the most remote and untraveled locales in North America, including my own homeplace, the dusty panhandle of Texas. How strange and delightful it was to learn about Proulx and nuances of my own region within the beautifully crafted space of The New York Public Library, right in the midst of one of the most diverse, compact, and vastly populated cities in America.

Within her working archive, the extent of Proulx’s research is staggering. She has pages of typed notes and scribbled bits of paper discussing local histories and daily lives; she comments on museum showcases and shortcomings, jots down observations on distinctions in local dialect(s), analyzes homegrown menus, keeps clippings from a wide range of newspapers, and assembles her own libraries of history books and reading lists, alongside her travel journals with observations about light and land, numerous photographs, character sketches in words and pencil drawings, and beautifully crafted watercolors. Within the depth of her process, Proulx seeks to understand the places she represents through her chosen narrative art, making visible the people and places most often unnoticed.

Proulx consistently explores how the local is altered from the outside, shaped by the national and/or global (economics, environment, social constructs, etc.). No matter the rurality of the region from whence she writes, her work reflects a sense of moral geography, questioning to what degree "we" are responsible for the destruction of places and people who dwell far from us. Asking, do we (and/or should we) seek to understand other lived landscapes from a distance? By rendering visible the usually paraphrased accounts of violence, Proulx does not allow for the concealment of human suffering by means of skewed data and sparse detail; she fashions a veritable portrait of the places, lives, and landscapes she wishes to be seen.

In so doing, she is drawn to the details of violence, often highlighting statistics of death, or misuse of the equipment under the guise of "progress," or the oddities of regional deaths not covered in national narratives, or the violence done on far-away landscapes through the dumping of chemicals, extraction of resources, or slaughtering of animals.

Proulx takes these obscure details of violence and explodes them in her published forms: she encourages readers to ask questions about the moral implications of pig farms in small town communities (That Old Ace in the Hole), inquire about the scant news coverage of lynching in New Orleans (Accordion Crimes), acknowledge the countless deaths and natural destruction due to profit margins within the logging industry (Barkskins), and respond to the enduring abuse and assault of those not fitting into the sexual norm of western cowboy culture (Close Range). At its core, the question of violence extends to the landscape itself, in particular, the racialized and gendered disappearances of persons as well as their absence of voice along both lines of the border, structuring the "American" landscape. By shading in these narratives of rural landscapes through historical details of violence, Proulx demands an accounting for realities too easily shadowed in the rhetoric of obscurity.

One such example is found in Proulx’s notes for Accordion Crimes. While researching race relations and regional culture within Louisiana, Proulx explored newspapers and documentation of the Thibodaux Massacre of November 23, 1887. The newspaper accounting was as follows: "at least fifty blacks dead." In her notes, Proulx records, "The lynching! Wretched coverage." (Proulx papers, box 18, folder 10).

Within her own fictionalized account in Accordion Crimes, Proulx writes artfully of the violence experienced by immigrants across the country from the southern border delineating the U.S. from Mexico, to the northern lines of New England and Canada. In lieu of printing the numbers of lives lost, she includes unsettling, but visually demanding, statements such as the following: "the corpses of the Italians had been arranged in a display like a butcher’s cutlets" (Accordion Crimes, 57) as well as, "They stripped him raw, prodded him up and down the muddy streets forcing him to kiss the American flag again and again… calling for tar and feathers but finding a rope and, drunk and inept and deadly, hauling the wretched man up into the air by his neck until at last he strangled" (89). Her details of violence make visible the otherwise emotionless death count.     

This project becomes vivid in the midst of her massive archive, the traces of her excavations made available for us to excavate likewise. Yet nowhere is this spirit more evident than in her correspondence, for an interview via letter to Jensen at The Atlantic, dated October 29, 1997, acknowledging that "the point of writing in layers of bitter deaths and misadventures that befall characters is to illustrate American violence which is real, deep, and vast" (b. 145, f. 2).

Though some do not care to see the realities of a clouded past and continued viciousness, Proulx asserts, "I [am] writing about the U.S., and… violence is a fact of life in our country and in immigrant lives. None of the violent episodes… were invented, they were all real things that happened to real people in the past found in pioneer accounts, travel diaries, dull labor statistics—all over the place… I used the kernels of real experience to create a fictional episode" (b. 145, f. 2). Through Proulx’s papers, we too may encounter the depth of research that informs her craft—and our own accountability on the violent soil we still traverse.