“Wide Place in Roach River”

As her writing attests, Annie Proulx is a keen observer of the natural world. The landscape of North America figures prominently in her fiction: the tempestuous sea in her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Shipping News (1993); high prairies dappled in “broken-cloud light” in “Brokeback Mountain” (1997); forests of “evergreens taller than cathedrals, cloud-piercing spruce and hemlock” in her bestselling epic Barkskins (2016).        



She captures the environment, with all of its harshness and beauty, in detailed sketches as well as in her lyrical prose. Her attentiveness is apparent in this watercolor drawing of a river in Maine, as well as in the precise contextual notes: “a windy day with scud cloud. NO FISH.” (Scud clouds are small, ragged fragments of cloud that hang low in the sky.)