It is a blinko day here in the Medicine Bow range of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming. ”Blinko” means the kind of day that changes every hour — one moment blue sky and bright, the next grey with brooding snow clouds, before the sun comes blinking through again. The word is one of the many inventions of Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News, and you will find it, along with other gems, in her new book, That Old Ace in the Hole (Fourth Estate).It tells the story of young Bob Dollar, sent down from Denver to the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles by his employer, Global Pork Rind, to scout for suitable properties for new hog farms, those grim bacon-and-spare-rib factories scattered throughout rural America. Bob’s arrival in Woolybucket leads to encounters with the local characters who all come equipped with tales that they are more than happy to spin. We enter a world in which Jim Skin’s dad once used an umbrella cover for a condom, and where the ”curious rock formations … resembled dinosaur excreta standing on end”.Proulx is not a didactic writer, but it is not hard to see that her sympathies are with the cowboys and their battle against the corporate machine. Here’s the eponymous old windmiller, Ace Crouch, on the subject: ”Pigs are animals, yes, but they are also intelligent and they like fresh air and the scenery, they make nests and frolic and take good care a their babies. But these — just cooped up to breed and breed, no nice dirt or weeds, no friends. Pigs are gregarious animals but not in them damn hog bunkers. Makes me sick.””I wanted it to be concerned with a contemporary issue,” said Proulx, sitting in her handsomely but unostentatiously timbered home in the small town of Centenniel in the heart of Wyoming ranching country. ”But I’m not an activist, I’m a professional observer.”She smiles and makes the sign of a zero when asked if there are campaigns or causes to which she has attached her name. But her sympathy for the little guy runs through all of her work like — well, it’s best to leave the similes to Proulx, who can write of ”grief like gravel under his kneecaps” or of a man ”with short, white face whiskers like the fur on a laboratory rat”.She appreciates that ”the people in Wyoming couldn’t give a damn whether I write or spin plates on the end of a broomstick”. She admires their ornery directness, which she also finds in her other home in Newfoundland. The big city holds no attraction. She lived briefly in Montreal and New York and that’ll last her for this lifetime. A short, ”insufferable” spell as a PR for a medical centre put her off office life forever. ”The infighting and bitchery made me want to flee into the woods.”Her celebrity, which arrived in her 50s after she had brought up four children and worked as a magazine writer, she wears with a sense of grateful obligation. Book tours are a mixture of ”duty and pleasure” that she feels she owes her publishers. ”Interviews are uncomfortable for everyone concerned,” she says as she prepares me a lunch of ham-and-pickle sandwich and a bottle of ale, ”except for the editor back in the office.” She is happiest at work in the lower recesses of the house, amid her files and research, where she is unlikely to be disturbed by anything much more intrusive than a distant passing antelope.”I like writing, I like the construction of paragraphs and pages. I like the architecture of it.” She revises her short stories as many as 30 or 40 times. ”There’s no room for error in short stories. The lack of a comma can throw everything off.”Proulx’s late mother was an accomplished amateur artist whose paintings hang in her bedroom, and her still ”hale and hearty and 89” father was a textile businessman of French-Canadian descent who reinvented himself as a Yankee in New England at a time when French Canadians were looked down on locally.During a peripatetic childhood there and in North Carolina, Proulx was reading Jack London and Somerset Maugham by the age of seven. In libraries as a child, she picked books according to the colour of their covers: ”I was very partial to beige.” Her first paid-for published work was a story she wrote for Seventeen magazine while staying with her parents during the break-up with the second of her three ex-husbands. ”They sent me a cheque for $700. I thought, ‘This is an easy way to make money.”’She was a full-time journalist in Vermont for a while, where she started Behind the Times, a local paper that distinguished itself by upsetting a cosy little coterie of local politicians. She was meanwhile working on her short stories, but did not complete her first novel, Postcards, until 1991, at the age of 56.Proulx is famous for and sometimes criticised because of the outlandish names of her characters — people such as Flyby Amendinger and Albina Muth or Freda Beauty-rooms and Ribeye Cluke. The names come from phone books, obituaries and bibliographies: ”Historians of Chinese culture have wonderful names.” You almost find yourself tapping your feet to the music of Shorty Bates and his Texas Saddle Pals, which is, alas, not a real band, although she loves ”honky-tonk country and western” music.In one of her short stories, People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water, there is a line about the ”endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.” But apart from ”bouts” of Sunday school, she says, there has been little religion in her life. She was not impressed by the odd varieties that attracted her mother and sisters in North Carolina: ”I was already inoculated.” And she has no time for the evangelical fringe groups now arriving in Wyoming: ”Very bigoted, extremely rightwing and full of hatred for people who are not like they are.” Perhaps the closest expression of her belief system is the slogan ”Take care of your own damn self — Wyoming state motto”, which appears on her fridge. ”I’m an admirer of self-reliance and the natural world and people who can get along in it,” she said. There is incest, lust and sexual ambiguity in That Old Ace in the Hole, and a delightful passage about a cross-dressing cowboy party in 1884, which, of course, turns out to be true. Love between two cowboys was the subject of Brokeback Mountain, a short story in her Close Range collection. ”I’m always annoyed that most American novels are very narrow in terms of their characters. There seem to be whole groups of people missing. There are a lot of gay people in this country and it seems to me absolutely natural and normal to write them into a novel. It makes some people very defensive and upset, but when Brokeback Mountain came out I got many, many letters from old cowboys in Wyoming who said, ‘You told my story.”’A reminder of the bigotry they faced came close to home when a gay student, Matthew Shepard, was murdered in Laramie in 1998. Proulx was on the jury panel for the subsequent murder trial but was not called to serve. She saw the play about the killing, The Laramie Project, when it was shown in town, and described it as ”probably the most intense theatre experience” of her life. ”The people portrayed on the stage were in the audience. People didn’t know if Laramie was going to be treated as a jerkwater, redneck, bigoted place, so people were anxious and I gather the cast was really frightened. They had no idea if the audience was going to draw out their Bowie knives and rush the stage. It was a really electric experience.”After September 11, to which there is a sideways reference in the book, there was much talk of the American novel being changed for ever. Proulx is unconvinced. ”Because I was a historian [she studied at Sir George Williams, now Concordia, University in Montreal], a lot of other things come to mind — ‘Remember the Alamo’, ‘Remember the Maine’, ‘Remember Pearl Harbour’…” Of the current martial drumbeat, she says: ”From friends I hear low mutterings, filled with trepidation. I haven’t heard anyone be gung-ho or excited or pro.”At the end of our interview, she pulls on what looks like a hunting cap and drives me in her Dodge back into Laramie and past the old jailhouse where Butch Cassidy once served time. The snow that was dusting the ground as we left Centenniel suddenly gives way to sunlight as we cross Big Hollow.A character in That Old Ace in the Hole is an old man with terrible scars on his back, which are frequently referred to but never explained. As she drops me off, Proulx reveals his secret. ”That was a fellow who crawled into a wolf’s den and the wolf, in its anxiety, just raked his back to ribbons with its claws as it charged over him.” A blinko day indeed. — Â