There's a great interview with Annie Proulx in the Miami Herald:
Q: You've said Brokeback Mountain began as an examination of homophobia in the land of the pure, noble cowboy.
A: Everything I write has a rural situation and the Wyoming stories, in the collection Close Range, which includes Brokeback Mountain, did contain a number of those social-observation stories, what things are like for people there. It's my subject matter, what can I say.
Q: Were you trying to accomplish something specific with this story?
A: No. It was just another story when I started writing it. I had no idea it was going to even end up on the screen. I didn't even think it was going to be published when I was first working on it because the subject matter was not in the usual ruts in the literary road.
Q: You've said this story took twice as long to write as a novel. Why?
A: Because I had to imagine my way into the minds of two uneducated, rough-spoken, uninformed young men, and that takes some doing if you happen to be an elderly female person. I spent a great deal of time thinking about each character and the balance of the story, working it out, trying to do it in a fair kind of way.
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Q: Would you characterize the story as groundbreaking?
A: I hope that it is going to start conversations and discussions, that it's going to awaken in people an empathy for diversity, for each other and the larger world. I'm really hoping that the idea of tolerance will come through discussions about the film. People tend to walk out of the theater with a sense of compassion, which I think is very fine. It is a love story. It has been called both universal and specific and I think that's true. It's an old, old story. We've heard this story a million times, we just haven't heard it quite with this cast.
Q: Have you gotten any response from gay organizations?
A: No. When the story was first published eight years ago, I did expect that. But there was a deafening silence. What I had instead were letters from individuals, gay people, some of them absolutely heartbreaking. And over the years, those letters have continued and certainly are continuing now. Some of them are extremely fine, people who write and say, 'This is my story. This is why I left Idaho, Wyoming, Iowa.' Perhaps the most touching ones are from fathers, who say, 'Now I understand the kind of hell my son went through.' It's enormously wonderful to know that you've touched people, that you've truly moved them.
Q: Is that why you write?
A: It's not why I write. I had no idea I was going to get any response of this sort. I wrote it from my long-term stance of trying to describe sections of rural life, individuals in particular rural situations and places, well, first the places. That it came out this way it just happened to touch certain nerves in people. I think this country is hungry for this story.
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Author discusses origins of `Brokeback Mountain'
BlueWizard's blog: The Rambling Corner
HEDWIG: "The road is my home. In reflecting upon the people whom I have come upon in my travels, I cannot help but think of the people who have come upon me."
