Part family history, part naturalist's journal-and her first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years- Bird Cloud is Annie Proulx's vivid chronicle of building a house on a spectacularly beautiful piece of land in Wyoming.
Idiosyncratic, original, and spectacularly vivid, Bird Cloud was conceived as a book about building a house and then became a family history, an archaeology of the Wyoming landscape, and as close to memoir as Annie Proulx will ever get. A half dozen years ago, Proulx fell in love with 600 acres being sold by The Nature Conservancy of Wyoming. Grazing land plunged down a 400-foot cliff to the North Platte River. The property was home to bald eagles, mountain lions, and cranes.
Interspersed with tales of construction and the stunning wildlife at Bird Cloud is family history going back to a great-great grandfather who was a river boat captain in the west in the mid-nineteenth century-a kindred spirit, it seems, who met Lafayette, Audubon, and Mark Twain.
Bird Cloud will be an opportunity for reviewers and listeners to see what Annie Proulx is made of, where she comes from, how her magnificent mind works, and why she writes so brilliantly.
Part family history, part naturalist’s journal—and her first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years— Bird Cloud is Annie Proulx’s vivid chronicle of building a house on a spectacularly beautiful piece of land in Wyoming.
Idiosyncratic, original, and spectacularly vivid, Bird Cloud was conceived as a book about building a house and then became a family history, an archaeology of the Wyoming landscape, and as close to memoir as Annie Proulx will ever get. A half dozen years ago, Proulx fell in love with 600 acres being sold by The Nature Conservancy of Wyoming. Grazing land plunged down a 400-foot cliff to the North Platte River. The property was home to bald eagles, mountain lions, and cranes.
Interspersed with tales of construction and the stunning wildlife at Bird Cloud is family history going back to a great-great grandfather who was a river boat captain in the west in the mid-nineteenth century—a kindred spirit, it seems, who met Lafayette, Audubon, and Mark Twain.
Bird Cloud will be an opportunity for reviewers and listeners to see what Annie Proulx is made of, where she comes from, how her magnificent mind works, and why she writes so brilliantly.
Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of Annie Proulx’s piece of the Wyoming landscape and her home there.
“Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it—a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.
Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor, and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho, and Shoshone Indians—and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers.
Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.
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