Location: Near East Ulm, WY |
GPS: 44d 38m 33s -106d 32m 46s |
Map / Satellite Image: Google Link |
Travel Directions: Remarks: Annie Proulx grew to love Wyoming as a resident writer at the Ucross Foundation, a 22,000 acre creative campus on the site of a working cattle ranch at Ucross, WY. She wrote much of The Shipping News there and continues to serve as a trustee emeritus of the foundation. The elite organization provides a supremely peaceful setting where carefully selected resident writers, artists, and composers are indulged with the luxuries of time, space, and quiet to do their work. It was during her residency at Ucross that Proulx first saw “the old Childress place,” an isolated ranch house some 10 miles from the Ucross campus. Beautiful in its austerity and supremely true to its setting, it made an enduring impression, one that she would summon to paper in writing what many consider to be Brokeback Mountain’s most dramatic scene. In 1998, when Proulx showed director Gus Van Sant potential Wyoming locations for his ill-fated Brokeback Mountain attempt, she arranged for him to see the old Childress place. Proulx’s apostrophe to the home that inspired the story’s dramatic climax can be found in one of the story’s countless subtleties, “Childress, Texas.” The house has also been the subject of other artistic endeavors. See: Important: Quotation: [1] Brokeback Mountain - Story to Screenplay by Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana (Scribner) ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9416-4, page 135. |
Pictures of surrounding area:
Revised 08 December 2010