Annie Proulx on her famous short story and how it grew

Check out this AP interview with Annie Proulx about her 1997 short story "Brokeback Mountain."

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. ...

After the story was published in the New Yorker:

(I received) 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.'

Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain, parents of gay children