While I was waiting with my sister Susan and her sister-in-law in the hospital waiting room during my brother-in-law George's seven hour operation this past Friday, I had a lot of free time, and so when my sister mentioned author Annie Proulx and her Wyoming home called Bird Cloud, I googled it on my phone. Susan seemed to think the place was somewhere in Central Wyoming, inaccessible to all but the hardiest four wheel drive vehicles, and hoped one day to see it. It turns out that Bird Cloud is actually located just 3 miles outside of Saratoga, Wyoming, a quaint little town that also boasts mystery writer C.J. Box as a part-time resident, and is a mere 2 1/2 hours away from Susan and George's Fort Collins townhome. We made tentative plans to visit there next summer and hang out at the gate until Proulx showed up to give a guided tour. What I found really interesting, however, is that Proulx got the money to build Bird Cloud from the profits she made from her Pulitzer prize winning book, The Shipping News. And that made me remember that my literary hero, Studs Terkel, who up until then had made only a modest living from his books, wrote the Pulitzer prize winning book, The Good War, and bought a large house in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, right near Lake Michigan, with the profits his book earned. It was that house former CBS anchorman Dan Rather was leaving when he was attacked by a man who kept asking him "What's the frequency, Kenneth?." But I digress. My point is that winning a Pulitzer means big bucks, and if you intend to do any writing, keep your eyes on the prize.
No comments:
Post a Comment