ANNIE PROULX. “I like difficult places,” the writer recently told an audience in Ireland. Her fiction movingly articulates the challenges of human connection in complicated territories, whether it’s the Newfoundland of her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Shipping News, or a lonely Wyoming, where two ranch hands fumble through love in her acclaimed short story Brokeback Mountain—whose wrenching last line serves as a sublime example of her gift for mapping emotional terrain: “There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.” She’ll share that gift when she talks here for Seattle Arts and Lectures. October 7, Benaroya Hall, 206-621-2230; lectures.org


Listen to Proulx and writers Uzodinma Iweala and Michael Ondaatje debate the ethics of writing private stories for the public good.