I have visited Salt Lake City several times. When you get on the Interstate near the airport and head East towards Salt Lake City, you see “Cheyenne, Wyoming” on large signs framed against the nearby mountains. I have always been tempted to disregard my immediate purposes and just keep on driving towards Cheyenne. Now I will get my chance.     Wyoming is featured in A JOURNEY THROUGH LITERARY AMERICA through the stories of Annie Proulx, a former resident of Laramie, Wyoming, who has since moved on to other pastures. One thing I am looking forward to experiencing for myself are the long sightlines. As Proulx told Charlie Rose in an interview, “When you can stand at your kitchen sink and look out your window and see a hundred miles down the road…you’re ‘on the beam.’”[i] She says that Wyoming is her writing place: “You go into it and it’s almost as if you were trailing a little cord behind you, plugged into the side of the mountain.”  Researching Proulx led me to Owen Wister as well. Wister, a sickly young man, fell in love with Wyoming on a trip out there and wrote one of the most popular cowboy novels [...] Read More »