A Mind Filled With Stories : Literature: She says she has tales enough to tell until she dies. But her novel “The Shipping News,” is keepping her too busy collecting praise to write.

E. Annie Proulx is talking about her next novel. The one she has scoured seven states to research. The one she wants to lose herself in. But the one she can’t write because praise for her most recent novel, “The Shipping News,” has kept her on the road.

And not finishing this book is like having a bird locked in her head. She can’t open her forehead and let it out, and it’s in there beating and beating.

But Proulx must quell the bird--at least for this month. She had to travel to Ireland to pick up the prestigious Dublin Times international writing award for “The Shipping News,” beating out Philip Roth and Vikram Seth. And once again she’ll leave her typewriter in Vermont because she is a finalist for the National Book Award, to be announced in New York on Wednesday.

“If I win the National Book Award,” says the tall, big-boned author as she struggles to pry open a hotel mini-bar during a recent stopover in Manhattan, “I’m going to run away from home.”

This is all very amusing--that she would run away from the one place she desperately wants to be; that she can’t open a mini-bar even though she is so accomplished with a hammer and hoe that she once built a log cabin and lived in it for a few years hunting, fishing and gathering to feed herself.

But after reading her sophisticated yet fresh prose in “The Shipping News” it is hard not to wish she would give up on life’s mini-bars, dispense with all the hoopla--though certainly she deserves it--and pry open that brow of hers to liberate a whole beating flock of stories before she grows one day older.

Proulx (which rhymes with true ) is 58 years old. And she is what publicists like to call a late-in-life discovery.

She only began writing fiction full time five years ago. Before that she was raising three kids by herself, supporting them with odd jobs such as slinging hash and selling sandwiches to rich college girls.

Proulx, the daughter of an itinerant textile worker from New England, had dropped out of college in the 1950s to get married. After two divorces and roaming from New York City to the Far East, she returned to school in Vermont to study history. She was a few months away from earning her Ph.D when she quit academics. Though she was relieved to get out of the tweedy male environment of the university, she acknowledges that scholarly work is invaluable training for novel writing--examining the lives of individuals against the inexorable passage of events. Proulx eventually became a free-lancer for magazines, writing about weather, apples, canoeing, mountain lions, mice, cuisine, libraries, African bead work, cider and lettuce.

In 1988 she published her first works of fiction--a collection, “Heart Songs and Other Stories.” In 1992, her first novel, “Postcards,” came out and won the Pen/Faulkner Award. Her second novel, “The Shipping News,” came out this year and is a breathtaking story of a third-rate newspaper man named Quoyle, a lumpish man whose early life is defined by “failure to speak clearly; failure to sit up straight; failure to get up in the morning, failure in attitude, failure in ambition and ability, indeed, in everything.”

After Quoyle’s whorish wife dies, he is so “brimming with grief and thwarted love” that he leaves Upstate New York for the storm-beaten coast of Newfoundland to make a new life for his two small daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, in his ancestral home.

Quoyle is an odd type of hero--he’s an ugly man with an enormous chin; he is passive and pathetic and, in the beginning of the book, an unformed person. But in his name, Quoyle--the Old English spelling for a coil of rope--the reader should see the possibilities of many knots, or in this hero’s case, turns of events that change his life. (Each chapter begins with a heading, often the description of a particular knot from “The Ashley Book of Knots.”)

For this powerful novel Proulx has been compared by reviewers to everybody from Charles Dickens and Herman Melville to James Joyce and John Barth. And don’t forget Nathaniel West, Samuel Beckett, and of course, Shakespeare. But the beauty of this novel is in the force of Proulx’s prose and in her characters and the richness of their environment.

After wrestling a bottle of wine from that mini-bar, Proulx took time to talk about the 377-page world of “The Shipping News” and how she went about creating it:

Times: Was the basic story line percolating in your head for years and years?

Proulx: No, not really. I needed a story. I really wanted to write about Newfoundland and about the fishing problems there. But what I mostly wanted to write about is this country. And that is the back side of this story to bounce off. I wanted to step back two generations into what rural America must have been like in terms of cooperation and a cohesive almost-now-forgotten life.

Times: Your descriptions of Newfoundland were so powerful I was sort of cold while I was reading the book. I also had this vague taste of salt in my mouth. How much time did you spend there and what did you do?

Proulx: I went back seven or eight times. Just listened. Drifted through. Sat around tables. Told ghost stories. Listened. Went out in boats. Hung out. Everywhere I went I fell into conversations with people. People there are good talkers. Everybody’s got stories . . . What I wanted was the glancing blow, the hit, the fast traveling through. The little bit here and there. The odd catch of stuff because as far as I’m concerned, the fresh eye, the first glance at something is the one that counts, not familiarity. And by doing this over and over I got a lot of different shifts of attention.

Times: Was that it for research?

Proulx: Oh no. Also, one works. One doesn’t just absorb it. I must have read 50 or 60 sociological, folkloristic and historical studies of Newfoundland ways before I sat down to write a single word . . . That’s left over very clearly from my graduate student days. The lovely thing about writing fiction is that you don’t have to pin everything down in footnotes. You can get the solid background and then, man, you can just fly. You can make it all up and that’s the most liberating feeling after spending all those years crouching over a hot footnote.

Times: A lot of times you skip using verbs and pronouns? One reviewer referred to your “poetic compression.” Why did you do this?

Proulx: It was purposeful for this book . . . I was trying to give the feeling of the older style newspapers that had those little subheads, condensed thoughts, little crammed up precedes to events. And also that’s the way people talk in Newfoundland. People talk in chunks and pieces and odd words here and there and a lot of things left unsaid so I just moved that kind of verbal handling of the language into the narrative itself to see what would happen and I liked the way it worked. Also I like to pare down a lot.

Times: Were your descriptions of the two newspapers Quoyle worked for, The Mockingburg News in Upstate New York and The Gammy Bird News in Newfoundland, your commentary on journalism today?

Proulx: Well, no. One of them is a dreadful hollow thing that is full of features that are so soft they dissolve on the page before they can be read. That’s the Mockingburg News, the world’s most dreadful kind of paper. The Gammy Bird is different. It grapples with real stuff even though it’s full of outrageous, incendiary sexual peccadilloes, purpler news. But it’s real. That stuff is going on in Newfoundland so they write about it. Those are just two kinds of papers but I could have described 50 others.

Times: A lot of time and space is devoted in this book to the description of different types of knots. They’re a metaphor, right?

Proulx: Actually, you can sort out the knot thing in many different ways.

There’s a little epigraph in the front that says most knots have about eight crossings and just one change will result in many, many hundreds of different knots. And this is like lives. There are odd little juxtapositions of things that happen that change everything. Quoyle is the knot-less piece of rope who after all these weird events ends up happy and in a place he never thought he would be.

Times: There are so many quirky characters in this book with odd names--Jack Buggit, Nutbeem, Terk Card, Bill Pretty, Wavey Prowse. How did you come up with the names and should they tell us something about the characters?

Proulx: A name is like a magnet, you don’t want to lose it. I want names that are going to fit the place and the person I’m writing about. When I was in Newfoundland I read telephone books and came up with 50 or 60 first and last names and started putting them together. Either the name is so great it just jumps out at you or it just so fits the character. Like Jack Buggit, (founder of the Gammy Bird News). He’s a short, slightly rude man just like his name.

Times: You’re working on your third novel, “Accordion Crimes.” Do you have a fourth or fifth cooking?

Proulx: Listen, I have stories to fill all the years until I die. They’re all in my head, they’re all waiting. And everything I read and see and do can become a piece of them. Even the pattern on the rug in this room. That yellowish flower could show up anywhere.

Times: You never tell us what Quoyle’s first name is. Does that mean you won’t say what E. stands for in E. Annie Proulx?

Proulx: Edna.