The staff of High Country News, that excellent magazine of the American west, are marking their 45th year by republishing some of their favourite articles. I liked best a piece from 2009 by Emma Brown on Annie Proulx’s association with the Red Desert in Wyoming. Proulx says: “Landscape is the driving force for everything that I write… Place comes first — what is this place, what makes it this way, what is the geology, what is the prevailing climate, what’s the weather like, how do people make a living, what grows here, what animals are here. All of this stuff I do first, and then the stories just are there because the place dictates what happens.”