Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 is a 2008 collection of short stories by Annie Proulx.

This is Proulx’s third volume of Wyoming stories, following her 1999 Close Range: Wyoming Stories and her 2004 Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2.McCloskey, 2008: “...Proulx's third collection of Wyoming stories…”Reynolds, 2008: ““Fine Just the Way It Is,” is the third in an astringent triptych of Wyoming story collections, joining “Close Range” (which includes “Brokeback Mountain”) and “Bad Dirt.”

Stories “Family Man” “I’ve Always Loved This Place” “Them Old Cowboy Songs” “The Sage Brush Kid” “The Great Divide” “Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl” “Swamp Mischief" “Testimony of the Donkey” “Tits-Up in a Ditch”

Selected story sketches

Family Man The story is set in a Wyoming "Old Folks' Home" for old cowboys, ranchers and their womenfolk. Old cow-poke Ray Forkenbrock has skeletons in his closet he must talk about before he dies. The past is inescapable. Mid-way through relating his early life to his granddaughter, Forkenbrock realizes that one of his fellow residents is the woman he first had sex with 71 years before; a day later that same woman falls to her death in the Grand Canyon. Forkenbrock had discovered, at his father's funeral, that he was not his father's only son called Ray. He was in fact one of four: his father had four families, the children all named the same to avoid mistakes.

I've Always Loved This Place Satan's personal assistant, one Duane Fork, busies himself spreading dust and sulfurous smells for his boss's return from a Milan design fair. The Devil is piqued by an article in The Onion reporting that a Tenth Circle of Hell had been added to accommodate Total Bastards.

Them Old Cowboy Songs Rose and Archie are a young married couple—Archie is only 16—setting out to make a life for themselves. At first, things are idyllic: they are very much in love. But then Archie gets laid off from the ranch where he has been working and heads to Cheyenne to find a job, leaving Rose behind in their cabin with a baby on the way. He has to hide that he is married because the tyrant he works for would fire him if he knew, since married men tend to want time off to go visit their wives. He tries to write a letter to Rose but does not have the money for a stamp. Meanwhile, Rose is alone and miserable. There are complications with her pregnancy, and no way for her to get help. She finally buries the baby. Archie, after a fall in a bog, comes down with pneumonia and cannot work, so his boss fires him. Another hand tries to help Archie get home but they get caught in a blizzard and freeze to death. In the spring, a friend of Archie and Rose comes by and finds her mutilated body.

The Sagebrush Kid A childless Wyoming couple transfer their affections first to a piglet, then to a chicken, and finally to a sagebrush they fancy to have the appearance of a child. They tend to and protect, the sagebrush, even feeding it bones and stray scraps of meat from their dinner-table. After the couples' passing, the shrub, now grown to the height of a fair-sized tree, is used to human attention, and meat. It consumes livestock, then soldiers, then a local medico, railroad men, surveyors, and a botanist come to investigate its unusual height and luxuriance.

Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl

Swamp Mischief

Testimony of the Donkey

Tits-Up in a ditch

Critical reception Delia Falconer described the stories as a "patchy collection, much less satisfying than Close Range". The stories set in Hell have also been criticized as—while being witty and well-written—ill-fitted to a book of Wyoming stories.

Novelist and critic Joyce Carol Oates provides this assessment of the collection:

Irish Times literary critic Molly McCloskey considers the collection an uneven effort, ranking “Them Old Cowboy Songs” and “The Great Divide” as “extremely fine stories” while identifying “two that should never have been included,” namely, those set in Hell: “Their inclusion in the collection does neither the writer nor the reader justice.”McCloskey, 2008: The two stories are “Swamp Mischief” and “I’ve Always Loved This Place.”

Footnotes

Sources McCloskey, Molly. 2008. "Life and Death in Wyoming" Irish Times, September 20, 2008.https://www.irishtimes.com/news/life-and-death-in-wyoming-1.939989 Accessed 20 August 2025. Oates, Joyce Carol. 2008. "In Rough Country." The New York Review, October 23, 2008.https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/10/23/in-rough-country/ Accessed 20 August 2025. Reynolds, Susan Salter. 2008. “Writers no longer at home on range.” Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2008.https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-oct-18-et-proulx18-story.html Accessed 23 August 2025.

External links Amazon.com user reviews of "Fine Just the Way It Is" at Amazon.com barnesandnoble user reviews of "Fine Just the Way It Is" at Barnes & Noble Tenth Circle Added To Rapidly Growing Hell at theonion.com