Pam Houston

Library Author Series: Pam Houston

Thursday, July 11, 2019 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm
  • Library Hall
Spend an evening with the author of a new essay collection, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, and the award-winning book Cowboys Are My Weakness.
Deep Creek by Pam Houston

At 31 years old, fresh off a tour promoting her first collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, Pam Houston had had no job and only a tent to live in. On an impulse and a good instinct, she spent her royalties on a 120-acre ranch near Creede, Colo. It was more than she could afford, and required more maintenance than she could manage. And yet, 25 years later, it’s the piece of land that’s defined the largest part of her life. Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country tells the remarkable story of “that girl who dared herself to buy a ranch, dared herself to dig in and care for it, to work hard enough to pay for it, to figure out what other people meant when they used the world ‘home.”’ Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect. In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how "to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief…to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive."

About the Author

Pam Houston is the prize-winning author of the novels Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, the short story collections Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat and A Little More About Me, a collection of essays. Her stories have been selected for volumes such as The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The 2013 Pushcart Prize, and The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Literary Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award, and multiple teaching awards. She co-founded the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers, is a professor of English at UC–Davis, and teaches in the Institute of American Indian Arts’ low-residency MFA program and at writer’s conferences around the country and the world.

This community talk is free.

“There is so much beauty, wisdom, and truth in this book, I felt the pages almost humming in my hands. I was riveted and enlightened, inspired and consoled. This is a book for all of us, right now.”
WILD Author Cheryl Strayed

About the Library Author Series

Bud Werner Memorial Library presents an ongoing program of author talks throughout the year. These are free community events held in Library Hall, where a diverse award-winning range of visiting authors speak about their literary works and their writing processes. Each talk is followed by a Q&A and an opportunity to have authors sign copies of their books.

Books will be available for sale and author signing courtesy of Off the Beaten Path Bookstore.