Author Talk: Pam Houston

Pam Houston is the prize-winning author of “Cowboys Are My Weakness” and “Contents May Have Shifted,” among other books. She is professor of English at the University of California–Davis and lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

“How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us.”

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam 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: Finding Hope in the High Country” 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.”