Local Author Spotlight // Pam Houston
The One Book One Community selection this year is 'Deep Creek; Finding Hope in the High Country' which recently won the 'Reading the West Advocacy Award. Author Pam Houston, once a resident of Park City, will be returning in September to talk about her latest book.
Houston's previous works of fiction are all autobiographical but Deep Creek; Finding Hope in the High Country is her first memoir. It's an obvious love letter to the natural world in general, her ranch specifically and to the life she's lived which brought her to that special place.
A trained fiction writer, Houston doesn't think she would have written a memoir had her publisher not pushed but now she's glad she did. “I get asked to teach memoir classes a lot, and now that I have written my own (as opposed to just a lot of personal essays) I have a lot more respect for the genre and will be a better teacher because of it.”
The life Houston designed for herself has three remarkably different components. She teaches at at the university level, owns a remote 120 acre ranch property in Colorado and travels extensively. Rarely can a person combine all three but Houston has and each provides cherished experiences.
She has 3 all-year teaching gigs: UC Davis, The Institute of American Indian Arts, and her nonprofit Writing By Writers which puts on 8-10 events per year. “They are each wonderful in their own way, but I guess I have to say what I cherish most is the education in the history of my country and in my own whiteness that I have gotten at IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts). I cherish all of the students I have worked with at all the places, the ones who have gone on to publish books like Tommy Orange and Becky Mandelbaum and Ginger Gaffney (to name only a few) and also the ones for whom writing was a thing they did for a while and stopped.”
Like most of us, Houston has been home the last couple of months and has no plans to leave any time soon. “The best thing about being at the ranch are the animals. I had a horse who needed to be re-homed delivered yesterday, a giant (16.3) quarter horse named Ben, a dark bay who looks like somebody threw a bucket of white paint at his shoulder. We’ve had two Icelandic lambs this spring, Becky, who is doing great at 6 weeks, and another little ram who was born just yesterday and is a preemie but I think he’s gonna make it. It’s wonderful (and so unusual) that I get to be with them every day.”
Extensive travel came to an abrupt end for all of us this spring and when I asked Pam about a travel highlight she reflected, “Wow, that is a melancholy question here at this moment where we don’t know if or when we will ever be able to travel in the same way again. I guess if I have to pick one stand out (though there are so many) it is my trip, nearly 25 years ago to the Kingdom of Bhutan. It was my first time to the Himalaya and my first time to a Buddhist country. It opened my eyes and my life, in similar ways that teaching at IAIA has.”
In regards to whether her book is a call to action, she'd rather not give marching orders but hopes people take whatever they want or need from all of her books. Houston feels it is her turn to 'get loud' about concerns regarding our environment and political policies.
“I believe with every fiber of my being that the only hope we have to save this country and the Earth is if women (and a few good men who can stand behind them and support them) take charge pretty immediately. We are seeing in real time the disaster that male insecurity and rampant capitalistic greed has created. Over 100,000 dead today and counting. My hope is that Covid teaches us we need, first, to be able to breathe. And then we need clean water. And then we need bees to pollinate our fruits and vegetables, and we need fruits and vegetables that don’t have toxic chemicals sprayed all over them. And then we need not to be raped. And we need our daughters not to be raped. Or shot. We need to stop being afraid of being shot all the time. We need to continue to be able to speak freely. I don’t know if Deep Creek expresses any of that, because in the now almost three years since I finished writing it, things have become much more grim in America. But I hope it does. And I promise that my next book will.”
The One Book One Community program is a partnership with Park City and Summit County libraries, along with Dolly’s Bookstore and Utah Humanities.
Everyone in Park City is encouraged to read Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country and then join an online conversation with the author on Thursday, September 10, at 7:00 pm on Park City Library's Facebook's page or through Zoom.
Facebook Live at www.facebook.com/ParkCityLibrary or through Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89197945320