Whitefish Review hosts reading featuring Pam Houston
Author Pam Houston will read from her latest book, “Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country” (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019) Friday, Jan. 17, at Casey’s in downtown Whitefish.
“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.”
On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, 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.
Houston is also the author of “Cowboys Are My Weakness,” Waltzing the Cat,” the novel, “Contents May Have Shifted,” “Sight Hound,” and a collection of essays, “A Little More About Me.” Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century.
Doors open at 6 p.m. with live music by Pete Redshaw. Readings by Houston and discussion with Whitefish Review founding editor Brian Schott happen from 7 to 8 p.m., with book signings afterward from 8 to 9 pm.
A $10 entry donation is suggested to help support the nonprofit journal. Both hardcover and paperback copies of “Deep Creek” will be available for purchase, as well as Whitefish Review’s “Lucky” issue No. 13, guest-edited by Houston in 2013.
Whitefish Review is a nonprofit journal publishing the literature, art and photography of mountain culture and beyond. It is supported by generous donations, grants and subscriptions. For more information, visit www.whitefishreview.org. For more information on Houston, visit www.pamhouston.net.