Herbert H. and Sofia P. Reuner Library Writers Series
The SUNY Ulster Herbert H. & Sofia P. Reuner Library Writers Series is a special program begun in 1998, sponsored by The Ulster Community College Foundation, that brings renowned writers to campus every fall. This is a truly unique opportunity for SUNY Ulster students and community members to hear award winning authors read from their work.
Pam Houston
Thursday, November 4, 2021
1:15 pm
Moderated by Kim Wozencraft, Adjunct Professor at SUNY Ulster and SUNY New Paltz
Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories Cowboys Are My Weakness (1994), which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages, and Waltzing the Cat (1999, reissued 2013), which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction; two novels, Contents May Have Shifted (2012); and Sight Hound (2006), all published by W.W. Norton & Co.; and three collections of autobiographical essays, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country (2019), from which Cheryl Strayed chose an essay for inclusion in the forthcoming Best American Travel Writing and another essay will be included in the forthcoming Pushcart Prize anthology, A Rough Guide to the Heart (Virago, 2001), and A Little More About Me (Norton, 1999, reissued 2013). Houston has also edited a collection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry entitled Women on Hunting: Essays, Fiction, and Poetry (Ecco Press). She is the author of a stage play called “Tracking the Pleiades”; and she has written the text for Men Before Ten A.M., a book of photographs by the French photographer Veronique Vialle.
About Deep Creek: Finding Hope in High Country, Lidia Yuknavitch reflects: “Deep Creek is a love letter to earth, animals, and the best of humanity. Pam Houston has taken our heartache and woven it back into hope. Her stories of love, loss, and a life lived in relationship to land give us good reasons not to give up on ourselves or each other. This is the book we need right now to remind us how to endure—passionately. An unstoppable heart song.”
Richard Ford selected “How to Talk to a Hunter” for the 1990 Best American Short Stories; a decade later, Houston’s “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had” was John Updike’s only addition to the 1999 Best American Short Stories of the Century. Her stories have also been selected for The O. Henry Awards and The Pushcart Prize. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, and The Evil Companions Literary Award. She is a regular contributor to O, the Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, and many other periodicals. Her essays and stories have been widely anthologized, and in 2012 she contributed the prologue to Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (University of Iowa Press).
Houston is a Professor of English at UC Davis, directs the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers and teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program and at writer’s conferences around the country and the world. She divides her time between Davis and southwestern Colorado at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
Image © Adam Karsten
Watch the Recording
Books from Pam Houston
Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country by ISBN: 9780393241020Publication Date: 2019On 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. Houston's ranch becomes her sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of parental abuse and neglect. In a work 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."
Contents May Have Shifted by ISBN: 9780393082654Publication Date: 2012Heart-stopping prose and crackling observations on a spiritual journey toward a life rich in love and freedom. Stuck in a dead-end relationship, this fearless narrator leaves her metaphorical baggage behind and finds a comfort zone in the air, "feeling safest with one plane ticket in her hand and another in her underwear drawer." She flies around the world, finding reasons to love life in dozens of far-flung places from Alaska to Bhutan. Along the way she weathers unplanned losses of altitude, air pressure, and landing gear. With the help of a squad of loyal, funny, wise friends and massage therapists, she learns to sort truth from self-deception, self-involvement from self-possession. At last, having found a new partner "who loves Don DeLillo and the NHL" and a daughter "who needs you to teach her to dive and to laugh at herself"--not to mention two dogs and two horses--"staying home becomes more of an option. Maybe."
Sight Hound by ISBN: 9780393327397Publication Date: 2006This is the story of a woman, Rae, and her dog, Dante, a wolfhound who teaches "his human" that love is stronger than fear (the dog has always known this). Dante is the catalyst for change in other characters as well, and they step forward with their narratives: Rae's house-tender; her therapist; two veterinarians; and an anxiety-ridden actor, Howard, who turns out to be as stalwart as Dante himself. As the "seer" who hunts by sight rather than smell, Dante has some things to add, as does Rose, another dog who lives at Rae's heels, and Stanley the cat. Among and above these myriad voices, Rae voices her own challenges. With the wit and dead-on candor we've come to expect from Pam Houston, Sight Hound unfolds a story that illuminates the intangible covenant between loved ones. Here, dogs and humans are simply equal creatures, looking to connect and holding on for dear life when they do. Reading group guide included.
Cowboys Are My Weakness by ISBN: 9780393356878Publication Date: 2019"Brilliant.... [Houston] takes women into grand spaces, both emotional and physical, and isolates them until there's nothing left to do but sit down and take a hard look at one's soul." --Los Angeles Times In Pam Houston's best-selling story collection, we meet smart women who are looking for the love of a good man, and men who are wild and hard to pin down. Our heroines are part daredevil, part philosopher, all acute observers of the nuances of modern romance. Cowboys Are My Weakness is a shrewd and intoxicating look at men and women--together and apart.
