Pam Houston Finds Hope in the High Country

Book cover and Pam Houston mugshot

“In ‘Deep Creek,’ her voice has never been more fully realized, and her message never more important.” — Samantha Dunn, author of “Not by Accident”


Sorry we missed this book last year, but, as we add it now, we’re happy to report it came out in paperback last month. Houston teaches in the English department’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing.

“Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all,” says the publisher’s description, referring to Houston’s 120-acre homestead in the Colorado Rockies. 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.’”

Wrote Sara Cutaia in the Chicago Review of Books: “Pam Houston is in possession of a deep, heart-achingly beautiful love for her own personal piece of earth. And as equally deep is her ability for hope.”

Houston’s other books include the novels Contents May Have Shifted (2012) and Sight Hound (2005), essays in A Little More About Me (1999), and two collections of linked short stories: Cowboys Are My Weakness (1992), winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and translated into nine languages; and Waltzing the Cat (1998), winner of the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction.

She teaches in the Master of Fine Arts

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