18 posts tagged Pam Houston
These days Rick wonders (aloud) if I will ever grow up enough to realize that everything I’m searching for on the other side of the world I could find just as well at my own kitchen table.
“Maybe someday,” I say cheerfully, “except that I can’t”
-Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted
“Musicians, I have always felt, have better access to their emotions than writers, because they have the ability to express them two ways at once. Writers taught me how to think, by and large, but musicians taught me how to feel.”
“What reading poetry has taught me, I think, is that when meaning gets made associatively, rather than logically or chronologically, we feel it in a different part of our bodies, and, I would argue, we feel it more strongly, like a punch. One of the things Contents is about is memory, the way a killer whale might make you think of a strand of white-heart trade beads, which might make you think of a drink your father used to order called a Negroni. Also, when you are raised by alcoholics, there is almost no such thing as chronology, no such thing as one thing logically following another; and everything that is told is always told slant.”
Pam Houston, currently on tour for Contents May Have Shifted: “Nothing cures the book tour blues like a couple of two week old goats.”
“
‘Do you write novels?’ I said.
‘Novels, Lord no,’ she said. ‘I can’t even stay married.’
”Pam Houston, Waltzing the Cat
Run, don’t walk, to get a copy of Pam’s latest, Contents May Have Shifted
“Every time my parents got ten dollars ahead we went someplace, and they gave their passion for travel to me. Of the two options, staying home makes me far more nervous. I find travel incredibly calming, incredibly freeing, even when I am going to a country where there is deep political unrest and/or serious amoebic dysentery. I am happiest when I have one plane ticket in my hand and another in my underwear drawer.”
That and Esther Robinson, who taught me to read and who gave me a Dr. Seuss book called On Beyond Zebra, about the twenty-six letters that came after Z and all of the creatures you could make from them. Esther gave me a penny for every road sign that I read and a nickel for every billboard, and a dime every time I jumped in the city pool, and a quarter for a dive and a fifty-cent piece for the high dive and like that, until I could swim like a fish. On Beyond Zebra gave me the first inkling that language was infinite, though I’m sure I had yet to learn the word. The Adventures of Mrs. Pigglewiggle made me believe in magic, and The Secret Garden made me understand that it might be a good thing to be lonely sometimes.
-Pam Houston, Sight Hound
“It is hard not to wonder whether we use the small sadnesses in life to avoid or to access the large sadnesses.”
“Writing is gratitude. It is like writing a thank you note to the world.”
In many of your stories, your characters come close to dying. Why do your characters get in such near proximity to death?
I think it’s playing out issues from my father, an abusive alcoholic — it’s very Psych 101, but I put myself in extreme situations where I can have control; get control back. And I write very autobiographically. In my real life, I’m always making things hard on myself. I always want to go to hard places. Like how my boyfriend and I were in Italy, and he wanted to go to Venice and I wanted to go to Naples. Or like I how I went to Cambodia last year, and it was the most dangerous place I’ve ever been to — I have been to more than sixty countries, but Cambodia is the only one where I wouldn’t go back. It’s got a real malevolent energy. But yeah, I like to be in control of my own life, my own money, my own car, because my mom never was. I used to love to tempt death in the outdoors all the time: the rivers at high water; the back country when an avalanche was only a matter of time. I haven’t put myself in those kinds of situations in a long time. But I still do things to try to get that same adrenaline rush, like reading brand new material at a reading. That’s a big adrenaline rush.
