If a certain kind of New West woman did not exist in Pam Houston’s fiction – wrangling white-water rapids and recalcitrant cowboys with aplomb, if not equal success – the author would have to invent her.
That this former Jersey girl draws such characters from her own life speaks to how Houston has created some of the most winning stories in recent American letters.
Houston is this year’s Evil Companions Literary Award honoree. The author of “Cowboys Are My Weakness,” “Waltzing the Cat” and “Sight Hound” will be feted Thursday at LoDo’s Oxford Hotel, starting with a 6 p.m. reception. The award honors authors who hail from or write about the West. Recipients have included Annie Proulx, Richard Ford, Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane.
Heady company, but she will keep things in perspective.
“Twenty years ago I would have thought that if I’d had this kind of run, that’s all I would need to be happy, that it would be the pinnacle of experience,” Houston says.
“But the thrill you get from having your work recognized is very brief.
Then you have to do more work.”
At 44, Houston is more than 15 years into a career that has seen her become something of the poster child for a certain kind of take-charge New West woman. Like their author, her characters tend to be a mix of high physical competence – running rivers, wrangling horses, reading terrain – and emotional vulnerability.
Houston splits time between her ranch outside Creede and the University of California at Davis, where she directs the creative writing program. (Hint to the University of Colorado: She loves Denver and would like to live here.)
“I was meant to be born here in the West,” Houston says. “That I wasn’t was just a mistake of geography.”
She grew up in New Jersey, the lone child of parents who married late. Houston went to Ohio’s Denison University, where she was an English major, then came to Colorado as a ski bum and outdoor guide.
Houston enjoyed success in her 20s when her stories were published in outlets such as Mademoiselle and The Gettysburg Review, but it was 1992’s “Cowboys Are My Weakness” that put her on the map.
Or at least the one west of the 100th meridian.
“Yeah, my sales kind of end at the Kansas state line,” she says with a grin. “I do great in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific region, and absurd in Alaska, but not so much back East.”
Still, she has fans overseas.
“I love the idea that my work is translated into other languages – just the German title ‘By Cowboys I’m Made Weak’ makes me smile,” she says.
Houston is working on a book whose genesis began with a Wisconsin writing festival. As an attendee, she had to create a story. “I wrote furiously on the plane and all the next day at the hotel,” she says.
Then she bogged down.
“I tell my students when they get stuck, ‘Just think about something that glimmered at you that day,”‘ Houston says. “In my panic I cast around and tried to grasp these glimmers.”
She came up with 12 things that struck her, and crafted a hook by linking the places where they occurred: Juneau, Alaska; Tampa, Fla.; and Creede among them.
“My belief is that if you bring these different things together, they will cohere,” she says.
The story’s title: “Twelve Reasons Not to Kill Yourself.”
Houston realized the piece needed tinkering, but the Wisconsin audience was bowled over – “Write more!” being the general consensus.
Off she went. “Being in love with twelves, I decided to write 144 of these,” she says. “I have about 40 now.”
The teacher found the process instructive.
“In a way it’s me getting down to my essential style,” Houston says. “It’s these glimmering things that bang up against myself in my head.”
The result, she says, will be a narrative of “simultaneity,” where fantasy and reality butt against each other.
Houston stays busy. Plowing through tax forms, she calculated that she only spent 45 nights in her own bed this year.
She pauses when she says that, grins. “Not to be salacious,” Houston says. “I mean, as in ‘not in a hotel.”‘
Which brings us to her love life, which has enjoyed – or been subjected to, depending – a starring role in her stories.
Men have entered her orbit, set up emotional shop, entwined their lives with hers. At some point they leave. Lack of romantic permanence is a complaint not unique to writers, but still, Houston wonders.
Part of being a writer is going where the work takes you, psychically and physically. “That hasn’t left space, apparently, for a relationship that lasts,” she says. “Every time I’ve had a book come out, a relationship has blown up.
“I’m not saying it’s a tragedy, but that’s the way it worked out. But I still have hope. I’m not dead yet.”
Hollywood too has come courting. Houston says she is less interested in seeing one of her books become movie fodder than she is in hooking up with an indie director and creating a movie out of whole cloth.
Like countless other authors, Houston has found the literary life offers the same concerns and frustrations of any day job.
“I saw writing and getting published like a fairy tale,” she says. “Now I see it much more like an industry than a dream. And maybe that’s growing up.”
But Houston has found deep reward in teaching.
“If someone put a gun to my head and said choose teaching or writing, I’d choose teaching,” she says. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t feel regret, but teaching has real value. I think my life would be much less full without it.”
Tickets for the Evil Companions Award program are $65 for basic tickets and $150 for patron tickets. Contact Marthina Maduka at 720-865-2051 or mmaduka@denver.lib.co.us.
Staff writer William Porter can be reached at 303-820-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com.
