Craft Advice with Pam Houston
Craft Advice with Pam Houston
On the patterns of form, not knowing the aboutness of your story, bringing unlike objects together, self-implication, the Compassion Read, eliminating unnecessary words, and "glimmers"
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Pam Houston’s writing takes my breath away. It’s grounded in reason and the tactile physicality of life, she’s a vast and deep thinker, but it’s from the heart. An aching, tender, tired, wild, hopeful, curious, nurturing heart. A heart that wants good to prevail. A heart that will not quit.
Lucky for us, that heart beats inside a master writer. Her prose is lean, precise, elegant yet muscular with vivid, staggeringly beautiful-till-it-hurts visions of the world. She does not look away. I get lost in Pam’s conjurings and never want to leave, even though they are not always easy places to be.
Most recently, Pam’s written Without Exception, a call for freedom by way of abortion rights. She’s also written Deep Creek (one of my all-time favorite books), Waltzing The Cat, A Little More About Me, Sight Hound, Contents May Have Shifted, and Air Mail — all of which are master classes in writing. Her stories have been selected for volumes of The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Short Stories of the Century among other anthologies. She teaches in the Low Rez MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is a professor of English at UC Davis. She’s also co-founded the non-profit Writing by Writers.
If you missed part one of our interview, you can read it here.
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Where do you write?
I write wherever I am. I'm a moving target. I write well on airplanes. I write really well in hotel rooms. I write here at this desk, where I'm talking to you from. I just write wherever I can grab time. I'm not precious about where I write at all.
Are you distracted by your surroundings when you're writing?