Possible, Probable and Radical Fun
The Body, Brain, and Books: Eleven Questions with writer and teacher Pam Houston
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Pam Houston is the author of the short story collection Cowboys Are My Weakness and the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, as well as six other books of fiction and nonfiction. She teaches creative writing at UC Davis and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is the cofounder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers and fiction editor at the environmental arts journal Terrain.org. She lives on a homestead at 9,000 feet near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Her forthcoming book, Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood and Freedom, will be published by Torrey House Press in September just in time for the 2024 election.
What are you reading now?
Martyr, by Kaveh Akbar, as well as drafts of about nine different MFA theses from the two programs where I teach grad students: UC Davis and the Institute of American Indian Arts.
What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?
My most beloved books as a kid were Dr. Seuss’ On Beyond Zebra and everything Mrs. Pigglewiggle. As I got older it was horses, Misty and Stormy and Black Beauty. Also, The Secret Garden. I read D.H. Lawrence in High School. Between him and Jackson Browne, who I listened to non-stop as a preteen and teenager, I developed quite a tortured idea about love! My parents, each in their own way, were pretty feral. The only book in my childhood home, before I started collecting books, was Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls which I read in third grade, and then again in sixth at which time I understood it better. My parents didn’t really understand my love of reading, but thought it was generally good and would never have had tried to police it in any way.
What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?
Here there are too many to choose one, but I just last week reread Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony for maybe the tenth or eleventh time, because I was teaching it to a new group of grad students. This time what I was most struck by were the last 70 pages, when Tayo is healed by the ceremonies, both the ones Old Betonie prescribed and the ones of his own making. What happens at the end of Ceremony is that Tayo learns to exist in a time/space reality that is much more fluid than the one the modern world agrees upon. This reality is not just better, in my opinion, than this more agreed upon version, I actually think it is more real. I think Silko gets at something truly essential here about what our lives could be. Ceremony reminds me how limited we are by our fears and our logic and capitalism and even science. Western medicine. I want to live in this other place, where all of these hard lines between the living and the dead, the now and the past and the future, the possible and the impossible, the real and the unreal, get a little softer.
What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?
My half chaps, that I ride in over my Ariats and riding tights. Sometimes I don’t take them off for the whole day after a ride.
What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?
A good friend of mine named Vibeke, a horse trainer who is Norwegian, but lives and trains in Iceland, told me that the Icelanders don’t ever say a horse is lazy. What they say is, “that is a horse who knows how to look after herself.” I have been thinking about that pretty much every day since I heard it, as I am trying to scale back, slowly slowly on my wicked workaholic ways.
Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?
Like books that have taught me how to live in the world, there are so many special animals in my life, to choose one is utterly impossible. I am who I am because of the animals in my life, the dogs and horses especially, but also the bears and the whales and the elk and the elephants. Over the course of the last five years I have developed a serious addiction to Icelandic horses. I like riding them best in Iceland, because they so embody the spirit of that place, but I am happy to ride them anywhere they live. There is one mare, who lives in southern Iceland named Salka. After a long and terrible bout with long Covid, she made me understand I could still fly. Even at 61, even on icy surfaces (it was January). She taught me about trading in control for cooperation. She made me believe I could fully live again.
What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?
I keep circling back to this question, and now it is the only one left. I guess the word that is throwing me off is “expected.” I try really hard not to expect anything. I am sure I fail at that sometimes but I try. One thing that has gone much better than I feared (if not expected) is my current (and with any luck, final) marriage. Marriage is a thing I have really been bad at all my life, both the choosing and the participation in. I am five years into my first good marriage, and it is honestly getting even better as it goes along. That feels like a miracle to me. At the beginning it went really well because I am an only child and Mike knew to give me my alone time, my freedom. And that is still true. But now it goes well for lots of reasons, including how we treat each other when we do have extended time together. We took the time to figure each other out, I think, to learn to give each other breaks. I really admire Mike’s calmness, his way of rolling. I married him because of the way he resembled a tree. A tall straight sturdy redwood. And he has turned out to be that. So in that way, I guess, not my expectation but my most fervent hope came true.
Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?
Neither of those, particularly, though Mike and I sometimes dance in the living room when the weather is too blizzardy at the ranch to get outside and do much of anything other than feed the animals. But I think a better answer to the spirit of your question is that even at this age (62), my body still likes to go fast. I realized that the other day. I still love to gallop horses, still love to ski straight down the mountain making as few turns as possible, still love to mush a team of dogs downhill, leaning into all the corners. I fell off a horse (the aforementioned Salka) at a full gallop last year, when I was 61, and unfortunately she had spooked over from the nice gravel path onto the hard surface of the road, so it was that that my head and shoulder hit first. I was wearing my helmet, but it was still the loudest sound I have ever heard. I spent a few weeks asking myself if I really wanted to continue to go that fast on horseback in general and on Salka in particular, and I am afraid the answer was yes.
What are your hopes for yourself?
I hope to be able to ride horses until I am 75. Or 80. I hope when I do face my own death I do it with some form of grace. I hope if this country turns itself over to fascism in this upcoming election, I have the wherewithal and the courage to get the hell out. I hope my writing, and in particular my forthcoming book about bodily autonomy will make some small difference in preventing that from happening.
What’s a kindness that changed your life?
Again, too many to name. But here is one. Eleven years ago, Mona Susan Power was supposed to read at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and at the last minute she was not able to come. The director of that program at the time called me to fill in for her, because even though I was not Native, I was a four-hour drive away and I knew how to handle winter roads. This too was in January, which is my birth month and a month where important things tend to happen to me. I spent 24 hours at IAIA, and by the time I left I all but had begged to be considered as a mentor in their MFA program. The director took a chance on me, again, in spite of my whiteness. My decade of mentoring students there has been, for me, the education of a lifetime. I understand my country so much better than I ever have, in ways that mostly break my heart (not that I was completely naive before.) More importantly, I have been invited to participate in value systems that make so much more sense to me than late stage capitalism. I have learned to negotiate and accept the ways I am trusted and the ways I can’t ever be. And I have gotten to bear witness to the rise of so many amazing Native voices including Tommy Orange and Amanda Peters and Stacie Denetsosie and Jake Skeets, to name only a few. I saw Mona a few months ago, and when I thanked her for not coming all those years ago, for making a path for me, she said, “Well, you know sometimes exactly the right thing happens at exactly the right time,” which was another kindness, as well as proof of everything IAIA has shown me about how to live a life.
What’s a guiding force in your life?
I went to a small liberal arts college in Ohio. My professors wore ceramic peace signs around their necks and gathered together to read Whitman and Morrison and Baldwin and Rich out loud and sometimes to howl at the moon. They were, to a person, awesome human beings. What they said, collectively, was that I could be anything I wanted to be, as long as I worked hard and kept the greater good in mind in every decision. Those words have served me well.
There is a more recent guiding force of my own invention that I am also finding useful. After I didn’t die from long Covid, (and there were months in there when I was sure I would) I made a rule in my life: I would buy a big Sierra Club Wall calendar each year, the kind I used to love when I was younger, and I would look ahead at the weeks and months to come. I would have three colored markers: green, blue and yellow, and I would circle the dates. Yellow, if I thought on that day there was a possibility of fun, green if there was a probability of fun, and blue was reserved for days I knew I was going to have radical fun. These did not have to be days off. I can and do have fun at my various jobs, but there had to be something happening on that particular day that portended fun. And when I say fun, I mean separate from reward or satisfaction, or other ways we feel good about a job well done. I mean FUN.
Possible fun, for instance, might be if I was co-teaching with a good friend, or teaching writers on a multi-day river trip, or working with a particular set of grad students who make me laugh and light up my mind. Probable fun could be teaching in Chamonix, France, say, or teaching at the guest ranch where we ride for five hours every morning, and have writing class in the afternoon. Radical fun is reserved for, you guessed it, riding horses in Iceland, or going on Safari in Namibia, or hiking my favorite trails in Pt. Reyes National Seashore, or a weekend with friends in a cabin somewhere, cooking together and telling stories.
Possible, probable and radical. So, as I look ahead a month or two, if I see that these three types of anticipated fun do not add up to ten days total, I have to change my schedule, have to let a little more fun in. Also, there are no roll over fun days. Even if I have 24 days of one kind of fun or another in February, March is its own month. I have achieved this for the last two years, and I am happy to report that it is getting easier as I go. So much easier in fact, that for 2025, I am thinking about upping the number to 15.
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I love this calendar idea! Even the idea of having a physical calendar to hang on the wall so you can see a whole month of fun stuff at once feels WILD to me and my digital-centered world. Thanks for this great interview!
So glad to see Pam’s interview! “Icelanders don’t ever say a horse is lazy. What they say is, “that is a horse who knows how to look after herself.”” Amen to looking after ourselves. I appreciated Pam’s answer about how her life changed through mentoring but mostly learning at the IAIA. Adding Ceremony and Pam’s forthcoming book to my reading list. Thanks Jane!