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The Longmont Public Library's "Authors We Love" series returns to the Longmont Museum for a special evening with two remarkable Colorado authors. Award-winning author Pam Houston will discuss her new memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country on stage at the Longmont Museum with fellow Colorado author Karen Auvinen on Thursday, February 6, from 7 to 9 pm.
At 31 years old, fresh off a tour promoting her first collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, Pam Houston had "no job, no place to lie except my North Face tent." On an impulse and a good instinct, she spent her royalties on a 120-acre ranch near Creede, Colorado. It was more than she could afford, and required more maintenance than she could manage. Yet, 25 years later, it's the piece of land that's defined the largest part of her life. Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country tells the remarkable story of "that girl who dared herself to buy a ranch, dared herself to dig in and care for it, to work hard enough to pay for it, to figure out what other people mean when they use the world 'home."'
In addition to Deep Creek, Pam Houston is the author of two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me. 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 is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award and several teaching awards. She teaches in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is Professor of English at the University of California-Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers, which puts on between seven and ten writer gatherings per year in places as diverse as Boulder, Colorado, Tomales Bay, California and Chamonix, France.
Pam Houston lives at 9,000 feet above sea level on her 120 acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio Grande where she raises horses, donkeys, Icelandic Sheep and Irish Wolfhounds.
Author, poet, mountain woman and professor Karen Auvinen will interview Houston. Auvinen is an award-winning poet, mountain woman, life-long westerner, writer, and the author of the memoir Rough Beauty, chosen as a Top 10 Book of June 2018 by The Christian Science Monitor. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, LitHub, Real Simple, and Westword, as well as numerous literary journals. Auvinen earned an MA in poetry from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D in fiction from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee and presently teaches writing workshops at Lighthouse North and film, pop culture, and storytelling to freshman at the University of Colorado - Boulder. A former Writer-in-Residence for the State of Colorado, she is the winner of two Academy of American Poets awards and has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes in fiction.
This event is a collaboration with the Longmont Museum and will be held in the Stewart Auditorium, 400 Quail Road, Longmont. Atrium doors will open no later than 6 pm, and the auditorium doors will open at 7 pm. Seating is first-come, first-served.
In the case of a full program, unclaimed reservations will be released to standby patrons at the start of the program. Standby numbers will be issued to patrons without reservations beginning at 6pm. Standby patrons will be permitted into the auditorium beginning at 7 pm. These will be last minute seatings, and the Library cannot guarantee that all those given numbers will receive seats or that parties will be seated together.
Following the program, both authors will be selling and signing copies of their books. A cash bar will be available.
Unable to attend? This program may be livestreamed on the Longmont Observer Facebook page, and recorded and posted on our Watch Recent Programs page.
