What Glimmers: Writing Emotional Landscapes with Pam Houston

​Join us as we examine the art of prose writing: the way we dip our ladles into the bottomless pot of our lived and witnessed experience and pull out what we need; the way we pick up hunks of the physical world and bring them back to the page, translated into language.  

​In this generative workshop, we’ll focus on the sensory details that surround us—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures from our world. Together, we’ll explore how attunement to the natural world gives us access to our elusive interior landscape. We’ll see what happens when we write all the way down to the bone. When we sit in the dark and distill up from the swamps of memory. When we reach for what glimmers beneath the surface.

​FAQ

• ​I'm unable to join live. Will the event be recorded?
  Yes! The event will be recorded and shared with ticket-holders via email the following day.

• ​How can I participate during the event?
  You will be joining a Zoom Meeting for this event. We encourage you to have your camera on, but remain muted until prompted. We also recommend that you to come prepared with writing materials!

• ​I live outside the U.S. Can I still join?
  Yes! We have many international members in Sustenance. We'd love to see you there no matter where you're tuning in from.

​Pam Houston is the author of the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, as well as 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, as well as a book of essays between Pam and environmental activist Amy Irvine, called Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics and Place. 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 UC Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers, which puts on between seven and ten writers gatherings per year in places as diverse as Boulder, Colorado, Tomales Bay, California and Chamonix, France.

​Pam’s passions include Icelandic Horses (especially the ones who live in Iceland, where she goes as often as possible), Irish Wolfhounds, travel, mentoring and teaching, particularly teaching writing about the more than the human world. She lives on a homestead at 9,000 feet near the headwaters of the Rio Grande in Colorado with her husband Mike and two dogs, a quarter horse, a miniature donkey, four Icelandic ewes, four hens and a rooster. Her most recent book, Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood and Freedom, was published September 2024.