Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country - Hardcover

Houston, Pam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393241025 ISBN 13: 9780393241020

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019

Synopsis

"How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us."

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.

In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how "to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief...to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive."

12 black and white illustrations

About this title

About the Author

Pam Houston is the prize-winning author of Contents May Have Shifted, among other books. She is professor of English at the University of California–Davis and lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

Review

“There is so much beauty, wisdom, and truth in this book, I felt the pages almost humming in my hands. I was riveted and enlightened, inspired and consoled. This is a book for all of us, right now.”
- Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild

“This book is endlessly wise, funny, and full of heart. To say that its clear-eyed, doom-laden―yet loving―message is important and timely would be an understatement. It is unapologetically sincere, utterly moving.”
- Tommy Orange, author of There There

“Deep Creek is a love letter to earth, animals, and the best of humanity. Pam Houston has taken our heartache and woven it back into hope. Her stories of love, loss, and a life lived in relationship to land give us good reasons not to give up on ourselves or each other. This is the book we need right now to remind us how to endure―passionately. An unstoppable heart song.”
- Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Misfit’s Manifesto

“Pam Houston is the rodeo queen of American letters. In Deep Creek, her voice has never been more fully realized, and her message never more important.”
- Samantha Dunn, author of Not by Accident

“Full of wisdom, wit, and loving attention, Pam Houston’s survey of her life and land should be required reading for anyone who loves this planet we call home.”
- Camille T. Dungy, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers

“In the face of the world’s turmoil, this book is utter clarity. In the face of the world’s harshness, this book is a soft place to land...If you find yourself careening toward despair, pick up Deep Creek and read even just one page. The words there will lift you back to hope―not the sentimental kind, but the kind that can and does change the world for the better. What gratitude we owe to Pam Houston for writing it.”
- B. K. Loren, author of Animal, Mineral, Radical

“Houston has a great range of vision, and she’s fun to read. She gets the land right...In this perfectly American memoir, a restless heart finds its place.”
- Craig Childs, author of Atlas of a Lost World

“A profound and inspiring love letter to one piece of Earth―and to the rest of it, as well.”
- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Houston's vision find a solid place among the chronicles of quiet appreciation of the American wilderness, without the misanthropy that often accompanies the genre; her passion for the land and its inhabitants is irresistibly contagious.”
- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Always impressive, Houston is in striking form here. Her talent remains remarkable and her words extraordinarily affecting and effective.”
- Booklist (starred review)

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0393241025
• ISBN 13: 9780393241020
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288