Friday, November 13th – 7PM
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A ferocious, incandescent memoir about motherhood, liberation, and the natural world–following one woman’s journey to reclaim her wildest self.
After a case of postpartum depression so intense it resembled zoochosis, the madness of a trapped animal, Irvine began the process of coming back to the world and unearthing a deeper connection with her child. Over the years that followed, encounters with animals–wild and domestic, predator and prey–led her forward, from a horseback showdown with a mountain lion to a more intimate run-in with the misunderstood black widow. And searching for guidance, she looked to the women who came before her: the tough, complicated ancestors whose lives, Irvine learned, are a testament to the freedom, loneliness, and mythmaking of the American West.
Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn who descends from the first Mormons to occupy the West. Her memoir Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land received the Orion Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. Her second book, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, is a feminist response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and during lockdown, Pam Houston and Irvine coauthored the epistolary Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place. Irvine’s essays have appeared in both The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Food Writing, as well as Orion, Outside, High Country News, Lit Hub, and Backpacker. She lives and writes on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado.
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What can a wagging tail and soaring wings teach us about a life well lived?
From Icelandic mares and Irish wolfhounds to elephants, leopards, hyenas, and a desert-adapted lioness named Charlie, Pam Houston has learned life’s most important lessons from animals. How to play. How to rest. How to love. How to die. How to be present with the dying. How to be present with the living and with the Earth. How to find joy in the least likely places. How to find joy, literally, everywhere. With playful sincerity, Houston finds power and promise in the teachings of our fellow creatures and reminds us that animals are here for us, every day and everywhere.
Pam Houston is the author of the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, Cowboys Are My Weakness, and seven other books of fiction and essays. Houston teaches in the Creative Writing MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing MFA program, is a Professor of English at UC Davis, cofounder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers, and fiction editor at Terrain.org. She lives at nine thousand feet above sea level with her husband Mike and a menagerie of animals (three equines, two canines, and an ever changing number of Icelandic sheep and chickens) near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
