On the tidal flats, July 2019

The reason I went to Provincetown for the first time, in the summer of 2006, was to take a class from Pam Houston. I owe her for the rest of my life for that alone. Over that winter she read the novel I was working on, my first novel. In 2007, I went back to take her class again. That summer, she introduced me to the breakwater, which I had somehow missed during my first summer. As we walked on the giant boulders, I began shedding things. Later that same year, I joined the writing group she led, and over the years, we’ve become the best of friends.

Here’s how she fictionalized that real time on the breakwater in Contents May Have Shifted.

Last year, on that same long walk across the breakwater, Willow left behind first her sweatshirt, then her shoes and eventually even her giant purse, which contained six hundred dollars cash and her brand-new Vaio computer, which is the exact effect P-town is designed to have on anybody who is willing to let it.

But really, the story starts years before that, back when I was a reader without the first thought of writing.

The kids were little, and in those days, after they went to sleep, I stayed upstairs and read in bed.  Early in January of 1992, late one night, when Cal arrived home from a business trip, he came into the bedroom holding a scrap of paper. “You have to get this book,” he said, handing me the paper. “I heard her on NPR.”

On the paper, of course, Cowboys Are My Weakness, Pam Houston.

I adore Pam’s sentences. Look at these two from Contents May Have Shifted:

Henry is the only man I’ve ever known in my life that I knew how to love well, and as luck would have it, we were never lovers (6).

See how she repeats love in the noun form of lovers. And notice the rhythm of the sentence. Now, take a look at this one.

We were each locked inside our individual sorrows, didn’t know each other well enough to share, but we agreed, out loud, that like moose, pelicans were surely put on earth to act as suicide preventers, agreed we’d never kill ourselves within the sight of one (8).

Notice the multiple could-have-been-single sentences contained in one sentence and how the compression creates such a lovely rhythm.

Some of you know that Tidal Flats is actually the fourth novel I’ve written–all of them about marriage. Here’s what Pam has to say about that, from her essay collection, A Little More About Me.

There is only one story of our lives and we tell it over and over again, in a thousand different disguises, whether we know it or not.

Currently, Pam is on tour for her memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, which was published in January.

Here are some of the lines from Deep Creek that I love most.

It’s hard for anybody to put their finger on the moment when life changes from being something that is nearly all in front of you to something that happened while your attention was elsewhere.

This passage means so much to me because I had a moment like this–when I finally lifted my head as my last child left for college. Here’s another one.

You have to be a certain age, I think, to understand longing as scarcely distinguishable from pleasure, and my love affair with the ranch is defined by a thousand leavings and a thousand returns. It’s the only place I always miss, no matter how fabulous my temporary circumstance. When the road turns to gravel and bends with the river into Antelope Park, every single part of me takes a deep breath.

All I need to do is substitute Provincetown for the ranch, the ocean for the river, and the Pilgrim Monument for Antelope Park…

Here’s one more. Pay attention to the symmetry and the juxtapositions and the rhythm.

Sometime in the last twenty-five years, the ranch changed from being the thing I always had to figure out how to pay for, to the place I have spent my life.

Her sentences, I’m telling you. And I’m still on the first essay. Actually, I’m only on page 10. I won’t spoil the end of this essay, but I will tell you I underlined the last two paragraphs.

I don’t know where in the world I’d be without Pam. She has shaped me as a writer and as a human being. Her writing and wisdom have set the bar high, high, high. I’m grateful for her and her writing and for her support of mine.

To inaugurate this monthly series, “How We Spend Our Days,” please welcome writer PAM HOUSTON.

photo by Russell Kaye

A

The day begins at first light when my youngest wolfhound, Liam, sings a song. He throws back his head and howls to greet the day. It sounds a little like a donkey and a little like an elephant. Sometimes Fenton and Mary Ellen sing along with him. Mary Ellen’s singing is second soprano, and Fenton’s is practically falsetto. They sing for about five minutes, and I am grateful the nearest house is more than a mile away. Sometimes I can go back to sleep, but more often than not I get up, and read to ease into the day. This week it was Margaret Atwood’s new one, another review for Oprah. The Year of The Flood….a dystopian future where everything is screwed up all thanks to men and their penises. Very droll in Atwood fashion. Incredible world building.

Greg gets up and makes coffee, this week it is Sumatra Mandheling ordered especially from Stumptown in Portland, and he makes our protein powder and goat yoghurt and banana concoction, which at first I resisted, but now I love. I look at email, give Mary Ellen her daily pain pill (she only has three legs), give good morning pets to all the pets and dog cookies likewise. I take Deseo (the diabetic pasofino) a pear with three chromium picolante pills stuck inside, and a carrot each for Roany and the Yellow Horse.

After coffee we take the boys (Fenton and Liam) on a walk to the end of the pasture, over the fence and onto the National Forest, up to the top of Lime Creek and back home, about two hours round trip. There is usually a load of laundry to do, before the thunderstorms boom up in the late afternoon (no dryer here at the ranch, so clothes get hung outside on the line.) We have a little lunch, usually leftovers from the night before, or, if there are none, a bowl of instant mashed potatoes or peanut butter and sour cherry jam on a spoon.

The afternoon is work time, which means working on my novel, or writing a review for Oprah, or critiquing manuscripts, or writing an essay for an anthology (or a blog) or whatever else is on the docket for any given day. Some days there is a late afternoon trip to town for mail, or milk, or a fishing license, or a trip to the vet for shots, or a torn ear, or clogged anal glands. The Rockies come on TV sometime between 5 and 8, depending on what coast they are on, and they are ubiquitous in this house on a summer evening. Dinner is the one meal I throw myself into, and it is usually fairly elaborate and fresh and full of whole food/no short-cut ingredients. A Thai curry with eggplant and scallops, or a duck with mango ginger sauce, or buffalo steaks with cauliflower mash and sweet corn. So a couple of hours in the kitchen with the Rockies on in the background is my idea of a perfect summer evening. Sometimes we take a nightfall walk, sometimes a nightfall bath. Sometimes we play some chickenfoot dominoes. We usually take books to bed and read a little, and close our eyes until it is time for Liam to sing again.

~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry.  It was chosen for me by Pat Towers, my editor at Oprah, but if it had not been chosen for me, I would have read it anyway.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• I must defer to Henry James, “A writer ought to strive to be a person on whom nothing is lost.”

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• Reading Sports Illustrated in the bathtub cover to cover every week.

By PAM HOUSTON:

Cowboys Are My Weakness

Waltzing the Cat

A Little More About Me

Sight Hound

Georgia Heard wrote in Writing Toward Home, “The seemingly random observations I make or the subjects I choose to write about are like the branches of a tree whose roots reach down to the depths of myself and reveal my obsessions….The task of finding your key images is lifework.”

Pam Houston wrote in “Pregnancy and Other Natural Disasters,” an essay in A Little More About Me, “There is only one story of our lives and we tell it over and over again, in a thousand different disguises, whether we know it or not.”  And I swear one of her characters says this too, but I can’t find it.

I don’t know what my one story is, but I’m working on it.  The more I write, the more I see similar shapes.  I have pictures from all over Columbus of these row houses.  (Unfortunately, I just realized, not digital ones.  And my scanner is refusing to work with Vista.)  When I travel, I take pictures of these houses as well.  The one at the top of the blog, as well as the one in today’s post, were both taken in Provincetown in 2006.  The one on my website is of the same houses but taken by a professional photographer.

I think the houses have something to do with exteriors and interiors.  All alike on the outside, but what goes on inside must be so different.  Or maybe a fascination with the exterior to avoid the interior.  Also, maybe something to do with simplifying our lives to one of these small little houses–something manageable.  Perhaps even , though this one will surprise me if it turns out to be true, something to do with community.

In an interview at the back of Waltzing the Cat, Pam Houston said, “I surrender myself to the truth of the metaphors I have chosen (that’s the scary part), and eventually, the story finds its own truth.”