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."

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.

Reviews
"Pam Houston is in possession of a deep, heart- achingly beautiful love for her own personal piece of earth. And as equally deep is her ability for hope." -- Sara Cutaia - Chicago Review of Books
"Insightful and evocative" -- Nathan Devel - Los Angeles Times
"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
"Good writing can make you envious, no matter how foreign the terrain. Other times, you read a good memoir and find yourself wanting to track down the author and become friends. A third kind of book is so insightful and evocative, you shelve it beside other favorite and instructive titles. Deep Creek might just do all three." -- Nathan Deuel - Los Angeles Times
"Pam Houston's Deep Creek is (of course) fantastic." -- Heather Hansman - Outside
"There are few books I have read that remind me how knowing a place, studying a place-the soil and weather and beasts and flora and trails and light at a given time of year, and scent at another, and sounds at another-is one of the ways we heal, one of the ways we de-alienate, one of the ways we return to what we are-the earth; our home. Pam Houston's Deep Creek is a miracle this way. It reminds us how to get home." -- Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights
"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
"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
"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
"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
"Pam Houston is in possession of a deep, heart-achingly beautiful love for her own personal piece of earth. And as equally deep is her ability for hope. In a time where the world is either drowning, or burning, or being drilled-into, Houston's outlook promises a better tomorrow-even if that means we're no longer here." -- Sara Cutaia - Chicago Review of Books
"If Cowboys Are My Weakness was Pam Houston's call to millions of women-blasting us with self-recognition of how we give away our own power-then her new book is the response to that call." -- Amy Reardon - Rumpus


Awards
Winner of Colorado Book Award 2020 and Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award 2020.



Book Information
ISBN 9780393357660
Author Pam Houston
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 243g
Dimensions(mm) 211mm * 140mm * 20mm