Pam Houston's Backstreets
Dave Weich, Powells.com
"I've never had a dog that wanted to cuddle quite this much, or quite this? humanly,"
Pam
Houston tried to explain in an essay about her young Irish wolfhound. "But it is
also true that Dante has a wider range of emotions than any man I dated during
my twenties." 
Years later, Dante's sweet, short life gives a framework to the author's
first novel. "Sight Hound
was my attempt to do justice to one of the most important relationships I've
ever had in my life," Houston says. "It was only after I turned in the final
version that I realized [it] is actually a book about faith."
She's written about dogs before
Jackson and Sally, then also the free-roaming canines of Park City, Utah
and relationships push many of Houston's stories forward, fiction and nonfiction alike.
When Richard Ford selected "How to Talk to a Hunter" for Best
American Short Stories 1990, he introduced a revelatory new voice to fiction
rough but intimate, independent but openhearted.
Cowboys Are My Weakness
catapulted Houston to the top rung of western writers. More stories followed
in Waltzing the Cat
John Updike chose "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had" for Best
American Short Stories of the Century and next came a "thrilling, exquisite"
(Mademoiselle), "fearless" (New York Times Book Review) collection of essays, A
Little More about Me.
In the progress of things, Houston says, it was time to write about a few good
men. That one of those men happens to be a dog, well, who would call it a surprise?
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"The novel's humor and irony are bracing....Houston's gift for capturing the dynamic of unorthodox webs of relationships is on pleasing display in this gruffly warmhearted novel." Publishers Weekly
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"Houston claims for women the terrain staked out by male writers from Hemingway to Richard Ford." Los Angeles Times
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"Whether she writes about Tibet, Bolivia, or Pennsylvania's Poconos, Houston's essays share a common quest for artistic, spiritual, and emotional satisfaction." Library Journal
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"As beautifully written as one would expect, shot through with Houston's irresistible blend of tough lyricism and wry humour." Times (London)
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John Updike and Katrina Kenison
Features "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had" by Pam Houston alongside fifty-four more award-winning stories.
Dave: Lots of people grow very close to their pets,
of course, but what is the attraction for you, personally? What is it about animals?
Why do you value your time with them to this degree?
Pam Houston: I think, at least in part, it's because they do things with their
full attention. If a dog wants to go outside, he wants to go outside entirely.
They want the steak off your plate; they want it entirely. They're happy to
see you; they're happy to see you with their whole being. There's something
in me that wants to be more like that. As a writer, one of the things I try
to do is shed all the encumbrances that keep me from living with my full attention,
with my entire being.
Sometimes I feel like my dogs are living better, more complete lives than
I am. To write from their point-of-view is natural for several reasons. I spend
a whole lot of time thinking and talking for them, as Amy
Hempel used to say, talking on their behalf in my own mind, to me and back.
In terms of the larger issue, I think it's about seeing life lived with a
kind of purity of emotion, wanting to be close to that and to emulate it. A
lot of people say animals don't emote, but I don't fall into that camp.
Someone asked me, "Do you really believe Dante was sent to you to teach you
these lessons, or do you think you made that up in your head?" I said, "I don't
think it matters. I think the answer is somewhere in between."
Dave: While I was reading your books these last few weeks, I was also
dipping into a memoir coming out this fall called The Tender Bar. It's
a long, lyrical book, entirely chronological, from page one. I've read about
two hundred pages so far and only once since the opening chapter has the story
jumped out of its chronology, and then only for a few lines. That kind of straight-line
narrative ordinarily bores me to tears, but it's a compelling voice, very well
done. I haven't wanted to put it down.
In your stories and essays, and now the novel, the structure feels more like
a dragonfly's afternoon it flutters here and there, landing for a minute and taking off again, sideways, front, or back. Do you ever imagine
yourself writing something linear?
Houston: No, though I shouldn't answer so quickly because there might
be a project that suggests itself down the line. Right now, I can barely imagine
myself writing in the third-person, but one day I might like to get
there.
The way work happens for me? I am a collector of shiny objects and
this has been true all along, no matter the subject matter or the form the book
ultimately takes. I'm like those birds, keas in New Zealand, who collect the
shiny objects: I go out in the world, certain things glimmer at me, they resonate
with something inside me it could be the waiting room of a veterinary
clinic, an overheard moment of conversation, the way the light is coming through
the trees. Whatever it is, it hits that spot in me that says, "Writing-worthy."
I talk about it with my students as "glimmering," though of course it's not
necessarily pretty. But it has that sheen around it that says, "Take me home
and write me down." Then for me it's all about putting those things in an order
so that they inform each other; together
they make something more complicated than the parts.
If I wrote something linear it would probably be a total accident; it would
be one random assemblage that would happen to go in order. It seems that, numerically,
the odds are very much against that.
Dave: Did you feel compelled to work from structural guidelines of any
kind as you approached the larger canvas of a novel? Did you outline at all,
or did you work from instinct, stitching the pieces together?
Houston: The very word outline sends chills up my spine. If
there's one thing I'm adamant about, it's that I don't know where I'm going.
If I think even for a second I might know, I do everything I can to confuse
myself so I won't know anymore.
I had never written a novel before, and unlike a short story or an essay I
couldn't keep the whole metaphorical field in my mind at one time. My fear was
that I would just keep collecting and collecting and the story would never make
that happy turn a short story makes that says it's starting to close down. The
one concession I made was the section dividers "The Hockey Player," "The End,"
"The Future" and I was sure those were going to come out; I was sure those
were just a crutch I was using to get the book into pieces I could handle.
I was positive my editor was going to say, "Get rid of them. They're not doing
anything." I really didn't think they were. But they just stayed. No one ever
told me to get rid of them. I thought, Okay, I'll leave them in. Maybe they'll
be some sort of guide for the reader. It's funny the conversations you never
have with your editor, but of all the conversations we had through seven drafts,
we never had the conversation What are these doing in here? and Should
we take them out? They just stayed.
The other thing is that I thought this was a collection of short stories until
about a hundred and twenty pages in. I thought it was twelve stories, each told
by a different narrator, around a series of events, the life and death of the
dog. But then I ran into the problem of time. I wanted Dante to be able to speak
at two different points in time. Then I wanted Dr. Evans to be able to speak
at more than one point. How do I do that? I imagined a 24-story collection
with everyone speaking twice. I was well on my way to imagining a 36-story collection
and what my editor would say about that nothing good when I sort
of went, Oh, this is what they mean when they say novel.
That's how I came to it. Denial was how I handled my fear for those first
hundred and twenty pages, and the section dividers were the way I got to the
end.
Dave: And it worked. At some point you realized all the pieces were
there.
Houston: When I did feel the book start to come in, start to turn back,
I was greatly relieved. I thought there were probably about fifty or sixty pages
left to bring all the metaphors around and gather everything in. Eighteen pages
later, somehow, I was done.
That was thrilling for me. I'm such a believer in how the subconscious and
the unconscious takes care of a story, even as your analytical brain is trying
to screw it up. One of the reasons I concentrate so hard on the physicality
of the story both the physical stuff of the story and the actual physical
pieces of the story is that if I can keep making it physical I'm
not analyzing it too much and heading to a false ending. This was a big test
of that because there was no way I could keep it all in my conscious brain.
When it came back around I was thrilled. I couldn't wait to do it again, for
that one minute of happiness when I realized it was all there.
Dave: After you published Waltzing
the Cat, you told Salon.com, "My next book is going to have a really good
man in it." Now, in Sight
Hound, we meet Howard and Dr. Evans. Did you have any concept five years
ago what you might be writing next?
Houston: I can only guess. I'd written Cowboys
Are My Weakness, which was the book where I didn't take responsibility and
I blamed the guys. In Waltzing
the Cat, I wasn't writing about a particularly better group of guys, but
at least I knew it was my own fault. Maybe I was thinking that the next step
would be to actually see some different kinds of men out there; it might not
lead to disaster every time.
There are a lot of good men in this book. Certainly Dr. Evans and Howard, even Brooklyn Underhill I think he's going to turn out to be a good man.
And Dante, of course. I'm afraid to think that I might have been dating someone
at the time that I thought was good and wasn't that's probably the real
answer. But in the progress of things, it was time.
One of my goals with this book was to try to make every character sympathetic
in some way. Even Eddie Kominsky. The books that I truly love, let's take for
instance Toni
Morrison's books? In Love,
her new novel, she has a line that says, "He was either a good bad man or a
bad good man, it all depends on what you hold dear." That's what I wanted: complicated,
multifaceted characters. One of the challenges was to write everyone with compassion,
with a sympathetic eye.
Dave: In your INK
Q&A, you referred to the "particular physical detail that stretches, but
does not snap belief." Can you think of any favorites from other authors' work?
Houston: There are so many. That's the way I think of stories I love.
I referenced one earlier one of my favorite details is in an Amy
Hempel story called "Nashville
Gone to Ashes" [from Reasons to Live]. The old woman in the story talks not so much to her
dog as for her dog. She does this dog-speak that's fantastic.
What have I read lately that I loved? In a book that's just come out by Elizabeth
McKenzie called Stop
that Girl, on the very first page, the narrator walks down the street past
a self-hating mynah bird that says "Kill me." It's so perfect. It's on the first
page, and I was committed to the whole book after that bird spoke.
Dave: What's your ideal altitude?
Houston: I live at nine thousand feet, and I quite
like it; I feel very comfortable there, but when I come down just a little bit
I have more energy. If I come down too far I have too many red blood cells and
I feel listless, which is the excuse why the Denver
Broncos didn't win all those Super Bowls: they had too many red blood cells.
I would say my ideal altitude is seventy-five hundred feet.
Dave: Bruce
Springsteen makes a cameo in Sight
Hound. Was that the bit of New Jersey that Pam brought west?
Houston: Probably. I'm still a pretty big Bruce fan. That is certainly
a part of my upbringing that I won't let go of. I've let go of a lot of my east
coast stuff, but I'm not letting go of that.
I had an amazing experience this summer. I went back to the Jersey shore because
I might write about it this new book I'm sort of flirting with is about a young
girl. I went back with a girlfriend from California who'd never seen the
Jersey shore. It was my first time there in about twenty-five years.
The very first night we were there I went to Seaside Heights, which is where
I went as a little kid. It's about as crummy as it gets. We went to the boardwalk
and there were all the rides and the Kohr Brothers Frozen Custard and everything
else. The whole drive down from Boston, I'd been saying to Tammy, "The thing
we should have brought was early Bruce." I'd brought all these CDs, and
I was saying, "I can't believe we came to the Jersey shore and I brought The
Rising." Terrible choice. Should have brought Greetings from Asbury Park.
I said, "We can probably just turn on the radio," and of course it was all just
hip-hop. There was no Bruce to be found.
So we get to the boardwalk, and I'm on total sensory overload: We've got
to get a cheesesteak, and a here's where they squeeze the lemonade? I can
hardly even speak, I'm so overwhelmed with memory. And I'm paying the cheesesteak
lady, and she says, "Are you a Springsteen fan?" I said, "Yes." She said, "I
thought you looked about the right age." She said, "There's a Springsteen cover
band playing down at the end of the boardwalk tonight. You should check it out.
Last week there was a Beatles cover band, and they were really good."
Well, when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, every single night we went to
Art Stock's Playpen in Wildwood Crest to see this band called Backstreets play
nothing but Springsteen all the time. We would get up in the morning and sleep
on the beach until we had to be beach inspectors at ten that was our
job, to make sure everyone had their beach tags on. From ten to five, we'd walk
the beach, then from five to eight we'd go to whatever happy hour had free food,
and from eight until five in the morning we'd go to Art Stock's Playpen again
and dance to the same songs every night: "Jungleland," "Rosalita," "Growing
Up," "Blinded by the Light."
Anyway, Tammy and I walk down to the end of the boardwalk. I hear "Jungleland,"
and I swear to God I get chills all over my body. This is a band that's playing
at Seaside Heights; it doesn't get any worse. There are all these people in
lawn chairs out on the beach, the sun's going down, the sky is all pretty, and
here are these guys. I say to Tammy, "They're old."
She looks at a flyer they're handing out, which includes weddings they're
playing, and the band is called B-Streets. Tammy, who's much more up on teen
culture than I am, says, "They had to change their name from Backstreets to
B-streets because of the Backstreet Boys." Well, it's the same guys! Twenty-eight
years later. On our first night we had just arrived! It was amazing.
I went up to them with my camera. I was like, "Art Stock's Playpen? 1978?" They
were all, "Yeah!"
That's a long answer to a short question, but I'm a fan. I remain a fan. There's
an anthology coming out called Meeting across the River, which I contributed
to. We all had to listen to the song "Meeting across the River" and write a
story from it.
Dave: Why that song?
Houston: It's a weird choice. It's a strange, quiet, little song. I
don't know why. But you know the line, "Cherry said she's gonna walk 'cause
she found out I took her radio and hocked it"? I wrote a story called "Cherry
Looks Back." I'm kind of excited about it.
Dave: You say in the INK
Q&A that you've always had a thing for the kid in Richard
Ford's "Communist" [from Rock Springs].
"I might like to date the man he might have grown up to be," you admitted. I'd
never read Ford's books until college, when a teacher played a reading of "Communist"
on tape?
Houston: Read by William Hurt?
Dave: Yes. So the kid in that story has always looked and sounded like
William Hurt to me.
Houston: I was at Symphony Space the night William Hurt read that story
because my story was read, too. Mia Dillon read "How to Talk to a Hunter." Or
was it a different night of the same season? I can't remember, but I was there
when William Hurt read that story. It was a brilliant reading.
Dave: In Sight Hound,
a passage describes Rae watching people perform her play. There's a moment when
she realizes that the person on stage has turned her work into something entirely
beyond her vision of it. You could say the same thing about a novel or a story,
how the audience gives it shape in its reading. Sometimes an author's vision
of the work isn't as incisive as the readership's.
Houston: Jonathan says of Springsteen's music, "I bring to it a complicated
understanding. More complicated, I'd wager, than they bring to it themselves."
That's definitely what I'm talking about. I absolutely believe it.
I bring my whole life experience to some series of events. I turn those pieces
of the physical world into language, and in that process they change. Likewise,
here's a book on a table; now someone comes along with their whole series of
life experiences and reads it. It's going to be different for every single person.
That's the beauty of it.
People tell me things about my work all the time that I can hardly believe.
Sometimes, I think, That's really cool, and sometimes I think, Wow,
that's out of left field.
Dave: How would you describe the difference between your fiction and
your nonfiction?
Houston: I think it's a matter of narrative stance, but I can answer
that question two ways. I can tell you what becomes nonfiction as opposed to
what becomes fiction. It all comes out of the same set of life experiences.
What becomes nonfiction are events or stories where the metaphors are in alignment
with each other and I'm not too afraid of what's going to happen if I look closely
at them. A good example would be an essay I wrote called "I Was a Captain in
Colonel Bob's Army" [from A Little More about Me], which was about a hugely important event in my life, something
so important to me that I can't even measure it. That would tend to knock it
over to the fiction category because I tend to believe in fiction more than
I believe in nonfiction, and yet it's a simple story that works out well in
the end and all the metaphorical evidence lines up in one direction. It doesn't
have that fear factor and the potential for unlimited complication that sends
something over to the fiction side.
A different way to say all that is to talk about narrative stance in
other words, where I stand as narrator, whether I am me or I am Rae or I am
Dante or whether I am Dr. Evans. In fiction, as the writer, I don't want
to know where I'm going. I don't want to know how it turns out. I don't want
to know what it means. I really don't want to know what it means.
When I'm writing nonfiction, it's okay a little bit to know what it means,
to have more of a retrospective stance, which is really another way of saying
the exact same thing: If everything lines up and I feel comfortable about the
outcome, then I feel fine having a retrospective stance. If I know that I'm
opening a can of worms that's going to take me somewhere I don't understand,
and it's probably darker than I would care to go on any given day and is going
to reveal truths that are going to surprise me, probably not all in a good way,
then it's fiction.
Those are not definitions that apply to work in general, but they apply to
me. That's how I divide it up.
Dave: You call yourself "a paint-my-face Colorado
Avalanche fan." How are you handling the lockout this winter?
Houston: It's grim and it's getting grimmer. I have friends who are
more or less connected who say it's going to be another year after this one
before they start playing again. One more reason to move to Canada, is how I
feel about it.
I love hockey so much. The only consolation, of course, is that I'm on a book
tour. At least they picked a winter where my attention is somewhere else. But
how lovely would it be to come back to the hotel rooms, turn on ESPN, and watch
the replays? That would be so much better than the Weather Channel.
Dave: I worked at a sports bar in Colorado the year the Avalanche first
won the Cup.
Houston: Their first year in Colorado?
Dave: Right. It was a strange experience. I grew up in Boston, so I was
raised with the Bruins.
At the beginning of that first season in Colorado, none of our customers even
knew the rules. We would be at the bar explaining offside and icing.
Houston: Of course. It wasn't even in the paper. I remember when they
were in the quarterfinals that year I grew up a serious Philadelphia
Flyers fan I was asking, "Where is this team?" I thought, If they
were in Denver, the Denver Post would be covering them, but they
were in the quarter round of the playoffs before there was anything in the Post.
It was Broncos, Broncos, Broncos?
Dave: That's Colorado, too. Those were the Elway
years.
Houston: I know, but you'd be surprised. Over the years? They love
the Avalanche. In fact the Post this year, I opened the paper one day
and saw, "Sauve Records First Shutout." It stopped me. What? They're
printing an article every single day, a short hockey article from another year.
Isn't that bizarre? To assuage our sadness.
Dave: I didn't know that.
Houston: You can't believe how hockey-crazy Denver got.
Dave: It's the nature of the people there. They're not fair-weather
fans.
Houston: Witness the Colorado
Rockies.
Dave: And growing up in Boston, we booed everything. If someone wasn't playing
well, or God forbid not giving a full effort, they were going to hear it.
Houston: Right, I know.
Dave: I'll never forget a Raiders-Broncos game at Mile High I saw on
TV when I was living there. The Broncos played so poorly in the first half that
they got booed going into the tunnel at halftime. In the newspapers the next
week, all the letters talked about how disrespectful the fans had been and how
embarrassed Coloradoans felt for their behavior.
Houston: Absolutely. It's true. I'm a Broncos season ticket holder.
It's one of the things I love about Colorado, the innocence of their sports
fans. And I love being innocent myself. It's why I can't move out here. I like
this coast and I teach on it, but I can't let go of the Broncos and the hope
that one day the Avs will return.
You probably know this, but when Ray Bourque was winning his Stanley Cup and
everyone was wearing his half-half jerseys, the one major billboard in downtown
Denver it's massive, you can't avoid it it said, "Good luck, Ray,
from the people of Boston." And it was so great. Every time you saw it you got
choked up. We felt like we were sister cities during that time.
Dave: Dante was the name of your dog, and now the name of the dog in
Sight Hound. He was not
named after the
Italian poet, however; you named him after Dante Bichette, the baseball
player.
Houston: That's true.
Dave: Did you have a problem with Andres Galarraga? Why Dante Bichette?
Houston: Well, if it were a cat? [Editor's note: Galarraga's nickname
is "The Big Cat."]
It wasn't so much that I loved Dante Bichette as a player in fact,
the year that I got Dante wasn't one of his better seasons. It was really the
sound of the announcer's voice saying "Dan-te!" every time he came out.
One day I got to meet him on the field a long and uninteresting story
but I got to shake his hand, and I said, "Hi! I named my dog after you!"
He didn't seem to be all that excited.
Dave: No knock on Dante or Rose, but I found myself oddly attached
to Stanley the cat in his short sections. There's a note in the acknowledgements
about someone in Greeley, Colorado, who told you to let the cat speak for himself.
What's that all about?
Houston: When I was in Greeley, I read from an early draft of the book
that included Darlene's monologue, which talks about Stanley but just
the briefest mention. There was no first-person cat at the time. This kid raised
his hand and said, "Aren't you gonna give the cat a chance to speak for himself?"
I'm really not a cat person, as is probably obvious, and I never would have
thought of it. I spend half my day wondering what my dogs are thinking,
so that was a natural.
I went home and tried to write Stanley. I don't have fun writing very often
I'm satisfied or dissatisfied or whatever I am but writing Stanley
was about the most fun I've ever had spending two or three hours at the computer.
Dave: What do you have going on that we don't know about?
Houston: I might team up with Rick
Reilly on Colorado Public Radio, which would be so much fun I can't even
think about it. I mentioned in the Q&A that I read Sports Illustrated
cover to cover every week; that's something most people wouldn't know about
me. You could say that professional sports are my untapped resource.
Dave: And next you might be writing a book that takes a character back
east?
Houston: The very first thought about this book, the very first feeling,
was that it was an ocean book. You know, Enough with the mountains already.
Let's describe a different landscape.
I keep writing about the mountains because I find myself in them more often,
but I live near the ocean when I'm in California and I grew up at the Jersey
shore. I love southeast Alaska about as much as any other place on the earth.
I'm always getting myself to watery places.
I think the primary relationship in the book is about a young girl, pre-teen,
and an older woman who she's not related to. That's a relationship I've had
in my life both ways: with my godmother, Martha Washington, who basically taught
me everything good I know; and now I have a goddaughter who is very important
to me. I wanted to write about that particular relationship. That would be one
facet of the book. You never know whether that becomes the subplot or the main
plot or whatever.
I don't know, but I imagine it will go to New Jersey. I grew up in Pennsylvania,
but all my summers were at the Jersey shore. That's the thing that sticks. That's
the only thing about back there that I get nostalgic about.
Pam Houston visited Powell's City of Books on February 4, 2005. This coming
October, she'll be teaching at The
Tomales Bay Workshops alongside Richard Bausch, Brady Udall, Kim Barnes,
Ron Carlson, Jane Miller, and Carl Phillips. Among the titles rejected for this interview were: Pam Houston Looks Back. Pam Houston Stretches but Does Not Snap. Woofing it up with Pam Houson. Pam Houston, Shore to Shore. Pam Houston Spent Teenage Summers as a Beach Inspector in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. Pam Houston: Barks, She Wrote. Locked Out with Pam Houston. A Little More (Again) about Pam Houston. Pam Houston Should Title the Interview Herself.
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