Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

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Deep Creek, Pam Houston's new memoir, details her life over decades on her 120-acre ranch in Colorado, including rich, vivid details about rural life, and honest, sometimes searing stories about Houston's own history. For any fans of her earlier work, or anyone who loves strong female voices or nature memoirs, Deep Creek hits the spot. Recommended By Jill O., Powells.com

"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."

“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)

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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.

In 2013, the largest fire in Southwestern Colorado’s history — 109,615 acres at final measurement — burned a mix of spruce fir and aspen forest on three sides of what has been my high mountain meadow home for 25 years. The fire raged for more than a month, running seven horizontal miles along a hillside in one afternoon alone...

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