Animals Taught Me Everything: A Conversation with Author Pam Houston & Mitzi Rapkin, Podcast Host of First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
Join the Pitkin County Library in hosting author Pam Houston, who will discuss her new book, Animals Taught Me Everything, with Mitzi Rapkin, host of the podcast First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing. The event will feature a live recording of the podcast, time for audience questions, and a book signing and sale with Explore Booksellers.
Animals Taught Me Everything
What can animals teach us about how to be human?
From Icelandic mares and Irish wolfhounds to elephants, leopards, hyena bitches, 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 the 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.
Mitzi Rapkin is the founder, host, and producer of the podcast, First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing, now in its 13th year. The podcast features in-depth conversations with today’s most distinguished literary writers of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and essays. Each episode covers issues of literary craft, creativity, and the themes of a writer’s work. Mitzi cultivates conversations that evolve from talking about the mechanics of producing a work of art to questions on what it means to be human, the mystery and awe of being in relationship with one another, and empathy. Her archive contains more than 600 interviews.
