 Good evening and welcome to the Longmont Museum. My name is Justin Veatch and I'm the manager of the Steward Auditorium. And guess what? This is the Steward Auditorium. Welcome. Who's here for the very first time ever? Hey, wow, that's a lot of first timers. Welcome. We do a lot of, lot, a lot, a lot of stuff here. You might want to pick up one of our new newsletters on your way out the door if you haven't already. It's got stuff in here through, well, well into May. We're doing a lot. We've got a great new exhibition up here featuring the work of Colorado based contemporary artist Terry Maker. I really think it's a blockbuster show. We do Thursday night programming. Every Thursday night we're doing something amazing here including tonight, actually tonight kicks off our Thursday nights at the museum series. We've got films coming up. We have a great program with KUNC that we're doing. We've got concerts and films and talks galore. Just grab one of these, why don't you? Do we have any members with us this evening? Hey, thank you members. We simply can't do all that we do without you. And like I said, we do a whole hell of a lot. So thank you. I'd also like to thank the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, otherwise known as SCFD, our media sponsor KGNU and Elevations Bank for supporting our Thursday night series. Tonight we're very happy to team up with our friends at the Longmont Public Library. We're like fellow siblings here in the city of Longmont. And so we're really glad to present this special library at the museum evening. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce to you the director of the Longmont Public Library, Nancy Kerr. Good evening and thank you to my brother Justin. The Longmont Public Library is very pleased to collaborate with the Longmont Museum to bring you an evening with award-winning author Pam Houston. Pam will share the stage with fellow Colorado author Karen Avanon to discuss Pam's new memoir, Deep Creek, Finding Hope in the High Country. Pam is also the author of two novels, Consents May Have Shifted and Site Hound, along with collections of short stories and essays. Her stories have been selected for volumes of the O'Henry Awards, the Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Short Stories of the Century, among other anthologies. She is the winner of the Western State's Book Award, the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction, my favorite from this list, the Evil Companions Literary Award, and several teaching awards. I want to ask about that in the Q&A. She teaches in the Lowe Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is professor of English at the University of California Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers, which puts on between 7 and 10 writer gatherings per year in places as diverse as Boulder, Colorado, Tomales Bay, California, and Chamonix, France. Pam Houston lives at 9,000 feet above sea level on her 120-acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio brand where she raises horses, donkeys, Icelandic sheep, and Irish wolfhounds. Our immensely capable interviewer this evening is author, poet, mountain woman, and professor, Karen Ovenin. Karen is the author of the memoir, Rough Beauty, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, Lit Hub, Real Simple, and Westward. She presently teaches writing workshops at Lighthouse North & Film, pop culture and storytelling to freshmen at the University of Colorado Boulder, is the winner of two Academy of American Poets Awards, and has been nominated for several Pushkart Prizes in fiction. Now, imagine being 31 years old with, in quotes, no job, no place to lie except my North Face tent. That was Pam's situation as she spent her royalties to purchase a 120-acre ranch near Creed, Colorado. As you can imagine, maintaining that kind of property did not come without its challenges. We'd like you to invite you to sit back and enjoy a conversation with Pam and Karen. There will be a question and answer period afterwards, so be thinking about your questions. And we do have book sales available, a book signing after the talk, and we would like to encourage you to patronize our local bookseller, Barbed Wire Books from Longmont. Thank you very much for coming. Enjoy the show. I can't see you, but I know you're there. But I also can see that no one ever sits in the front row. Isn't that a funny thing? Anyway, thank you so much for coming out on an soon-to-be-snowy night. I really appreciate it. I slipped over Kenosha Pass just before it got really gnarly this afternoon, but it was on its way to gnarliness. I think because Karen and I are going to be talking about the book and talking about all things ranch and because you have these beautiful pictures of the ranch up there to look at, I'm going to read something that I don't often read. It's a section of a long essay called Mother's Day Storm, which is about the death of my beloved Fenton Johnson the Wolfhound and an elk calf that found its way into my barn and also the climate catastrophe. But I'm only going to read one section, which is the Fenton section. In 2014, I lost Fenton Johnson the Wolfhound. Mother's Day weekend was his last, which I know from experience will make all the maze from now on a little sadder. Eleven years is a big number for an Irish Wolfhound, and Fenton had made excellent use of everyone. I named him after my dear friend, the novelist and essayist Fenton Johnson. And as Fenton the dog grew up, he revealed more and more ways the name was apt. Like Fenton the human, he was wise and reticent, the best kind of grandfather, even when he was only middle-aged. He wasn't big on asking for affection, wouldn't wiggle up to you like a black lab or a Bernie's mountain dog, wouldn't even very often bump his head up under your resting arm for a pet. He preferred to sit nearby, keeping a loving and watchful and ever so slightly skeptical eye, as if the humans were always potentially on the verge of making a really bad decision. And he would be ready, in that case, to quietly intervene. When Fenton was a young dog, he would bound through deep snow with an expression of such pure joy on his face, it could make even a non-dog person laugh out loud. He'd only drink water out of the very edge of a bowl, and only then with his top teeth pressing firmly against the metal rim. When he wanted something, he would come over and scratch on the chair or the couch I was sitting on, as if it were the wrong side of a door. When he was happy, for instance, if I rose from a chair with a leash in my hand, he would wag his tail heartily. But when he was ecstatic, like when I came home after a week of working on the road, his tail would make huge happy circles, the scope of his happiness too big to be contained in a movement that only went from side to side. To say Fenton was intelligent, to say he had a wider range of emotions than anyone I dated in my 20s and 30s, is really to only scratch the surface of what a magnificent creature he was. He was the ranch manager, hyper-vigilant but not neurotic, keeping an eye on everything, animals, people, making sure no one was out of sorts or out of place. Because of his watchfulness, he had perfected the art of anticipating what would happen next better than any person could have. He knew all of my tastes and my tendencies, and he was always ready to be of service in any undertaking, moving the sheep from one pasture to another, walking the fence line to look for breaks, riding into town to drop off the recycling, cheering me up on a sleepless night by resting his heavy head across one of my ankles, reminding me to get up from the computer after too many hours of writing and go take a walk outside. His last year though, the arthritis that first made itself known when he was about eight years old was getting severe. He'd been on Remedill, the canine version of Advil, for years. We had had good results from acupuncture massage and glucosamine chondroitin. Doc Howard had shelved his country vet skepticism to give a laser gun a try and had been surprisingly impressed with the results, using it on many patients for pain relief as well as on his wife and on himself. Once a week, I loaded Fenton into the forerunner and we drove to Doc's, donned our Keith Richards goggles, and Doc's granddaughter gave Fenton six shots of laser light in his back end. Lately, even the laser gun treatments were reaching the point of diminishing returns. I'd been away for a few days in Boston when I got the call from Kelly, my ranch sitter, that Fenton was down and didn't seem to want to get up anymore. A wolfhound isn't meant not to be able to stand and walk around, however comfortable we might be willing to make him. Months before I had written on my calendar the words, this weekend keep free encase Fenton. And there was the old boy, as obliging as ever, doing everything, even dying right on time. I flew to Denver immediately and invited some of Fenton's closest friends to the ranch for the weekend, knowing that in order to come, they would have to brave the predicted Mother's Day blizzard during the five-hour drive from the front range to the ranch. In Boulder, I bought dry-aged organic beef steaks for everyone I thought might make it, plus a mountain of other groceries. I figured if we were going to be sad, and we were going to be sad, at least we were going to have good food to eat. When I selected the steaks, the butcher, whose name is Jerry and whose dog's name I would learn later is Gristle, took a lot of time and great pleasure describing the dry aging process. And when I asked for six T-bones, one for each of the potential guests and another for the old boy himself, Jerry said, you must be having quite a party. And since he had been so kind and thorough in his explanation, I said, well, what I'm actually doing is having kind of a living wake for one of the best dogs who's ever lived, and I want to buy the very best for him. And for his friends who are making the drive up to my ranch and creed to be with him, Jerry lifted one of the massive T-bones off the top of the pile sitting on the scale. You should have said so to begin with, he said. In that case, Fenton's is on me. My friend Tammy Anderson had a wonderful dog named Taylor, who she was as deeply connected to, I believe, as I was to Fenton. I have loved all my dogs, of course, but there is the rare dog I have had too so far in my life that asked me to transcend my human limitations and be at least occasionally a little more evolved like them. Fenton was such a dog and so was Taylor. Taylor and Fenton were puppies together and they loved each other truly all their lives. When Taylor was coming close to the end, she and Tammy would often lie on the bed together and look into one another's eyes. One day, Tammy told me, almost in a whisper, they were in such a position and Tammy said, maybe next time, I'll be the dog. But Tammy couldn't be there for Fenton's weekend and neither could Greg, so it turned out to be me and Kelly and Linda, who had cared for Fenton so often over the last five years of his life, he belonged to her nearly as much as he belonged to me. She had flown in from Reno and met me at the Denver Airport and we had driven together. The storm had kept everyone else away. The weekend was everything all at once. It rained and snowed and blew and eventually howled and I slept out on the dog porch with Fenton anyway, nose to nose with him for his last three nights. The storms seemed to have been ordered especially for the old boy, who loved the cold and snow most of all, who hated the wood stove and preferred it when I kept the house in the 55 to 60 degree range, who all his life would literally raise a disapproving eyebrow at me the moment he suspected I was going out to chop kindling. Linda and I gave him sponge baths and rubbed his face and ears until he didn't want us to rub his face and ears anymore and then we sat quietly beside him. I will admit to even loving cleaning him up, changing his dog beds, washing and drying him, fine tuning my attention to meet his every need. When I could stand to tear myself away from him, I cooked, giant pots of soup and pesto and grilled vegetables and salad. I had no appetite but the kitchen was warm and smelled good whenever I walked into it. Fenton ate Jerry's giant dry-aged T-bone in three sittings over two days and enjoyed the bone as much as I've ever seen him enjoy anything in his life, even though he had mostly lost interest in other food by then. There were times I was sure we were doing exactly the right thing by Fenton. There were times I thought that if my last weekend could be like his, it would be better than pretty much anybody's last weekend I had heard about in the history of the world. Other times I was in a flat panic. How could I be trusted to make this decision? What on earth gave me the authority or the wisdom to decide when his quality of life had crossed over some determinate line? And all that aside, how would I live in a world without him? Without his tender presence beside me? Without his increasingly stiff rear end glumping down the driveway to meet me without his quiet vigilance as I sat in a chair and did my work. Fenton was my seventh Irish wolfhound and my tenth dog overall. I was not new to being the decision maker, but no amount of times down this difficult road made it any easier. At one point I got myself so freaked out I thought maybe we would get in the car together, just him and me and drive and drive and see if we could outrun death. On Monday morning I saw he was getting the very beginning of tiny sores from sitting still for so long and I knew Tuesday morning would have to be his last. My friend Kaye Penner-Hall called from Denver and said she had tried to make it on Sunday, but they had closed Highway 285 because of black ice and so far it had not reopened. She asked me if I was okay and I told her that I was. I've always called Kaye the moral center of my large and wonderful group of women friends, in part because she was raised by preachers, in part because she has so much backbone, but mostly because she has a remarkable way of orienting toward True North. Kaye and I have the exact same Prius, year in model, and when she pulled in the driveway ten hours later, Fenton got more excited than I had seen him all weekend, even though I was sitting right there beside him, like there might be two of me and I might come home all over and start caring for him again, as I already was. This was another unexpected gift of the weekend. How many hundreds of times had I seen Fenton at the bottom of the driveway, his tail going in giant crazy circles, but because I was always the one in the Prius, I had never before witnessed that moment of recognition, the moment he became sure that car was my car. Who in your life has ever been that ecstatic over your arrival? Someone I hope, some living being. But of course, it wasn't a second me who got out of the Prius. It was Kaye, and when he recognized her, he danced and danced on his front legs only because he loves her too, and he knew she had come to see him. As a culture, whenever we want to treat someone or something inhumanely, we declare they don't have emotions, but anyone who thinks dogs don't have emotions should have been on the porch that night in the snow. Kaye had driven 10 hours in white-out conditions, doubling the length of the drive. When I asked her if it was awful, she shrugged, you never ever ask for help. So after we talked, I figured I needed to get here. I don't think I asked for help this time. Maybe not, she said, but you were close. We bedded down on the dog porch and sleeping bags under the swirling snow. She said, you're doing the right thing, Pam. He's not going to get better. I said, it feels like a betrayal no matter what I do. And she said, I don't think betrayal is a word that belongs on this porch. I teach sometimes with the Colorado writer Laura Hendry, and she gives a craft lecture on something she calls the jaws of life character, the person who sweeps in and pulls your protagonist from the burning car just when it seems all hope is lost. Kaye Penner-Howell was my jaws of life character that weekend. She came just when all my intrinsic strength and broad-minded philosophy about the cycle of life was about to fail me. She drove 10 hours in a Prius on black ice to sleep on a hard wooden porch in a poorly rated sleeping bag with Fenton and me on his last night on Earth. I didn't want to go to sleep because the hours were short now and I didn't want to miss a minute. After we had been quiet a while, a coyote barked and another howled back from a great distance. Before long and for the last time, Fenton joined their song. A few hours later, when it was barely getting light, I lay nose to nose with him and petted his perfect ears and said aloud, you did such a good job, Fenton. You did such a good job taking care of me. He looked right at me, right into me. He wanted me to know he knew what I was saying. And I think you already know this, I said, but you don't have to be afraid. I didn't know where those words came from. If it were me getting the shot in the morning, I sure as hell would have been afraid. But I knew when I said them, they were the most important ones. In the gathering light, he looked in my eyes, not with fear exactly, but urgency. He said, now it's my turn to trust you and I said, you can. And Al hooted some geese honked and case stirred in her sleeping bag. One of the lambs started buying, Queenie probably, the one with the higher voice. I heard Rony knicker softly, heard him walk around on the crunching snow, somewhere in the distance, the sound of a woodpecker, all the sounds the ranch makes every morning. Doc Howard came at ten through the snow to give Fenton the shot. Doc is getting older and he told me he would be sending his granddaughter in his place and I didn't protest though. I know he heard the disappointment and fear in my silence, so I was unsurprised and very grateful to see his small gray head behind the wheel. When I saw he did not have the sedative most vets give initially before they give the drug that stops the heart, he again heard my unasked question. Doc said, what's in this syringe is the world's biggest sedative. I don't like to mess around with lots of reactive drugs. Fenton was calm, almost smiling, for the very few minutes it took to put him to sleep forever. I believe he knew what was happening. I believe he was ready to put his head down on my lap one last time. Everybody cried. Even sweet Jay, Doc's brand new vet tech who had only met Fenton a couple of times. When I found my voice again I told Doc the story about Jerry and the stakes and he said, Pam, it turns out there are a lot of really good people in the world. After we loaded Fenton's body into Doc's truck to be taken to the morgue for cremation Kay and Linda and I took a pasture walk in his honor. A couple of inches of snow covered the ground and the birds who had returned recently hoping for better weather were almost too beautiful against the freshly whitened pasture to bear. The sun came out and we fed all the equines, apples and carrots from our hands. Eight hours later I found myself back in the Denver airport which was full of opportunities to do all the things I hadn't found the time or the wherewithal to do all weekend. Drink water, go to the bathroom, eat food. My plane was delayed two hours and the corn chowder at Elway's Bar tasted miraculous. I was riding on something I recognized as having lived through the thing you thought you might not live through, adrenaline. I marveled at all the people around me who weren't grieving, who had had normal days in board meetings or at home with their kids. I wasn't sleepy exactly. It was more like the insides of my eyes had been scoured with a brillo pad. Fenton the human sent me a text saying Fenton the canine loved and was loved all his life and there is no condition in all our living and dying that could be more satisfying. As I waited for my plane I found myself thinking back as I had many times that weekend to Jerry the butcher pulling that steak off the top of the pile. He might have thought what he did was a small thing though the price of those dry aged steaks makes it at least a medium thing even by the most objective measure. But the relative magnitude of his kindness to me at that moment was frankly immeasurable and I had held on to it all weekend and would continue to for the weeks of grief to come. Thank you. When I read Cowboys Are My Weakness and I've been running after Pam Houston all my life so it's such a thrill to sit on stage with her so thank you so much for coming and talking to me. Thank you for talking to me. So let's talk about this memoir. I wanted to know why you decided to write this book now because it seems to span so much. It's got the natural world. It has mothers. It has the ranch. It has home. There's so much in it. And I just wondered like did lightning strike you and say write this book? What happened? No, not at all. In fact, more so than any of my other books this book was my publisher's idea. My publisher had said to me I want you to go on a book length adventure. And basically my publisher has published everything that I've dreamed up over the last 30 years. And so I thought okay, I can do that. And so I made a list of book length adventures like mushing dogs to the North Pole or sailing the whole coast of Turkey because I thought I'm an adventuring type and it would be fun to go on a book length adventure paid for by a publisher. That seems like the kind of thing that I say yes to. And then I was driving home from a teaching quarter at Davis and the dogs were in the car and we drive across Highway 50 and kind of to get excited about coming home. We take lots of walks on the Forest Service Roads in Nevada and Utah. And we were up on one of those Forest Service Roads and the dogs were so happy to be on the leachless side of the Sierras and everybody was excited. They knew what it meant. And I just thought to myself, oh wait, I'm already having my book length adventure. My book length adventure began 26 years ago when I bought this ranch for 5% down and assigned hardcover copy of Cowboys or My Weakness which is literally true. And it has been, it has gone from the thing I always had to figure out how to pay the mortgage on to the story of my life. And so I wrote that as a proposal and said I'm having my book length adventure. It started 26 years ago or at that time 20 years ago. It actually seems like the biggest adventure you've been on in some ways. You call it the adrenaline rush of buying. And so I guess we're going to talk about this a little bit more about the kind of what the adventure is but can you say a little bit more about that? You're legendary for doing great big things in your life and how can you translate the adventure to the ranch? Well, you know, the summer that I bought the ranch I had dropped out of grad school. I dropped out of grad school with two months left because my book Cowboys or My Weakness had come out and they started to treat me very badly there. They said that I glorified an archaic form of masculinity and that I had set feminism back 50 years by myself. Can you imagine the power that they afforded me? Just one day I was in the English department office and, you know, I was in a five year program. I was two months from my PhD and there were two professors of mine standing at the copy machine talking about whether it was better to be an imminent writer or an imminent writer. And... English departments. This was a professor who had said on our first day of workshop no snow, no mountains, no trees, no skis, no eyes and no female bodily excretions. Those were the rules for workshop. And then I wrote Cowboys or My Weakness which if you happen to read it you understand is an aria to all of those things. But... But anyway, so there they were saying imminent, imminent, imminent, imminent. It didn't have anything to do with me. But I looked across the English department office and I thought what if I never had to go back in this building? What if I never had to go back in this building? And once I started saying it it took on a kind of a chant quality in my head and I never went back in the building. I didn't go back to get my coat. I didn't go back to get my books. I literally never went back in this building. Have not been back in the building to this day. So I was set free. I had a check for $21,000. I no longer had a place to live. I was living in my yellow Toyota Corolla. Which one of my students are the Haiku Corolla? Yes, it's the first Haiku. My Lemoneal and my North Face VE24 Tent which also happened to be yellow and I had my dog Jackson who was a sheepdog Airdale cross precursor to the Wolfhound look if you can picture a sheepdog Airdale and their fuzzy faces. He made me fall in love I think with Wolfhounds but that's another story anyway. So my agent when she gave me the check for $21,000 which is how much I got paid for Cowboys she said don't spend it all on hiking boots because she knew me and knew my tendencies and so I drove around the country giving readings at small independent bookstores. Thank you small independent bookstore for coming tonight. This is another aside but I'm just going to take it. I've been in small independent bookstores all year since the book came out and I got to tell you that's where it's happening. Libraries honestly and small independent bookstores where people are talking and people are having the hard conversations and people are trying to figure out how we're going to get through this mess we've gotten ourselves in and really I mean small independent bookstores have never been more alive than they are right now after almost having died you know. Capitalism tried to kill them and capitalism lost and small independent bookstores won and it's really a miracle but anyway so that summer I drove around the west giving readings and looking for a place to put that $21,000 and so when I got decreed and one thing led to another and I was shown this piece of property which was 120 acres and the most beautiful place I'd ever seen in the 100 year old barn and it was the third week of September so I don't have to tell you what was happening on the mountainside. I just fell completely in love with it my $21,000 represented 5% down of the asking price and for that reason it was an adventure and it was an adrenaline producing adventure the realtor said to me Donna Blair who was the widow who was selling the ranch he said Donna Blair is going to like the idea of you so give me that $21,000 and a signed hardcover copy of Cowboys Are My Weakness and I'll see what I can do. This is the great thing about small towns. It is the great thing about small towns and she agreed to sell me the ranch and she agreed to carry the note herself even though I didn't have a job and I was a recent grad school dropout and I was living in my car so for all those reasons it was an adrenaline producing adventure but also it's important to say that once she expressed that belief in me even though she was a total stranger to me it would have seemed terrible to say no it would have seemed like I was turning around and trying to swim right upstream everything in the world was funneling me toward that ranch and there was really no way to say no or at least that's how it seemed not that I wanted to I fell in love with it I seriously consider not doing it even though it was a crazy thing to do given my life circumstances and given how much I didn't know about ranching I mean just for one thing you know as ill-equipped as I was to pay for it I was more ill-equipped to care for it I come from New Jersey and deep in suburbia and you know you turn the hot water faucet on and the water comes out of the wall miraculously you know I didn't know I knew almost nothing and you've lived the house has not burned down everything has survived so that's fantastic congratulations I did I learned the learning curve was steep so I want to talk a little bit because you started out as a fiction writer and you've written essays and have a collection a little more about me but memoir is a different animal oh my goodness and for me memoir is a journey and I have a little something I want you to read and I want to talk about it so you want to use your book or my book no your book okay I gotta find it of course you know you'd think I would mark the page but I did not do that today I hit all my mark I had this book I've been carrying around with me for weeks and it had you know three dozen sticky yellow sticky okay there it is so from here to there okay this book has taken me nearly five years to write a long time even by my own molasses standards when I started I was attempting to express my love for a piece of land that has defined the largest portion by far of my life somewhere along the way I came to understand that to write a book about my little parcel of take your breath beauty sitting up here because in one of the last valleys in North America that will go under water when the oceans start to rise in earnest to write a book about loving this particular pristine acreage when so many millions of acres are being destroyed at an unprecedented rate would be a kind of heresy somewhere in the process I started writing toward an answer to the question I wake up with every morning and go to bed with every night how do I find hope on a dying planet and if there is no hope to be found how do I live in its absence in what state of being respect tenderness unmitigated love the rich and sometimes deeply clarifying dreamscape of vast inconsolable grief in her book Hope in the Dark Rebecca Solnit calls for us to redefine hope as an accounting of complexities and uncertainties with openings is there an opening before us big enough to save the planet and if so is there an opening big enough to save the planet that does not necessitate the annihilation of us E.O. Wilson says we could take the earth all the way down to the microbes and she would still find a way to recover even now evidence of the earth's ability to heal herself is all around us a daily astonishment every day the Everglades purify stream water by filtering out agricultural toxins mycelium mushrooms filter radioactivity from the ground around Chernobyl earthworms are still cleaning all that DDT we put in the soil in decades past we won't know until the ninth inning what she'll do in her last at bat this book has been an effort to write my way to an understanding of how to be alive in the meantime in the final days if not of the earth then at least of the earth as I've known her because it has only been in knowing her that I've come to know myself thank you so what's the journey of the book I mean you're talking about so what is the journey I mean what was the revelation for you in writing this book yeah well the first thing to say is to acknowledge what you said about memoir like I thought I've written all these personal essays memoir will be a breeze that was funny that was a funny thought memoir I teach memoir I taught it before I wrote this which is now strikes me as an absurdity I mean memoir is is in fiction when you're writing fiction and you're bored you can blow up a car or you can have a handsome Italian my students are up there do not say that you can you can have a handsome Italian walking and deliver a line you know you can have a moose run through run up your driveway like in fiction even if it's autobiographical which mine is there's always that option to get out of your boredom by making something happen and so it's a very I came to think of it compared to memoir as like a very vertical process it pops up and it dives down memoir is like it's like water flowing out across a field and sinking in you know it's saturation and you just have to sit there while it saturates and hope that meaning arises you know and it's hard to sit there because in those bored places that's where all the self-hatred you know comes in and like what you know why would anyone care about this so all those naysaying voices in the writer's head like boredom is the enemy of them but there's no choice in memoir but to just sit there I felt like when I was writing this I felt like I was a calf like standing in the middle of a field like staring with my mouth open and I felt I imagined the reader looking at this calf you know just like with my tongue out I did like I felt so dumb when I was writing this book and so plain and so unadorned in a way that fiction isn't you know the process with the book was my agent my editor me when we started talking about this which we talked more before it was ever written than I ever had with a book and so it was like all ranch all the time that's what it was going to be it was going to be a year in Provence in Colorado we called it among ourselves and it was going to be you know like Bailing Hay and Birthing Lambs and chopping wood and the return of the bluebirds and the Perseid meteor showers which it is all it is all those things but I wrote that book and we all hated it you know it just wasn't a book yet you know to your point of addressing in that passage and it was my agent who said isn't this the book where you really talk about what happened to you as a child which I hadn't at all in this book but what I said to her when she said that was well that's all I've done my whole career is talk about what happened to me as a child and she's like no no you haven't and I was like oh and she said she said no you haven't talked about it in this plain spoken way like you're talking about wood or Bailing Hay and and that was true and you're not hiding behind fiction anymore right I had always couched it in fiction or metaphor or dream or whatever and it wasn't because I was hiding exactly that same teacher who said no female bodily excretions he said you can't swing a dead cat anymore without hitting an abuse story and for alas it's true but there's a reason for that and for all the things he said like for some reason I internalized that like most stuff I was able to push back against him which is really what graduate school is you know I tell my students that all the time this is about finding out the kind of writer you don't want to be but in any case so I just really didn't want to be boring you know but anyway that's we're getting that's two-cycle in any case so so I wrote so I so I added the chapters about my childhood the chapters that negotiate between the ranch and my childhood and of course she was right you know the ranch has a lot more meaning if it's the healing place if it's the safe place compared to this childhood that was the quickest way to say it if you haven't read the book is my both my parents drank a ton and my dad was violent he broke my femur when I was four so I spent my fourth year in a three-quarter body cast and then there was a lot of other sorts of abuses including sexual in my junior high and early high school years so and my mom was sort of too drunk to deal but so I so I put that in the book from this side and then as I just read about you know I over the last eight years which is really how long it's been now I started writing it you know the climate catastrophe has become more and more and more present to all of us but to me and so it's kind of like my childhood came from this side the climate catastrophe came from this side they met over the scaffolding of the ranch which was very tactile you know bailing hey chopping wood and and I came to understand you know if you're lucky you write a book and it will really show you something and what this book really showed me is that my response to my childhood the way I look at that now as an adult is like this two-handed you know I I I grieve for that girl she was terrified she thought her father was going to kill her every day I have all this sadness about it but also it got me here to this life that I and there were people that I write about along this into the world earliest and the most steadfast this woman named Martha Washington who was sort of a glorified babysitter who taught me right from wrong so I have all this you know affection for her and all this joy about having survived my father's house and made it to this life that I love so much and and those two ways of thinking about a thing together from the joy is you know exactly what the world's asking me of me right now vis-a-vis climate change like I got to love the world every minute and I've got to grieve it too and I can't pretend that it's not dying but it's still beautiful and that's cause for celebration and those two things side by side I mean I know that some of you are out there going yeah this is like 101 you know good for you Pam for like getting there at age 57 but but you know I wasn't I wasn't raised by sane people so it takes me a while to get to these things you know and so that's where I got that's what the book showed me this like of course that's what the world is asking of us is to hold the grief and the joy and the wonder side by side and it's really interesting because part of that thread that connects those two things is mothers so your mother there's Martha Washington but your mother died right before you bought the ranch is that right yes and Terry Tempest Williams says to you now you're untethered and you say now I bought the ranch and it was my way to re-tether to like so I want you to talk about that but I want to talk about that idea and then I get another question about mothers well yeah I mean my mother and I my mother was a beautiful talented alcoholic and we were very close in certain ways but she didn't mother me per se you know she was smart and funny and gorgeous she Martha Washington who became my lighthouse for my young life my mother was in the hospital having just given birth to me and she wanted to go to a party from the hospital and she went to a bulletin board and there was Martha Washington's name on the bulletin board for babysitting at the obstetrics ward right and she called her and I mean it's a miracle I mean it is it's a miracle trust me Martha Washington came to the hospital to watch me so my mother could leave the hospital and go to a party I mean she was she had my mother I'll say that for her and Martha fell in love with me like instantly and then sort of dedicated the rest of her life to me I mean really to my safety and my care and to teaching me how to swim and teaching me how to read when I was two and a half and teaching me how to hold doors for my elders and teaching me that like that attitude is the right response to almost everything and I would have never had any of that you know she was in her sixties when I met her so I was her late in life project and she died when I was 20 and you know every good thing about me comes from that but but after my dad broke my leg she tried to take me from my parents and that turned into a thing and so we moved to Pennsylvania we moved away from Martha and I still got to see her a lot but not as much and it was really when we moved to Pennsylvania that I turned to the outside to the to the outside world and long walks in the woods and you know understanding that I could be mothered by mother mother nature and and I take that so literally now even now at my age when I'm very sad I will go outside and I will like curl up in the roots of a tree or I will you know build a little snow cave and get in the snow cave or I will always you know take a walk and look at the beauty and all that but I when I'm really sad I will become a child of the earth wrapped around me I will find that position and you know it's one of those things that I only realized really quite recently that not everybody does like I just thought it was a thing people did because I do it I'm just going to read this to you because you say this in the book when you give yourself wholly to a piece of ground its goodness enters your bloodstream like an infusion you will never be alone in the same way again never quite dislocated your heart will grow into and back out of that ground like a tree that's beautiful I love that so let's talk a little bit about I want to talk about I mean I've got these kind of I think I was going to ask about the ranch I'm pretty sure but I want to talk about home the concept of home and I I completely identify with this idea of not feeling like there's a place for me and what does home mean and I'm just wondering how your concept of home what is your concept of home and how has it changed one of my students said I wonder if it's different because she's not at the ranch 365 days out of the year and so I just want to talk about how has your concept of home changed since you've moved you've been on the ranch that's a complicated question especially right now because I have great fear for this country and I have great fear that we will not be free in this country for very much longer and I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave the ranch and move to another country and so honestly like I'm hedging my bets about how committed I am to it right now because I'm so frightened but prior to the current goings on in Washington I would say that the you know driving around that last bend to the ranch the last bend of the Rio Grande and there I can see it like it's a feeling like I've never had you know anywhere in my life the feeling of like who my whole body relaxes you know my whole body relaxes and maybe if I lived there 300 just to answer your students question maybe if I were there 365 days a year maybe I would be cranky about it or maybe I would be like God I want sushi or maybe I would be like my neighbors you know drive too fast I don't know I don't know what people say about their neighbors for me the fact that it's always the place I'm trying to get back to just makes it so valuable you know I can't make my living there and also teaching is so important to me it has become I mean when you asked about home I thought wow you know there's something homish about about mentoring and being with students like that's a kind of home in my life that if I lost the rancher if I had to give it up I would make a home in my role of mentoring with certain students I have such amazing students and they're publishing amazing books and so many so much of what's good in my life right now is mentoring these books into the world that we need so badly you know these books of these young writers and not such young new writers and so but the fact that I have to leave to work and I like to leave I do I like sushi a lot you know and I like really good coffee and I like film and I like I even like dry cleaning you know like there's things that I like I think oh I get to dry clean my blazer next week I thought that today several times with enthusiasm there's so many things at the ranch you know that we that are so profoundly healing but I'm not a loner and I'm not a meat and potatoes person and I you know there's many wonderful things about coming to the city and talking with people who read and you know and eating Indian food you know like there's I like it both ways I have it both ways and I like it both ways and and as a result of me having to be gone from the ranch so much going home always feels good I think at home though then in that case can just be saying that you're more at home in who you are now because it really feels like this book I mean Pam I've read everything you've written and I this book feels like a revelation to me it feels like you have come to something I mean I really I mean I know that you're writing fiction about your life and that kind of stuff but I just really feel like you went in there and you said here it is I just feel like you kind of settled in I don't know I'm totally projecting I don't know I think that's right I mean I think I I mean you know you know this I assume you know this I don't know how old you are exactly I'm close yeah this amazing thing happens to women when they turn 50 you know I feel so sorry for women who don't make it to 50 yeah because 50 is such a miracle because you stop caring what other people think of you and it's a miracle I never care it's a miracle and you just say what you think and the filters come off and you're not worried about you know oh did I hurt his feelings or do I look alright you know all that stuff like a bunch of it fell away at 40 but then the whole rest of the show just dropped at 50 and and so a lot of it's just that but it's but it's also that the ranch taught me you know the ranch taught me I could be responsible I mean I paid off the ranch during the West Fork Fire there's a big chapter in here called Diary of a Fire and I made my final payment really on a day that we didn't know whether the ranch was going to burn down or not and I thought if I hand through this check is that going to make the ranch more likely to burn down or not or less likely but but you know I I did this crazy adrenaline producing thing of buying the ranch and then I paid for it and I paid for every bit of it with money I earned from my teaching and my writing and and there's something in that that calms me down and makes me feel like I did write by it you know I I learned I failed I tried harder I figured out how to give an animal a shot in the middle of the night when the roads aren't plowed I sweet my own chimney I learned all about fencing and you know UV protector and plumbing I can fix a cell phone with a steak knife now and I did I took my own cell phone apart with a steak knife and I fixed it but you know I think the combination of paying for the ranch of putting it into a conservation easement which I did I think for the last 25 years I've had I did this to myself but I've had this like oh I'm going to let it down I'm going to fail it I'm going to lose it it's going to be subdivided like all these crazy thoughts in my head like it was my responsibility and now and now it's in a conservation easement so as long as there's you know a country and a Colorado I'm worried about that but as long as those things hold you know it will be protected so ultimately I did write by it even though I maybe had no business doing it I mean it's like in your book you know it's so much like in your book where you say oh I deserve to have the fire it's that same impulse and and I was thinking about that today how much that's like because I was like I'm going to lose the ranch I'm going to hurt the ranch I'm going to burn the ranch down and and I didn't you know I didn't I showed up and and I and I'm proud of that I think we need to talk about being the cowboy because I think the thing about it is that we're really close in age and I think a lot of women in particular in this audience when I do book stuff women come up to me and talk to me about the kind of life I've lived and they're I wish I could do that they say and so I want to talk I want you to talk about being the cowboy but also the kinds of ideas that women grow up with and and where do we go from here because you know what sisters it's us right now this is it it's us so yeah well the easiest way to talk about that is to say when I wrote Cowboys and My Weakness when I came out here from New Jersey and fell in love with this landscape and this landscape in particular you know Colorado in particular not just the Rocky Mountains not just the West everyone always says you live in Montana don't you I was like no I've never lived in Montana I live in Colorado you know I because I was dating hunting guides and river guides and becoming a hunting guide and a river guide myself but always like behind the man always I thought that in my own naive way I think I thought that I needed a man to translate this landscape for me that if I could get close to the man the cowboy hence the title not real Cowboys exactly but you know I could get proximity to this landscape and that they were the translators and this book very much like I wrote my way to that sentence where I say I finally realized I could be the cowboy you know I I I wrote my way to that sentence in good faith you know what I mean like I I didn't know that sentence and try to I got to it I was like oh that happened you know and and I do think you know owning the ranch and caring for it was the best way to have proximity to to understand that I have a relationship with this land I have a relationship with these trails a woman a student of mine came to me crying because her her husband has passed away a few years ago but she was like I'm so afraid to go out and hike you know without him and I said well I'll go with you like call me like we'll go together because I've always gone out by myself I always was the cowboy I just didn't see it until I wrote this but yeah I have the same experience somebody a friend of mine got divorced and she said I don't know how to mow the lawn and I was like yeah so what do we do what do we do I mean I really feel like this is one of the things I've been talking about of this little spiel called Marlboro Woman where I say you know when I wrote my book people said oh my god weren't you afraid living by yourself oh my god weren't you lonely and I wrote the book and answered to those questions and I feel like women need to be not only reading stories of women who are doing it on their own but they need to be getting out there and experiencing their own strength and their own independence because I do really think that women are the future you know I teach a lot as I said and I teach both men and women but the largest of all ages I have house-sitters that come to my ranch and take care of things while I'm gone they're almost always young women and when I get in a room with women of any age who have stories to tell and who want to tell their stories it's so powerful and what I don't understand and what I want the way I want to help women in the next years whatever it is we're moving into right now I want to help women know their own power you know because everywhere I look I see young women, older women post-50 year old women who have more power in their little fingers than these frightened lying men who are selling us out yeah and I just I know the patriarchy, I know the media I know all the things that are amassed against us but if women can just keep reaffirming, if we can just reaffirming each others you know not just power but ability to help do you remember when Christine Blazy Ford was hearing I just want to help I just want to help and that's the thing we can help we just have to keep telling each other I see you that's the thing I say more than anything I say now I say it constantly I see you I can see it it's not power to destroy or overtake it's power to help it's power to build beautiful things that will help and even if we got rid of all the the current the current administration even if we got rid of all that we're still facing a catastrophe and we need compassion and we need ideas and we need to help there's so many young people with good ideas we need to empower them you know the young farmers and these young scientists who are coming up with you know all these things to pull carbon out of the air all these things but unfortunately we have you know women keep being told to shut up and they're being told to shut up so much right now we're almost not noticing how much they're being told to shut up and that can't stand can't stand I have no idea how much time we have left Justin oh great I have a great so I just want to terrific you know the largest part of this book is Diary of a Fire so my house burned down so I know what this is like but I was thinking I'm just going to float this idea because you render this fire in incredible detail and you're using stuff from NCWeb and you've got your defining terms and it's it's huge it's like it's like the Moby Dick of Fires and I was just thinking about this like why did she do that what's going on there what's going on there and you say at the end I now know so much about fires that I will never be afraid of fire in the same way and then I thought oh my god that fire is like a metaphor for climate change you know we start if we what we have to do and I know all of us think this we hear bad news and we go right and we have to keep our eyes open and I think that's one of the things that your book does really well is to encourage us to kind of love and grieve and to keep our eyes open and get ready yeah I mean for me you know knowledge has always been power you know for me if like there's a funny noise in the plane like I'm the one who pushes my call button and say I want to know what that noise is can you please tell me what that noise is like I like to have information and one of the reasons that the fire chapter isn't the largest part of the book it's just the longest chapter right and it was a big fight with my publisher because they all live in New York you know where it's raining probably right now and they were like nobody cares about fire and I was like you know and and it was it was interesting because everyone on the east coast was like the fire chapter is too long and everyone on the west coast was like I couldn't put down the fire chapter you know in the west and it really was like it was a Mississippi River debate but we live with it now you know we live with fire now as I know you all know and for me going through the West Fork fire and being the most obsessive in C-Web watcher I know there are other people in this room who think no I was more obsessive than you but in fact I was the most obsessive in C-Web watcher there has ever been and I would cross reference the various sites and I would look up the glossary of wildland fire terms and I wanted the chapter to reflect that so much about that but also you know this is about language and this is about like I learned the language of fire and as a writer and someone who loves the natural world like I learned the language of river rafting I learned the language of western geology I learned the language of sheep hunting when I was a guide I learned the language of you know the Colorado Plateau like it's an honoring to learn the language of something and I wanted to honor fire and fire fighters and fire fighting you know with that chapter of like once we can speak the language a thing doesn't become so scary anymore and that's really the arc of that long essay it's like I'll never be scared in the same way again because now I understand that aspen trees have water in their trunks now I understand what what if what's it called I can't think of what's called the funny word what's the funny firefighting tool a pulaski yeah now I exactly thank you now I know what a pulaski look at all the firefighters now I know what a pulaski is you know there's there's something about and I mean I know you know it's because I've been listening to your book all day but but like knowing the language of the place you are that that that syncs you into it and makes it home you know back to that like I am more at home in fire danger times because I speak the language of fire now yeah okay I think we're going to have some questions so if you have a question for Pam if you would raise your hand and we have people who are coming around with microphones and I'm going to point oh come on I didn't ask one animal question she's got some great stories oh I hi I was just wondering about your writing practice could you talk about that I wish I could say I had a practice I wish I could answer this question that some way that sounds more like a grown up but you know I I don't write every day and I don't write every week and I don't write every month that's the truth I avoid writing whenever possible I just heard Ocean Vong talk the other night in San Francisco and he said he said I loathe writing but I love seeing and that's the thing I love to collect stuff to write about just don't like the writing part but the truth is I teach so much I have a master degree thesis students this spring alone so I will be reading probably 5,000 pages of student work so I really do prioritize my students these days I realize that's not what you asked me I write in between I write when a flight gets canceled I write when I'm home at the ranch for a couple weeks I'll go out there to my little cabin and see what happens I write when I have something do sometimes I I get things do on purpose because it will make me write I'm writing short stories right now and I'm really enjoying that but when I say I'm writing short stories right now I haven't touched a short story since the week after New Years so I don't have a practice I wish I did I wish I could say what I hear so many people say I set the alarm for five and it goes off and then I make my coffee and then I write for two hours straight and then I get to go take the dogs for a walk it's not my life and I think maybe that's okay I think maybe writing isn't meant to be on a clock or on a schedule at least not for some writers I said a long time ago that I didn't really care whether I wrote two books or six books or ten books as long as I was really engaged in the book I was writing and I was engaged in the world alongside the book I was writing and that's kind of turned out to be true it kind of amazes me that I've written six books because I'm so bad at staying in the chair but once I get on a roll then I might stay in longer like I might really carve out like once I feel like something's happening like I've got a book coming together then I might block out time if I can to really write and then sometimes I'll write for 17 hours in a row you know if it's rolling but that only happens you know a couple times a year so I again I know this isn't the right answer but it's the true answer other questions over here I just want to address your graduate school experience and writing teachers and why do you think they're so prescriptive well not all of them I mean why is there such a propensity to be prescriptive is there any room for prescription in the writing classroom I mean is it all evil oh no I mean I teach at two universities and I started my own non-profit where we teach all the time I mean there's wonderful wonderful writing teachers I hire them for writing by writers all the time you know I went to school at a particular moment in a particular program and you know lots of writers came out of that program I learned a ton there I should say that I learned a ton at Utah I went to Utah it's not a secret but I learned a ton there they just didn't like my work you know but that's okay what I I can't talk about what other teachers do but what I do when I read student work is what I'm trying to do and this is really important to me this answer I'm trying really hard to see what that story or novel or memoir wants to be that's I always read everything twice I sat in the car I don't know if people saw me I was sitting in my car on my computer because I had promised to get the story back so I was sitting out there for an hour because I didn't know how long it would take me to get down here in the snow and I was like re-reading this student story for the second time because she's in a touchy place you know emotionally and I just wanted to make sure that I could really get in there and see the story and then I made all my notes and saved it you know and then I came in here to do this like my first job is to see what the story wants to be and then think about how I might help it get there but my bigger job is to just hold a place for that person to tell their story and maybe to put books in their hand that'll help them so that's what I do as a teacher but I know many wonderful teachers I work with a woman in Davis Katie Peterson she's an amazing teacher I mean there's many amazing writing teachers there's also some really shitty ones other questions over here hi I was wondering if in the future writing again and I know you're knee deep and being a great educator I'm kind of curious if you're going to put your Icelandic adventures in fiction coming up or essays like maybe being the the western woman that's gone to a different country and being the outsider again and how that makes you to come back how that makes you to come back home when you leave the country to such a different place I loved Iceland I went to Iceland this summer and it was so much fun it's such a beautiful landscape everywhere you turn I don't know if I'll write about Iceland I think I probably will I already wrote one little tiny piece about being in Iceland it was for an anthology called Letter to a Stranger and I wrote about seeing this woman who was writing her Iceland of course bringing the sheep down which is when they collect all the sheep in the fall so I already have a little Icelandic piece but it was like I said it was very short I imagine Iceland will crop up my experiences there will crop up in things as I write forward and that piece was really fun to write in fact it's my favorite thing I've written this fall it's only like 500 words long but I really I got into her that woman I mean of course not for real I got into my imagined version of her but anyway I imagine Iceland will work its way in to things I write over here I keep hitting this side because I'm aim that way but anybody over here questions did you have one in the orange sweater over here we're recording for podcast and live streaming so we need you to wait for the microphone you have a new cabin I do and it was described so beautifully in your last book yes thank you so you're getting used to that now but have you lost anything about the original condition of that is part of the old cabin I'll tell you what happened you might find this interesting so there was a cabin on my property for those of you who don't know there was a cabin on my property that was the homesteaders cabin the homesteaders son lived in it for about 60 years and when I took over the property it was in pretty bad disarray and then over the 25 years I've owned the property it started to split like the ground sort of rose up under it and it was going to split like a cupcake and I had left it alone because I thought that's Bob's like the spirit of Bob who lived in it for 65 years that's his spot and I don't need to mess with his spot but then it was going to fall down if I didn't fix it so with some trepidation I found a guy, a local guy RJ Mann who loves the old cabins and loves to preserve them and he fixed it he made it a writing space for me and I have a good friend named Souther who actually communicates with the dead and the dead make himself so known to him he can hardly go outside some days and I have seen him do this like I don't have a strong belief system around this but I have seen Seth like tell friends of mine amazing things about their dead relatives that I could no way know anyway so I believe in Seth I guess that's the way to say it I don't know if I believe that the dead are floating around but I believe in Seth's ability to communicate with them and so I ask Seth Seth sees Bob all the time my homesteader and they smoke together and every time Seth comes to the ranch so I ask Seth like how was Bob about the cabin because in truth like I have a red pellet stove that's my version of girly but there you have it and so I put a red pellet stove in and I thought oh Bob would hate that Bob would hate the red pellet stove mostly it's still his cabin all the same wood is used it's just used a little differently we really preserved it but we raised the roof so that I could actually stand up in it because he was very short and we put the red pellet stove in and he sees it the old way which I thought was so beautiful nice there was right here I was just wondering given that you came from New Jersey was there an activity that turns you towards nature when you were young and is that activity still something that you find yourself coming back to kind of over and over again yeah lots of things but the main thing is there was this guy in our neighborhood it was actually Pennsylvania by that time because we moved to Pennsylvania when I was four but same difference really Eastern Pennsylvania there was a guy in our neighborhood named Colonel Bob Miller and he was a retired army guy and he took all the kids camping and we had to ride under wool blankets in the back of station wagons and he would tell us we were going out west and it was 100 degrees in a Pennsylvania summer and so we believed him because we were under these wool blankets in the back of station wagons and he would be like oh we just crossed the Mississippi and then he'd be like oh we just crossed the wide Missouri and then he would get permission he would stop and get permission from excuse me for that to enter the reservation and if you looked out from under the blanket you got demoted because we had ranks we started out as buck privates and then we advanced to corporal and sergeant and chief petty officer all of those and really we were going to just really a city park in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and we we camped out and we had we took hikes in the very small woods and we had night watches you had to stay up between the dead man's watch was three to four and you and another kid had to share three marshmallows and one hot dog and he talked about nature about the church of nature and he was an amazing guy and I think he influenced all our lives but I loved it so much I went from the time I was five to the time I was 20 I went back and got to ride with my head up but I went back to sort of take care of the other kids and even though it was just this little city park in Pennsylvania Monocacy Park I think probably that's one huge reason why as soon as I graduated from high school I was like going west he taught us how to love camping and how to respect the woods and how to be smart in them he taught all of the kids in my neighborhood that he took 20, 30 kids at a time it was amazing it was like the unofficial boy scouts you know way in the back what has the ranch taught you that has surprised you the most I don't know if this is surprised the ranch has taught me to be still and I would have said I'm incapable of being still and I'm still not very good at it but it's true like any amount of calmness or stillness or lack of anxiety that I can come up with which isn't much I owe to the ranch I owe to sitting on the porch and watching the light change on the meadow it's taught me it's taught me the value of being still even though I don't achieve that very often I think we can do one more quick question over here you sort of primed us for an animal story and those sheep look quite interesting I have no idea what sort of sheep those are those are Icelandic sheep in fact do you have a funny story about Icelandic sheep I do it's kind of long I have a donkey story can I tell you a donkey story I can tell that one quicker the Icelandic one is too long to tell because we're out of time and I know everybody wants to get home but if you buy the book it's hilarious but if you buy the book yes the Icelandic sheep story is in there but here's the donkey story which is also in there but it's such a good one so I brought these two mini donkeys home and the dogs were absolutely like they did not I let the donkeys sort of have the run of the place and the dogs would chase the donkeys and the donkeys would chase the dogs and one reason I had to leave the donkeys out is because the way my pastor is fenced the donkeys were so little they could walk through the walk arounds for the people anyway there was a lot of dog donkey tension and I kept thinking it might go away well one day after the donkeys had been there for a couple months I had to go to the valley to buy a bunch of supplies and I left the donkeys and the horses in the yard and I left the horses, I mean sorry I left the dogs in the house so that the donkeys and the horses could have their way and eat the green grass, the sweet grass in the yard and there's a porch that belongs to the dogs it's where they sleep when they're not inside it's completely the dog porch all their stuff is on it and I had noticed that the donkeys had walked up the stairs on their little hooves to the dog porch to really check it out they were like sniffing the dog beds and sniffing the dog bowls, they did that a lot and then they clipped down off the porch they're only like this big they're actually shorter than the dogs and so I go to the valley I come back loaded with stuff and Desayo, my pacifino was running and running and running up and down the fence line which means something terrible has happened so I go flying up the driveway and I catch Desayo and he seems fine and there's the donkeys and they seem fine and I see my other horse and he's fine and the sheep are in their pen and the chickens are fine and I'm like well what was the problem and Desayo's all frothed up so I go to start unloading the groceries and I walk up across the dog porch which is how I get to the door and the donkeys have shit all over the dog porch like not once or twice or four times but they have covered the dog porch in shit like they had been saving up for weeks and somehow knew when I was going to go to the valley and they had picked up the dog beds with their teeth and flung them and then shit on them and they shit into an open cooler that I had drying on the dog porch and they kicked over the dog bowls and shit in them it was the most amazing it was like a fraternity prank except you know somehow it had been carried out by only the two of them it remains a great mystery and of course they had done this with the dogs like noses pressed on the kitchen window looking at the dog porch like watching them shit all over everything and so anyway that was the final straw and I got some cement and I closed up those gaps and everybody had their own space after that thank you let's thank Karen Avanon Pam Houston for a fantastic conversation and thank you all for coming please join us in the lobby for a book signing