Elk River Arts & Lectures: An Evening with Pam Houston

Photo: Adam Karsten

Novelist Pam Houston will open Elk River Arts & Lectures’ inaugural season with a reading and talk at the Blue Slipper Theatre, 113 E. Callender, in Livingston on Tuesday, September 17 at 7 p.m.

Houston is an award-winning author known for her autobiographical short stories, novels and essays, including the acclaimed Cowboys are My Weakness, A Little More About Me and Contents May Have Shifted.

“My books always come from events, people and places I have experienced or at least witnessed, but I also want to be free to mold and shape those events into the most meaningful story, the emotionally truest (as opposed to the most factually accurate) story, which sometimes means merging and shifting and tweaking reality to fit whatever demands the story begins to make on the material,” she told an interviewer from Psychology Today. “I have never been a big fan of lines, of mutually exclusive categories. I live more comfortably in the between spaces.”

Elk River Arts & Lectures is a new non-profit (501c3 status pending) that seeks to bring writers to Livingston for free readings, and also provide opportunities for those writers to work with local public school students. To that end, Houston and her partner, poet/musician Greg Glazner, will begin their Livingston visit by talking with students from Park High on Monday, September 16.

Houston’s work has been praised for pioneering women’s adventure writing. “Houston claims for women the terrain staked out by male writers from Hemingway to Richard Ford,” writes the Los Angeles Times. The Boston Globe describes it thusly: “Houston’s voice is something new in fiction-bright, edgy, touching, and ruefully self-aware as she rewrites the old heterosexual blues…. Her heroines are lean and tough, self-created adventurers.”

Houston’s reading is free, open to the public, and will be followed by a signing. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. The event is co-sponsored by Elk River Books and the Murray Hotel.