Houston Offers Insightful Journey
in Contents May Have Shifted

An exclusive Authorlink interview
with Pam Houston

By Ellen Birkett Morris
August 2012

In her latest book, Pam Houston take readers on a journey across the world with the fictional character Pam as she seeks comfort, adventure and insight. Houston offers her thoughts on the development of the novel and writing life.

AUTHORLINK: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

HOUSTON: There are so many ways to answer this question, depending on what level of “wanting” you mean, but one true answer is that when I was in the 8th grade I had the good fortune to be an exchange student in Wales with the Rotary club. The Rotary club in the town I lived in was extremely active, so much so that a different member of the club took me on an excursion every single weekend I was there. One weekend, one of the families took me to Stratford on Avon, and there, at the Royal Shakespeare Theater, I saw a young Kenneth Branagh doing Henry the 5th. An empty stage, just the actor and the language, he climbed a kitchen step stool to give the St. Crispin’s Day speech to nobody. That may have been the time I really knew I wanted to be a writer. Years later, when I saw the movie, I was so shocked to see all those horses, all those dying men, all that mud. It is not that I didn’t understand, in 8th grade, that the play was about war, I did. But the emphasis in that production in Stratford was on the lines, and the man who delivered them so movingly.

AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your education and the ways in which your education has fostered your writing? What degrees do you hold?

HOUSTON: I hold a BA in English from Denison University. I also hold an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Denison as well. In between receiving the two of those I spent five years in a creative writing PhD program at the University of Utah, which I walked away from, not ABD (my dissertation was my first collection of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and was completed and published at the time I left) but because I didn’t believe the students, myself included, were being treated respectfully at the time. That said, I learned much of what I know about writing in my five years at Utah. At Denison I learned a great deal about literature, and also how to be a human being, but Utah was where I developed my real voice as a writer, and I owe my teachers there thanks, even though I did not quite finish my degree.

AUTHORLINK: You live a wonderfully adventurous life between travel and challenging physical activities – how has this fed your writing?

HOUSTON: Directly. Nothing gets me excited to write like being in a brand new landscape and trying to familiarize myself with it as much as I can in however much time I can, and often some kind of physical adventure it the best way to do this. I am writing these answers from a Greek island, where 24 hours ago I either sprained or broke my ankle, and because Greece, as lovely as it is, is all rocks and cliffs and steep marble stairways, this injury has already become its own kind of adventure. Today I slithered down 100 yards of beach like a reptile, for instance, because I couldn’t stand to miss one day of swimming while we are here.

AUTHORLINK: Travel adventures form the basis for Contents May Have Shifted. Tell me about the structure of the book and its associative nature. Why do you think linked stories and stories told in episodes are so popular today?

HOUSTON: I have always believed that we feel meaning that gets made associatively more deeply, on more of a gut level, than we feel meaning that gets made chronologically or logically. The poets know this, and I am a great appreciator of poetry. I think our lives are very fractured these days, and so it makes sense that our fiction would be fractured too. I think we are beginning to have our doubts, as a culture, about the existence of linear time.

AUTHORLINK: How do you manage writing, teaching and an active traveling life?

HOUSTON: With care, and with the help of a superfantastic dogsitter named Linda.

AUTHORLINK: Where do stories begin for you – character, plot, a first line?

HOUSTON: None of those. Stories always begin the same way for me. Something happens out in the concrete physical world…I slither into the sea for a hundred yards like a reptile, say, and then something else happens, an overheard line of conversation…”Oh, yeah, I always roll with Rose Quartz,” and then something else happens….a chef hangs a dried octopus over the road in front of his restaurant to indicate that the catch was good, that he will be cooking octopus that night, and the skin on the octopus is dried to the point of translucence. Before you know it, I have enough of these glimmers for a story.

AUTHORLINK: Tell me about where the premise of Contents May Have Shifted came from.

HOUSTON: Well, first I would have to know what you think the premise of Contents May Have Shifted is. It didn’t have a premise, I don’t think. I just started collecting glimmers, as I said above…it was much later that I had to think about things like overall narrative arc. For the first few years it was the form almost entirely driving the story.

AUTHORLINK: How long did it take you to write the book?

HOUSTON: Five years, if you don’t count the fallow year before I started, but after Sight Hound was finished.

AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your research. What resources did you draw on when developing the novel?

HOUSTON: All of the chapters begin in my experience of the places the narrator finds herself. There was no real research in the “library” sense.

AUTHORLINK: What challenges did this book pose and how did you overcome them?

HOUSTON: The biggest, and honestly, most enjoyable challenge was the ordering of the 144 chapters. An inordinate amount of thought went into the placement of each chapter…how they functioned within the narrative arc of the novel, how they functioned within the group of twelve mini chapters in which they occur, how they bump up against the mini chapters that occur immediately on both sides of them. There are eleven sets of twelve chapters, and twelve airplane stories dividing them.

I wanted the order to have a loose overall chronology. I wanted Pam to make progress of a certain kind. But I also wanted the ordering of the chapters to feel accidental, almost random, though in truth they were anything but. It was like a giant math problem, and truth be told, I love math problems. A giant Rubik’s Cube of a book to be solved.

AUTHORLINK: I love your thank you to “writers who gave me artistic permission for this book.” Sometimes as writers we need to see another writer do something daring to know it can be done. Talk more about this and what you learned from those writers you listed.

HOUSTON: It was Richard Bausch, who, the night I read the first twelve of these mini chapters at the Wisconsin Book Festival at an evening called Unveiled, where four of us were supposed to read brand new work that was completely untested and untried, said, “Pam, write a hundred of those and that is your next book.”

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried was a very important book to me when I was a young writer. He talks most eloquently about the ever shifting lines between autobiographical fiction and memoir.

Mark Doty and Nick Flynn each came out with fantastic memoirs that were modular during the years I was writing Contents, (Dog Years and The Ticking Is The Bomb, respectively) and they are two of my favorite books from that time.

Larry Levis’ poetry taught me everything I know about making associative meaning, and Carl Phillips’ poetry inspires me every day to write about the ineffable, and all matters of the soul.

My colleague Lucy Corin’s work reminds me that weird shit happens all the time and that fiction ought to reflect that. David Shields book Reality Hunger, is an important work to this one, and to anyone who is frustrated with the recent conservatization of genre borders.

Toni Morrison reminds me daily that there are no heroes nor villains, only characters that are “multiple.” Mike McNally and Fenton Johnson give me courage to write about my heart and inspire me to do it with clarity and elegance.

AUTHORLINK: What was your revising process like?

HOUSTON: That depends on which of the 15 major revisions you are talking about! There was a lot of compressing the language within the chapters, and a lot of moving the chapters around--endless moving the chapters around and rereading in the new order. When I got to the point where I had what I thought was a final draft, I got the idea to try a new revision technique that I called “Pulling up widows.” Every time there was a word or two at the end of a paragraph that spilled over to the next line, I found a way to compress the language of the paragraph so that it got pulled “up” to the line above. My book is in 144 short sections, so I did the same thing if a sentence or two at the end of a section was “widowed” onto a blank page. You can see how this becomes a self-perpetuating process. If I pulled up a three sentence-widow from the end of a section, and then pulled up word-widows from every paragraph within that section, I might create, by the time I was finished, new widows to pull up at the section’s end. I knew, of course, that the layout of my Microsoft Word manuscript would bear no resemblance to the typeset book. This was simply a way to say to each sentence, “I know you think you’re as tight as you can get, now lets tighten you up just a little bit more.”

AUTHORLINK: Who was it like working with Alane Salierno Mason on this book?

HOUSTON: Working with Alane was fantastic. I had done my last four books with the irreplaceable Carol Houck Smith, and after she died, I wondered if I would have to leave W.W. Norton simply because it was hard to imagine being there and not being with Carol. Alane showed an early interest in Contents, and I am so glad I paid attention to it. Alane is deeply intelligent, fair and humane. Like all the best editors, she can get quite ferocious on behalf of her writers when she feels they are being mistreated by the media or by anyone else. She pushed me hard at certain times, on certain points in the manuscript, but never unjustifiably, and she also understands the value of a well timed compliment. I couldn’t be happier with my decision to stay at Norton, and to work with Alane.

AUTHORLINK: Who is your agent? How and when did you connect with your agent?

HOUSTON: Liz Darhansoff. I met Shannon Ravenel at a writer’s conference before I had had anything published, and she read a story of mine there, and recommended me to Liz.

AUTHORLINK: What advice do you have to first time novelists about the craft of writing?

HOUSTON:

1. Just as important as everything you tell us in a novel is what you decide to hold back.
2. We don’t have to know the whole backstory by the end of the first chapter, or the end of the second chapter, or really, the end of the whole book.
3. Don’t waste the reader’s time.
4. To write a novel of real quality, it is absolutely essential to stay in the “not knowing” for an amazingly lengthy time…usually, years.
5. In other words, try not to ask, “what does it mean, where it is going, or, how does it end?”
6. Trust your subconscious to take care of those things while you are making your sentences beautiful and your images razor sharp.

AUTHORLINK: What advice do you have to first time novelists about breaking into publishing?

HOUSTON: Make the book the absolute best it can be before you show it to an editor. You should think it is absolutely bulletproof when you send it in. It won’t be, of course, there are at least 6 revisions to come, but only send it in at the point where you know you can not make it one iota better on your own.

AUTHORLINK: You direct the creative writing program at UC Davis. What role can a creative writing program play for a novice or emerging writer? What can’t it do for a writer?

HOUSTON: Most importantly, it can give them time and space to hone their craft. In the best case scenario, it can encourage their natural ability and cultivate it. Again, in the best case scenario it can create for them a constructively critical but ultimately supportive artistic community in which to share ideas. Sometimes I think the greatest gifts I give my students are the novels and collections of short stories by writers they have not heard of, that I put into their hands.

AUTHORLINK: What are you working on currently?

HOUSTON: I usually take the year after publication to let the next book find me, and we are not even quite half way through that year. I am working on a long story set in Mongolia. I have a Greece story to write. There are some essays I have been working on off and on, some on craft and one on turning 50. It is too early to speak about the next book length work.

Pam Houston divides her time between a ranch in Colorado and the University of California at Davis, where she is the director of the Creative Writing Program. She is the author of the bestselling Cowboys Are My Weakness. She has written for magazines including O, The Oprah Magazine and More.