Glimmers of Pam Houston
Photo: Mike Blakeman
(The following is an excerpt from my January 2024 e-newsletter to subscribers. If you’d like to subscribe to my free and very occasional newsletter, please fill out the form at the bottom of my main blog page.)
Last week, I participated in an online writing class with Pam Houston. Pam’s work is witty and important, and I savored her soul-stirring memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country—which, come to think of it, could easily serve as the title of my own memoir-in-progress.
There are many ways in which Pam’s sensibilities seem to resonate with my own, especially her love for dogs and other more-than-human animals, her fondness for humor, and her sacred communion with wild nature. True, I don’t share Pam’s weakness for cowboys…and I wish I did share her gift for writing (more of) the essays I’m often crafting in my head. But hey, if we all wrote like Pam Houston, nobody would want to do anything but read.
During her lecture Pam said that most of her writing is driven by the physical world—especially the natural world. Here, again, I can relate, and I appreciate her concept of the “glimmers” that grab her attention and inspire her prose. Below is an excerpt from one of her essays, published in About Place Journal:
As I move through the world, I wait to feel something I call a glimmer, a vibration, a little charge of resonance that says, ‘Hey writer, look over here.’ I feel it deep in my chest, this buzzing that lets me know this thing I am seeing/hearing/smelling/tasting on the outside is going to help me unlock some part of a story I have on the inside.
This notion speaks to me, as I, too, tend to walk through the world seeking connections—whether with the cashier whose bicep bears a pawprint tattoo or the barred owl peering at me from my garden post. How do these connections unlock a story? Sometimes they don’t, of course, but often a glimmer sparks a surprising memory or association. Glimmers, Pam told us, can be a portal to the subconscious, and “I don’t believe art can happen unless the subconscious shows up.”
For me, to be outdoors in nature is to be awash in glimmers—the sights, sounds, and scents that help release the stories I hold inside. I can’t hear the call of a red-winged blackbird, for example, without being transported to that 300-acre hay farm in Vermont where my husband and I lived on one side of a rustic duplex and took daily walks to discuss Big Decisions like marriage (yes), having kids (no), and how we could shape our respective careers to study wild carnivores (still in progress).
I find that glimmers can generate sensitive personal material that might not be every reader’s cup of tea. But given the growing number of memoirs on the shelf at my local bookstore, I think there are many of us who crave to explore our own stories and to better connect with those of Others. As Pam put it, “the world finally got shitty enough that sincerity is cool.”