A Little More About Me

The road I've taken these five years has been a long and twisted one,writes Pam Houston in the first piece of this stirring collection. That journey takes the acclaimed author ofCowboys Are My WeaknessandWaltzing the Catacross five continents, through forty whitewater rivers, over three thousand miles of backcountry hiking trails, on more than four hundred planes. But whatever her destination -- the Alaskan outback or the mountains of Bhutan -- these are the starting points for her personal emotional journey.Through her stories we meet some good dogs, a few good men, and the occasional grizzly. Ultimately, Houston's adventures -- and her clear-eyed reflections upon them -- prove what she has always suspected: fiction has nothing on real life.

Pam Houston is the author of two works of fiction, Cowboys Are My Weakness ( the 1993 winner of the Western States Book Award) and Waltzing the Cat. Her stories have been selected for Best American Short Stories (1990, 1999), Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards (1999), and The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999), as well as a Pushcart Prize. Houston is the editor of the anthology Women on Hunting, and has written the text for a book of photoghraphs called Men before 10 A.M.. She has been a contributing editor to Elle and Ski, writes regularly for Condé Nast Sports for Women, aand has been a guest on CBS-TV Sunday Morning with "Postcards from Colorado"

She lives at an altitude of 9,000 feet in southwestern Colorado.