Faculty Feature: Pam Houston

This summer at the Taos Summer Writers' Workshop Pam Houston is offering a Short Story Collections master class! If you're a fellow lover of the form, and have been needing some focused, quality feedback on your collection, then look no further. This master class will put you in a room with others who know the form intimately, will have read your work carefully, and are ready to give feedback on one of the most difficult things to write: a collection of stories.

Of the class Houston says, "We will have the luxury of time to talk about six manuscripts of short fiction, written by you and read by us all. I am a structuralist at heart, so my focus in directing you toward particular revision will usually start with the form the book as a whole is taking as well as the form and structure of each story. Is the story constructed, in other words, to exploit its full power?"

Pam Houston is a veteran faculty member at the Conference. One participant of her 2013 workshop said, "Pam Houston is the best writing teacher I've ever studied with. She is able to articulate the weaknesses in a draft with stunning perception and great kindness."

Pam Houston's most recent book is Contents May Have Shifted, published in 2012, by W.W. Norton. She is also the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, the novel, Sight Hound, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The 2013 Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, The Evil Companions Literary Award and multiple teaching awards. She is Professor of English at UC Davis, directs the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers and teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program and at writer’s conferences around the country and the world. She lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.