Like any MFA graduate worth their salt, I have a shelf in my library reserved for the writers I’ve also called my teachers. I mean this in a very literal way, and not in the traditional my-work-is-a-marriage-of-Joyce-and-Tolstoy way of thinking about literary influence; the majority of my artistic mentors have been living, breathing men and women with office hours on Monday and Wednesday afternoons.
Pam Houston is one such writer. As the director of the graduate program in creative writing at UC Davis, she’s sold a lot of books to fledgling writers vying for a place in one of her workshops. I’ve often heard other students gushing about her first collection of stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, a book that in many ways carved out the themes that would remain central to her work ever since, themes that might have emerged, as one reviewer remarked, “had an intelligent woman followed Hemingway around.”
