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What can animals teach us about being human? Join Pam Houston as she discusses her latest book with Becky Mandelbaum on this live Chuckanut Radio Hour!

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From Icelandic mares and Irish wolfhounds to elephants, leopards, hyena bitches, and a desert-adapted lioness named Charlie, Pam Houston has learned life’s most important lessons from animals. How to play. How to rest. How to love. How to die. How to be present with the dying. How to be present with the living and with the Earth. How to find joy in the least likely places. How to find joy, literally, everywhere. With playful sincerity, Houston finds power and promise in the teachings of our fellow creatures and reminds us that the animals are here for us, every day and everywhere. 

Pam Houston is the author of the short story collection Cowboys Are My Weakness, the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, and seven other books of fiction and nonfiction. Her books have won multiple Western States, Mountains and Plains and Colorado Book Awards and her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, the O Henry Prize Anthology and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She teaches creative writing at The Institute of American Indian Arts and UC Davis, is cofounder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers and fiction editor at the environmental arts journal Terrain.org. She lives on a homestead at 9,000 feet near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Her book of essays on kinship, Animals Taught Me Everything, will be published by Torrey House Press in October, 2026.

Pam Houston will be in conversation with: 

Becky Mandelbaum is the author of the novel The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals, an Indie Next Pick, and the story collection Bad Kansas, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award, the High Plains Book Award for First Book, and was a Kansas Notable Book. Her writing has received a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The New Yorker Daily Shouts, One Story, The Sun, and elsewhere. Her new novel Homewrecker is forthcoming in 2027. Originally from Kansas, she now lives in Bellingham, Washington.