Check out Pam Houston's books at barnesandnboble.com A L S O+.T O D A Y Mara and Dann Reviewed by Norah Vincent A dystopian vision of our planet undergoing another ice age thousands of years in the future, as seen through the eyes of two young children T A B L E+T A L K Love the smell of dusty old books? Talk about what used book stores have that the big guys don't in Table Talk's Books area B O O K C A S E A new service for book lovers R E C E N T L Y Andrea Barrett By Peter Kurth (12/02/98) Jim Harrison By Jonathan Miles (12/02/98) Ken Follett By David Bowman (12/02/98) Andrew Sullivan By Carol Lloyd (11/30/98) Lorrie Moore By Dwight Garner (10/27/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		THE SALON INTERVIEW: PAM HOUSTON | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - This is not a deeper ambivalence toward men, then. I believe I'm less ambivalent about men than I used to be. I'm not sure how well "Waltzing the Cat" reflects that, because I'm not writing it as I sit here today. My next book, I think, is going to have a really good man in it. I've been through a lot of therapy lately, and as a result of that, I'm able to see everyone, but especially the male half of the population, in a better light. I'm seeing the good man. I have a very nice man in my life right now. He's very kind and smart -- that other kind of man, that suddenly you notice when you start to get your shit together a little bit. He teaches American literature, and he is not a cowboy. We're together, not married. However you say that. Are there writers that you'd say have influenced you? When I was writing "Cowboys," I was reading Russell Banks, Ron Carlson, Lorrie Moore. I was totally ripping off Lorrie Moore when I wrote "How to Talk to a Hunter." I was just trying to see if I could write a story like she did. Lately, I read a lot of Alice Munro. I'm a big fan of Tim O'Brien. I just read a first book I really like, "Rules of the Wild," by Francesca Marciano. She's an Italian-American who lives in Kenya, and the African landscape was wonderfully used. My early influences were the modernists, especially Lawrence. Everybody says Hemingway, so I guess so, although I never loved him the way I love Lawrence. The lineage is there with Raymond Carver, too, but then I'm sort of a plainspoken person. I couldn't write like Andrea Barrett, even if I wanted to. The title story of "Waltzing the Cat," about your troubled relationship with your father, seems different from the rest of the stories, except for the epilogue. I wrote the epilogue maybe a year after the stories, on an airplane, on a barf bag -- which is perfect -- when I was half-asleep and nauseated. There was a lot of controversy in the [publishing] house about whether we should add it or not. I fought for it and I got to keep it, although it was originally called "Equinox" and they made me change the title. "Waltzing" is very clipped, in the way that a lot of the stories in "Cowboys" were, and I wrote it right after "Cowboys." I feel like I'm writing with a lot more generosity of language and emotion now. In the epilogue, you seemed almost to be stepping into the picture and disappearing. To enter your life is to become invisible, and visible. It's that whole dialectic I'm working with, and the idea of framing. I made Lucy a landscape photographer because she had to have a job where she traveled, but I also had several things to say about framing. Photography is the one visual art I have any talent for, and it translated very well into what I was trying to talk about with stories and the way you make or save or erase your life with the stories you tell. Do you see writing as a way of working out your own problems? Or are the two so intertwined that you don't distinguish? Well, all those stories start in autobiography. I don't make any secret of that. Like Lucy, I had a rough childhood, and like the woman in "Cowboys," I duplicated that danger and that difficulty in love. I did what we all do: try to duplicate it, work it out and control it. I've learned a lot about why I did it. I wonder, too, how much the stories -- the desire in me to have stories -- sort of keeps me in that loop. I don't think that's true, but a lot of times I will put myself in a ridiculously complex and threatening situation because I can't resist the metaphor. For example, I went on a 15-day cruise with my father through the Panama Canal, because I couldn't resist the metaphor. I did it for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was that I was hoping we'd resolve our relationship -- that one last time, we'd get it right. I'd just had the miscarriage. It's going to be the next story I write, and it's going to be wonderful. SALON | Jan. 8, 1999 Randall Osborne writes a weekly book column for the Atlanta Press. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.