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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

For you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and today we're continuing women, writing, and the imagination,

a special series of conversations with nine prominent women in the arts at the beginning of the 21st century.

My guest is Pam Houston.

The author most recently of a book of essays called A Little More About Me, published by Norton,

and her book of stories, Waltz in the Cat, has just come into paperback from pocketbooks.

She's the author as well of Cowboys Are My Weakness and the editor of an anthology of essays called Women on Hunting. Now, I wanted to begin by talking to you about the relation of your, you know, life to your writing, and I was very

interested to see that you said that the story writing involves making the characters more

vulnerable than you are. And indeed, the essays and a little more about me are very, very confident.

You know, they kind of exude an energy and confidence.

How do you rewrite yourself into the vulnerable state you see is necessary to fiction?

Well, I think when I'm writing nonfiction, I bring, you know, all the intelligence and wisdom and learning that whatever I'm writing about afforded me.

In fiction, I try to know as little as possible.

You know, my process when I write fiction is to remember the physicality of the situation,

you know, the landscape, a conversation, you know, something an animal did, something a human being did,

but just to stick really hard with the physical

situation and to not analyze it in any way, to not bring what I would call, you know, my

...