Pam Houston - Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place

Praise for Air Mail

Air Mail is the record of an epistolary friendship forged in a time of political peril, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. These letters are pure outpourings of deep thought and daily life, sent back and forth across the Continental Divide, missives as necessary as air, beautiful and maternal and brutal all at once. Houston and Irvine reveal the ferocity of women who have made their lives in the wilderness and by the pen, the depths of wisdom hard-won, survival and what it cost, and all of this in a language where horse hooves can be heard thundering. They invite us to read our precarious moment in the light of conscience, as they excavate the layers of denial and historical amnesia that have kept us from knowing who we are, and then with determination and grace, they envision our possible future.

CAROLYN FORCH, author of In the Lateness of the World

This epistolary exchange, which becomes a friendship, and then a fierce and loving sistership, reminds us that solidarity, by which maybe I really mean love, emerges in conversationin listening, in asking, in sharing, in wondering, in sorrowing, in raging, in attempting, in dreaming. In dreaming together, with each other, and for each other. This takes practice, and it takes care. Pam Houston and Amy Irvines Air Mail is evidence of that practice. It is evidence, and a seed, of that care.

ROSS GAY, author of The Book of Delights

What happens when two brilliant women write to each other across the time and space of our present tense? Nothing short of a secular miracle, thats what. These epistolary love notes between Pam Houston and Amy Irvine bring rivers and mountains and valleys onto the page and into your heart, reminding you how you are still part of a body that matters. They bring hope and imagination wide as the sky. They bring the beauty of animals and trees, the hum of motherhood drumming up from the very ground, the hard truths and difficult days of violence and virus woven through with whats left in us: fight, resilience, and astonishingly, song. This is your present tense calling you to action out of the mouth of despair. This book is fierce love in motion, which is to say, everything worth anything on the planet begins intimately.

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, author of Verge

As these two new old friends discuss their hopes and fears I find myself nodding or taking a deep breath or saying Yes! as their shared experiences mirror some of my own. This collection of letters will serve as a longstanding reminder of where we are and where we hope to end up in the future.

ANNE HOLMAN, The Kings English Bookshop

ALSO BY PAM HOUSTON

Deep Creek

Contents May Have Shifted

Sight Hound

Cowboys Are My Weakness

A Little More About Me

Waltzing the Cat

ALSO BY AMY IRVINE

Desert Cabal

Trespass

Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place

PAM HOUSTONAMY IRVINE

Illustrations by

Claire Taylor

TORREY HOUSE PRESS

SALT LAKE CITY TORREY

Versions of some of the following letters initially appeared in Orion Magazine.

First Torrey House Press Edition, October 2020

Copyright 2020 by Pam Houston and Amy Irvine

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Published by Torrey House Press

Salt Lake City, Utah

www.torreyhouse.org

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-948814-38-6

E-book ISBN: 978-1-948814-39-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020938536

Cover art by Claire Taylor

Interior art by Claire Taylor

Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf

Interior design by Rachel Buck-Cockayne

Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

Torrey House Press offices in Salt Lake City sit on homelands of Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Paiute nations.
Offices in Torrey are in homelands of Paiute, Ute, and Navajo nations.

For Natalie Maines, who wouldn't just shut up and sing, and for CHICKS, everywhere.

Dear reader,

When we began writing letters to each other in March of 2020, shortly after the COVID-19 outbreak led to Colorados governor issuing a statewide stay-at-home order, we had never met, and only knew each other through the books we had written. These books were all, in one way or another, about how the Earths wild places saved us, raised us, mothered us, and brought us back to life. We live on opposite sides of the Continental Divide, on opposite sides of the San Juan Mountain Range. The rain that falls onto Pams high mountain meadow will make its way eventually to the Atlantic Ocean, while the rain that falls onto Amys high desert mesa will run toward the Pacific. The land between our houses, much of it over ten thousand feet in elevation, is arguably the most beautiful and wildest country in the lower 48.

In a culture defined by Twitter and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, writing letters felt like ritualintimate, ancienttwo barn owls calling to each other across a starry sky. As the reality of COVID set in, our letters became a life raft of clarity in days filled with increasing numbers of the dead and the incessant dismantling of our government from within. In them, we could rage and cry, hold each other up, and talk ourselves back into agency, back into hope, back into action. We could hear each others voices and our own, ringing like bells, reminding us that the fight to save the Earth is what we were born for. Eventually we could hear your voice too, dear reader, your fear for the future, and your passion for the land.

Our voices are just part of a broader resistance. These letters were already assembled for publication and in the final proofreading stage when George Floyd was murdered and protests against police brutality and systemic racism flared across the nationa long-overdue mass exercise in First Amendment rights that has been met with violence while those flexing Second Amendment muscle by storming state capitals armed with assault weapons have been met with zero pushback. We acknowledge that whatever threats COVID and distruction of the planet pose to us, to the very basic right to draw a full, clean, and healthy breath, those threats are at least tenfold to Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. Whatever fear and outrage we carry as our own, we hold far more of it for those more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement, in their jobs as essential workers, in their communities more polluted and underserved.

Dear Reader, you are the one weve been waiting for. Weve caught up to a future we could not imagine, but weve known all along we were ready.

Well see you soon, in the sky.

Amy and Pam

Hi Amy,

Greetings from the east-facing side of the Great Divide!