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When the state of Colorado ordered its residents to shelter in place in response to the spread of coronavirus, writers Pam Houston and Amy Irvine—who had never met—began a correspondence based on their shared devotion to the rugged, windswept mountains that surround their homes, one on either side of the Continental Divide. As the numbers of infected and dead rose and the nation split dangerously over the crisis, Houston and Irvine found their letters to one another as necessary as breath. Part tribute to wilderness, part indictment
against tyranny and greed, Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, & Place reveals the evolution of a friendship that galvanizes as it chronicles a strange new world.
October 2020 | Nonfiction essays
978-1-94-881438-6 | $15.95
To book virtual events (maybe lives ones, too),
contact Michelle Wentling, michelle@torreyhouse.com
For interviews, contact Anne Terrashima,
To order:
https://www.torreyhouse.org/product-page/air-mail
“An affecting collection of candid, heartfelt letters that stands as a testimony to the sustenance of friendship in frightening times.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“This epistolary exchange, which becomes a friendship, and then a fierce and loving sistership, re- minds us that solidarity, by which maybe I really mean love, emerges in conversation—in 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 Irvine’s Air Mail is evidence of that practice. It is evidence, and a seed, of that care.”
—ROSS GAY, author of The Book of Delights
“These letters are pure outpourings of deep thought and daily life. 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 FORCHÉ, author of In the Lateness of the World
“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 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 what’s left in us: fight, resilience, and astonishingly, song. This book is fierce love in motion.”
—LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, author of Verge
