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. “These letters are pure outpourings of deep thought and daily life. ROSS GAY, author of The Book of Delights It is evidence, and a seed, of that care.” Pam Houston and Amy Irvine’s Air Mail is evidence of that practice. In dreaming together, with each other, and for each other. “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 conversation-in listening, in asking, in sharing, in wondering, in sorrowing, in raging, in attempting, in dreaming. “An affecting collection of candid, heartfelt letters that stands as a testimony to the sustenance of friendship in frightening times.” Houston and Irvine will also read from their recent individual releases, Deep Creek and Desert Cabal, respectively. Part tribute to wilderness, part indictment against tyranny and greed, Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place reveals the evolution of a friendship that galvanizes as it chronicles a strange new world. 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. 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. 5:30–7 pm Join us for a special reading by authors Pam Houston and Amy Irvine on Thursday, October 1 at the Rochester Hotel’s Secret Garden in Durango, Colorado, where they will read from their new release AIR MAIL.