Horse Girls by Halimah Marcus

Author:Halimah Marcus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2021-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

I wanted to write a Western, but more than that, I wanted to be in a Western: to disappear into the desert with my trusty steed and learn the sweat and pain of a new lifestyle; to be incompetent for a while, so the mastery would be all the sweeter when it came. I wanted to escape the world I’d built for myself, which focused so much around my computer, around being inside and reading small words on a screen or page, scanning them for some kind of cathartic energy. There must, I thought, be other methods of catharsis.

Even though learning to ride a horse had been a dream of mine since childhood, I had to trick myself into it, wedding the lessons to something productive: research for my book. I tried to use everything I experienced. My heart, pumping with unfamiliar joy as I raced down a dirt road in the desert, became my protagonist’s heart. The smell of creosote thick in the air around me, and the small Quarter Horse moving into a canter with the merest squeeze of my legs—these were given to her as well. She was not me, but we had things in common. We both lived with deep nervousness about the future, our families, the possibilities the world might offer us, and we both found solace on horseback. The difference was, I chose my new equestrian way of life, while she was thrust into it. This—the protagonist’s lack of agency—would become a recurrent problem with the manuscript, something I would struggle with for years. But I didn’t know that then, in the early drafts. Her hostage energy made sense to me. Her sense of escape, once she grew to embrace her new life under the desert sky, reflected my own.

But it wasn’t only escape I sought: it was connection. Epiphany, even. As I learned, week after dusty week, horsemanship is a conversation, a language you and your horse co-create. You can teach an animal voice commands, or you can make your requests silent and soft: tilting forward or back, movements imperceptible to the eye. You, the rider, must learn to listen to them, too. What it means for your horse’s ears to flatten in fear and anger, or perk upward in sudden alert. The texture of a snort, the licking and chewing of comprehension. Riding well is a flow state not unlike writing, a place where you exist outside time.

Whenever I pulled into the dirt parking lot and waved hello to the ranch’s owner, this new creativity blossomed in me, along with the equally important knowledge that I had chosen to find it. Riding, like writing novels, filled me with the conviction that I was lucky, that I was strong, that I could do most anything I wanted to, if I was simply willing to try.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.