Author Interview with Jean Harper about her memoir, Still Life with Horses

I devour memoirs and novels about horses—but I’m also a harsh critic when it comes to prose about our equine partners. That’s why I was so thrilled to read the stunning memoir, Still Life with Horses by Jean Harper, recently #9 on the Small Press Distributors’ bestseller list. Like a fangirl, as soon as I read the final sentence, I set out to connect with the author, who graciously agreed to answer my many nosy questions.

Jean teaches literature and writing at Indiana University East, is the author of Rose City: A Memoir of Work, and wrote and directed the documentary film “1:47”. Jean’s essays have appeared in The Florida Review, North American Review, Iowa Review, Harpur Palate, and Yemasee Review. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, has been a Scholar in Residence at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and in residence at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Please welcome Jean Harper.

LR: So you were writing about your horse and how you came to riding as an adult, for a few years, but struggling with shaping those drafts into a coherent memoir—and then had a turning point. What changed?

JH: I was at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and my studio looked out over a field. The first day, I was standing at the window, staring into space, not writing or really thinking anything at all, and then I saw a horse. A large, black, gorgeous horse. I had an apple left over from lunch and went out to see this horse. He came trotting up and leaned his head over the fence; I took bites of the apple and gave him bites. We shared that apple and I felt as though – even though I’m not really a believer in these things – that this horse was some kind of sign. I remember holding my hand out, empty of apple now, and the horse breathing on my palm. I thought of the James Wright poem, “A Blessing,” the last lines, when the poem’s speaker has been nuzzled by a horse:

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

And I knew that moment was how my book would end: with that black horse giving me a blessing, giving me permission to write. I went back into my studio, sat down, and wrote the chapter that would be the hardest to write. The rest unfolded from there.

LR: Your book was published as a result of winning the Howling Bird Press 2017 Nonfiction Prize at Augsburg College. I’d love to hear what that experience was like.

JH: Oh my, it was fantastic. I remember meeting the students at AWP in early 2017, and how interesting I found the idea of a publishing project working with MFA students. I liked the students, and liked the books they had on display, and so I decided I’d submit my manuscript. Their word limit was 40,000, which meant I needed to edit out about 15,000 words. Honestly, it was liberating. Whole chapters got the ax, plus anything that I had even slight doubts about. I was killing a lot of darlings. I highly recommend cutting a manuscript by 25 percent, even as an exercise! It will open up your work in ways you might not imagine.

Then, of course, you submit and you wait. Ironically, about a month before I got the call that told me I had won, I had a very disheartening meeting with a literary agent at a conference. The agent had read a portion of the memoir, and in our meeting, she pushed my pages across the table and said, “So, what’s the story?” I summarized it as best I could, and she shrugged and said, “Well, my horse died too. What’s the story?” The implication being, I suppose, that if I wasn’t famous, or my horse wasn’t famous, then the book was a waste of her time. I left that meeting about as discouraged as I had been in a long time.

Fortunately, the phone call telling me I’d won came soon enough. I’m a writer, but I am also a dedicated teacher, and the notion of working with students sounded just perfect.  The editing process was the best I’ve ever been through. The publisher, and faculty mentor, Jim Cihlar, is a thorough, gentle, wise, and very particular editor, and the main student editor, Katherine Fagen, was exactly the same.

For me, as a writer, the process of being edited by them, and the rest of the student team, was truly enlightening. Through Jim and Kathy’s guidance, I was able to see where things needed to be tightened, expanded, tinkered with even slightly. And then there’s the experience of working with a small, independent press, where you and your book are given close, personal, scrupulous attention. It was kind of like an intense workshop with very skilled practitioners. I only wish I could publish my next book with Howling Bird Press.

LR: You employ a segmented form within each chapter, and – I loved this – in between chapters, short (flash?) pieces, no more than a paragraph or two. These are visually varied on the page and have a different feel/voice, more like prose poetry, rich in imagery. Some draw on the narrator’s girlhood memories, art and mythology, equine psychology or behavior. When and how did these bits come about, and what did they mean to you?

JH: I have always loved playing with form in nonfiction, in service of the story, not simply form for form’s sake. In part, these prose poem pieces came about as an experiment, inspired by the “Entre’acte” pieces Mark Doty used in Dog Years. I found those short pieces between chapters to be very effective and intriguing as counterpoints to his main narrative, and thought I would try something like that. I’d also been playing with poetry and wanted to have the feel of poetry in the book, how through poetry we can come at things in a less direct, perhaps more mysterious and visual, even visceral, way.

So I was thinking about all this, and then when I decided to submit to Howling Bird, and had to cut those 15,000 words, I saved a few slices, images, moments, and re-fashioned them into the prose pieces. It was so interesting how it just clicked into place, and I found myself again thinking that the constraints of form—only 40,000 words—helped put a kind of creative pressure on the manuscript that really worked.

LR: In the book, the narrator begins to take control of a disappointing personal life as she’s learning to become a confident, capable horsewoman. Was that connection evident as you were living it?

JH: Absolutely, yes. When I got interested in horses I was about 40, and a complete and utter novice. I was also, and I think the book alludes to this more than once, terrified of just about everything related to horses: riding, lunging, ground work. All this fear, at the same time that I felt drawn to horses in profound ways, you’d think I would have taken a lesson or two and stopped. But I was also mentoring Mia, the young girl in the book, and I wanted, I think, to be a role model for her,to be that strong, determined, committed woman she could emulate and look up to. So I kept taking lessons, and kept going with Mia to hers, kept playing the role of a confident woman.

Then I got Buddy, and suddenly I was responsible for this beautiful, huge, unpredictable, wise, intuitive horse. That was really the tipping point: once I had Buddy, there was no turning back. I had to not simply play the role, I had to embody confidence and capability because he was a funny horse: brave about so many things, but terrified of others. We could trail ride anywhere, and he never shied once, not even the day we turned a corner on a trail and there was a fully opened bright blue umbrella on the path. He just kind of looked at it, and we kept going. But, he was afraid of very specific things: streams and puddles, wash stalls, horse trailers. So I felt my job was to teach, protect, and be his leader.

And when you learn how to be the trusted leader of a thousand pound animal, whose first instinct at any danger is flight, you learn a deep-seated sense of confidence in yourself. It’s confidence at the body level, the cellular level. You learn how to be calm in the face of fear, how to be centered, grounded. All of that did change me as a person, and did give me a new sense of self, allowing me to imagine a different personal life, both with and beyond horses. It also allowed me to be calm in the face of a somewhat turbulent personal life, and see a way past it, and thus, out of it.

LR: You’re a full-time college writing professor, so presumably much of your personal creative writing is completed on breaks, weekends, and other found hours, like other writers with “day jobs.” With each book, does that balance become any easier? Any advice for writers struggling to produce long works in short bursts of time?

JH: During the school year I have a small mantra I repeat to myself: “Touch the work every day.” Even if I only have ten spare minutes, and I can probably find that in any given day, I make a point of looking at what I am writing. I think about what I’ve got, where I’m going. I write one sentence, a phrase, a word. That’s incremental progress, of course, but it’s still progress.

On breaks between semesters, and in the summer, I work to create a large chunk of writing I can edit during the school year. I was fortunate to have a yearlong sabbatical last academic year and so wrote the first draft of my next book. It’s a bit of a mess, but that’s okay. It’s a draft.

You have to allow yourself to write badly. That’s what revision is all about: turning the bad writing into good writing. Now, back in the trenches of teaching, and committee work, and all the rest, I’m touching that draft every day. I would say that this particular process – create a full rough draft, then edit it over time – is something I have learned to do more fluently now, working on what will become my third book.

My best advice for writers is written on two notecards over my desk. 

The first: "All real writers go through this." The this being anything related to writing: getting stuck, searching for the right word, getting rejected, getting published, fiddling endlessly with a paragraph, getting it right on the first try. If you are writing and going through whatever you are going through, you have company. You are a real writer.

And, from Chuck Close: "A quilt may take a year, but if you just keep doing it, you get a quilt."

LR: It’s easy to get sentimental when writing about the profound relationships between a horse and human being, but sentimentality usually pulls down the prose. Your book is frequently loving, saturated with memory and meaning—but never sentimental or sappy. What was it like to write about an experience that clearly meant so much to you, without getting nostalgic?

JH: When I was first writing about Buddy, it was awful, to be honest. I adored that horse, and right after he died, I was completely wrecked. For months, I wrote in ragged fragments, just flashes of memory, words, images. And then I couldn’t write at all. It was just too difficult. When I finally went to the writing retreat for two weeks, I had the solitude and unbroken time to focus on the chapter about his death. I spent a lot of those two weeks just weeping. But I also was writing. I wanted to get his story right, to honor the life of that brilliant animal. When you love an animal, it's almost a primal thing. Especially with horses, you speak to each other in ways beyond language, through the body; so when I was writing about Buddy, it was as though my whole body was writing. It was exhausting; it was exhilarating.

I also had to give a reading at the end of the residency, and when I finally had a draft chapter, I practiced reading aloud what I had written about 25 times before I could read it without tears streaming down my face. And when I did read it for an audience of my new writer and artist friends, I was not the one weeping. They were. A painter came up to me afterwards and said something like, you know you’ve described the Pieta, don’t you? I hadn’t intended to do that, but I understood what he meant: the death scene I wrote was intimate, raw, a physical manifestation of grief. I think it’s that physicality, the details we can see and touch, that keep us from sentimentality. I know it keeps me from sentimentality.

LR: The artwork on the cover is gorgeous. The horse’s large brown eye, the way it’s mirrored in the sketchy lines, is so hauntingly, achingly lovely—to me it evokes the depth of love between horse and narrator. Is there a story behind how you came to find the artwork or what it means to you?

JH: I have a dear friend who works at an art museum; my friend is also a poet, and she and I were writing back and forth about what we thought the cover ought to look like. This was at the same time that design students working with Howling Bird Press were coming up with their cover ideas. My poet friend found the artist’s website and told me to go look. I don’t remember now if she found this particular painting, or if I did, but it was my poet friend who led me to it.

It took some back and forth between the press as we hashed out what the cover should look like, but I was certain this was the right image and so gently kept putting it before them. I think that’s the beauty of a small press too: they listen to the author, and care about the author’s vision for the cover art. I love this artwork too, and I’ve gotten to know the artist a bit, and she is just a delightful person, who really understands horses on a visceral level.

LR: You describe horse-related activities, behaviors, equipment, and medical issues so that those without horse experience can understand, but without talking down to knowledgeable horse-people. Was that was particularly challenging? Any advice for writers dealing with specialty topics?

JH: It was challenging, yes. I’ve read so many horse books that struggle to do this well, that it became a particular writing goal of mine to write good prose about horse “stuff.” Too often the prose is too technical and dreadfully dull, or overly explained and awkward, or convoluted descriptions of nuanced things that end up killing the nuance.

As a writer, I grew up learning to write by way of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and still keep copies of that thin brilliant book in my office, so I can give it away to students. Strunk (and White) stressed the beauty of plain prose, and that is what I have come to value most. The ability to write plain, luminous sentences comes with practice and patience and more practice. I appreciate well-crafted extravagant prose, but I much prefer plain prose, the kind of writing that becomes almost invisible, allowing meaning to rise from the page without calling attention to the way meaning is made.

I also read widely, looking for this kind of prose, writers like Michael Cunningham, JoAnn Beard, John McPhee, Joan Didion. That, and I read everything that I write aloud, listening for the music of the sentences. If it falls flat on my ear, back to the drawing board. 

LR: You mentioned you have a current work-in-progress. Care to elaborate?

JH: I'm writing about five generations of women in my family, going back to a whaleship captain's wife in Nantucket. I am very interested in how women in this family, probably many families, tell stories about themselves and to themselves. I'm interested in how stories of the past shape our present, how stories get passed down, passed around, altered, the alterations becoming accepted as true, about the power stories have over us, how arguments are embedded in stories, yet in a way we almost don't see them, we just see the story. 

Currently, I have a draft of this book done, and am slowly but surely working on revisions.

Connect with Jean Harper at her website/blog. You can read another interview with her about publishing the memoir at the Howling Bird Press website.

Images: Book cover and headshot, courtesy Jean Harper. Inside book, L. Romeo. Strunk & White: royalty free clip art.

Scratching a Familiar Writing Itch in New Way Keeps Horses on the Page

I've mentioned before that themed calls for submission—announced by literary journals, mainstream websites or magazines, or anthologies—are an excellent way to spur writing and create outside deadlines. For any writer struggling with maintaining a disciplined writing practice, or those overwhelmed by too many writing ideas, or dismayed by not having enough ideas, submission calls can help define writing time and energies.

Peruse the calls at various sites and listservs (some links here), pick one or two that appeal, and…you're off. Writing a piece that addresses the theme, adheres to the required word count, fits the style or tone of the venue, and meets any other criteria noted, are powerful ways of developing writing chops. And of course, meeting the deadline is paramount, especially for those who start but don’t finish writing projects, or just have trouble with deadlines.

The unspoken rule is that you must, of course, have something to say on the topic of the submission call. Such was the case last fall when I noticed a planned anthology on writing about animals. In my 20s and early 30s, I made a living writing about horses. In the last few years, I've been itching to write about horses again, but it's been two decades since I've been around horses on a daily basis, so I've been finding new ways of integrating horses into my writing life, resulting in many personal essays. And here was a chance to combine horses and writing into an essay about, well, horses and writing!

Off went my piece to the anthology, a combination personal essay and advice on one aspect of writing about horses. And a few weeks later, back came the rejection. That's okay, it's part of the writing life. First, you wallow. For minutes, hours, days—depends on your personal rejection wallowing style. Then, you decide: Scrap it? Make a few tweaks and send it right back out? Revise, rethink, rewrite?

I rarely scrap something, though I may let it sit for weeks or months (or longer) before I gin up the interest or energy to revise, or have the time to do so properly. That's okay, too.

With my writing-about-horses piece, I believed it had merit as it was, so I made only a few minor tweaks. The next question was where to send it. "Advice for those writing about animals" is not that common a themed submission call! So I turned to venues that publish all kinds of essays about writing craft and the writing life; in fact, I've begun to maintain a list of such outlets because I want to write and submit more pieces on writing craft.

Then, as often happens, serendipity intervened in the form of an announcement that the literary journal Hunger Mountain (published by the Vermont Center for Fine Arts, which runs a fine MFA program), was seeking new work for its writing craft website series.

And off went my piece again.

Hunger Mountain published it two weeks ago in Ephemeral Artery, the Hunger Mountain Online Companion. Here's an excerpt:

"… On the “A” level horse show circuit where, even in the 1980s, top jumpers were bought and sold for the high six figures, one of the most reassuring relationships I witnessed was between these high-priced performers and their minimum-wage earning grooms…. A fiery Thoroughbred ex-racehorse could be snorting, galloping might in the ring, but transform, once handed by the professional rider to his groom, into a cuddly, frolicking pony….My advice to those who want to write about modern horses at work or play in America: find them with their caretakers. The ones who love them whether they’ve had the fastest jump-off round that day, or if they spooked at the stray plastic bag at the side of the ring, tossing a rider on his duff. That is when you will see the real horse, the one who knows he’s safe and seems to understand when nothing is expected of her except that she exist…"

You can read all of  "When Prose Turns to Horses, Remember the Humans," here. And, for more on the horse-writing connection, see Annie Penfield's essay in the same section, "On Rhythm—In Sentences."

Let me know of your experiences with writing to themed calls for submission. Or writing about animals, or horses, or whatever's going on in your writing life now!

Image (top): Flickr/CreativeCommons-S.Carter

Unfinished: When it comes to personal stories, aren't they all?

A couple of years ago, I nodded in agreement with a slightly-older-than-me writer friend who declared that at this age we've earned the right to no longer care what anyone thinks of us based on the personal stories we tell or what we choose to write about in our essays and memoir.

What's the point of holding back? she said.

None, I agreed.

But really, I was still holding back plenty, an automatic behavior learned from Mom, Catholic school, judge-y friends and relatives, society's ideals of what it means to be a good wife, mother, person. While I'd written frankly about postpartum depression, marital rockiness, and all the ways I've failed to eat properly or be a supportive daughter to ailing parents, there was still a lot I was keeping from the page.

Then I had a rare slow week this past summer, with no pressing deadlines, no clients with unmet needs, no students to tend. That's when a submission call for an anthology caught my attention, and I challenged myself: to write exactly what I wanted to, without holding back, without worrying who might think what.

The anthology (now published) is titled Unfinished Chapters. The original call for essays listed many possible topics, including an unfinished relationship from the past. And boy, did I have one of those, dating from my late teens/early 20s that was not only unfinished, but unwise—and unlike me.

Could I tell it without explaining or trying to excuse my youthful, selfish choices, and without trying to make the other party seem more awful or less culpable? He shouldn't have, I shouldn't have: one of those relationships that taught me valuable but difficult lessons, amid a few sweet memories. Unfinished relationship? Yes, death will do that.

Almost reflexively, I began to write in the second person, which provided just the right amount of distance and intimacy, cover and bullhorn.

After writing and submitting that essay, and before I knew its fate, something clicked for me, and I wrote three other essay drafts that same week, also about situations I might not ordinarily have gotten around to. Two are under consideration at various venues, one needs more work. Meanwhile, I have my writer friend (who prefers to remain unnamed), and Unfinished Chapters to thank for that nudge.

My essay, "The Horsey Set," begins this way:

"You knew. You knew I was 19. You knew you were 32 and married and the father of two children. You knew I was attracted. I wonder if you knew my attraction (which I didn't even understand at the time) was fueled so much by your position (your celebrity almost) in that rarefied air we both breathed, in that world we both pranced through – you with ease, me with longing – that dazzling playground scented with horses and money and blue ribbons, with Hamptons houses and equestrian estates and show horses that cost more than my father's house. Did you know that?

            When you flirted with me in the horse show office, when you accidentally brushed against me in the stabling tent, when you waved at me from the rail, when you winked at me from under your hat brim on the sidelines of the polo field, did you know that I thought it was about me? Did you know every time I saw you across a field, across a barn aisle, across the table at a fundraiser, that I wondered if you were there because I was there and not because you were always there? That I didn't understand it was about you and what you could do, get away with, possess, mark?..."

Unfinished Chapters, edited by Christina Hamlett, is available now, in print (you remember print, right?), and now also via Kindle.

UPDATE: In January 2016, this essay was also published online at The Manifest Station.

I'd be happy to send one copy to a blog reader, chosen at random from comments—just leave one below by midnight on Sunday, November 15. (You must have a US postal address, and a way for me to track back to your email to let you know if you've been selected)

Image of horses: Flickr/Creative Commons - Five Furlongs

The Essays We Must Write, Must Let Languish, Must Rewrite

By now, I haven't ridden horses on a regular basis for more than 20 years. But the 20 years before were spent riding every day, competing, and writing about horses. The people in that equestrian life were so important to me, then. Which is why, when one of my "horse friends" disappeared, the departure was deeply unsettling, haunting me for many years, for decades.

I first tried writing about that fracture nearly 10 years ago, then put away the crappy draft for a long time. At various times, I'd rework that draft, bury it, forget about it, start fresh, decide to skip it, pull it out, start all over, drop it again. All that time, there was a certain urgency missing. 

But something about the story clicked for me last fall so I revised and sent it out. One editor's personal rejection note helped me understand a flaw in the piece, so I took another whack at it. Then I asked a trusted writer friend to read it. Her single piece of very intelligent advice (about structure) nudged me toward the final revision.

This week, the lovely site, Full Grown People, published my essay. Here's a little excerpt from "Must Love Horses, Must Love Dogs":

"When I moved back and settled in an apartment near her house, I returned to our old stable and trainer, but Nancy never visited me there, though I spent chunks of days at the barn where she’d moved her horses.

One chilled spring night she and I met a plane at the nearest major airport, where a flight attendant passed us a sealed medical bucket, a tube of high-priced semen from a champion dressage horse inside. We drove an hour back to Nancy’s stable, freezing because we blasted the air conditioning to keep the sperm active, and when we arrived, I held her mare’s tail aside as Nancy inserted the baster-like syringe. Eleven months later, we slept on horse blankets tossed over hay bales, taking turns to check on that mare every twenty minutes, and I was the one who first spotted the steaming foal in the straw.

Perhaps experiences like this seduced me into thinking we might stay bound, for a long time, forever..."

You can read the full story here.  (And if you're so inclined, it would be wonderful if you could leave a comment and/or click on like over at the FGP page! Thanks.)

Image: Flickr/Creative Commons, AnemoneProjectors

Where Essays Begin: Sudden news, old friend, odd lyrics, far away

Sometimes an essay or piece of memoir begins in my head as a scrap of something that will not quiet--a phrase, a bit of remembered conversation, a line of lyrics. Like this one, a 1960s tidbit.

My boyfriend's back and you're gonna be in trouble.

That line circled my brain a few years ago, insisting that I write…something—in response to news I heard about my first real boyfriend. How the lyric connected to our story, or to my reaction to his news, was a mystery.

Still.

There it was, an earworm, a prod, that wonderful awful feeling as I'm drifting off to sleep or when just waking up, that says, Hey, you! Get out of bed, start writing.

Only, as I began to write, I heard the lyric differently, altered.

Your boyfriend's back and you're gonna be sorry.

Over the next few months, the piece took shape, fell apart. I put it away, pulled it out again. Pushed it aside again. Let it marinate. Let myself figure out what I had to say. Fiddled with it again. Forgot it for months. Tried again. 

Draft number four.

Then a few things happened.

First, I asked a half dozen readers for input; not my usual writer friends, but students in the MFA course I was teaching last fall. As a way of sharing in the psychic pain of their first graduate workshop experience, I invited them to comment on my draft.

Draft number five.

Next, I realized it wasn't only about an old boyfriend, but about how he helped me understand things—some then, more later—about romance, love, sex, kindness, passionate hobbies, and eventually, even a little about mothering teenage sons.

Draft number six.

Then, when the piece, eventually titled, "Your Boyfriend's Back," was accepted for the Spring 2015 issue of Front Porch Journal, smart editors had some thoughtful questions and intelligent revision suggestions.

Final piece (draft number seven).

Here's a very short excerpt of the longish piece:

...I tried to think about what Joe would look like now, and compared that to the tiny, poorly focused photograph in the magazine of him on a bike, wearing a helmet. Perhaps it wasn’t my Joe. But I didn't think M____ was such a common surname. And the age was right. The Joe I remembered had not been athletic. Yes, his arms always felt strong around me, and even then, he’d ridden his bicycle for miles, but a triathlete? But then, I hadn't seen Joe in decades. So much can change...

I'd love it if you would visit the journal and read the full piece.

Now, like all writers I suppose, in my head, I am circling another scrap of …something.

Image, top: Flickr/Creative Commons - Lee Haywood

Guest Blogger Kim Ablon Whitney on Writing Niche Novels, Writing What You Know

The first thing I wrote that evoked a positive reader reaction was about a trip to the Sunday morning pony rides that turned terrifying, when my favorite plodding mount spooked and ran off. That was in first grade, and I was immediately hooked on writing about horses. Since then, I've been a columnist, reporter, and editor for equestrian magazines, and dozens of essays about what horses have meant to me have run in journals, magazines, and anthologies.

Along the way, I've made many friends who also write about horses. Kim Ablon Whitney is one of them. Her novels have earned praise from the American Library Association, Bank Street College of Education, and Booklist Magazine. Kim, a Massachusetts resident, holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. She has been a top competitive rider, and is now a horse show judge. Her latest book, Blue Ribbons, is available for Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and Kobo.

Please welcome Kim Ablon Whitney. 

I remember a specific conversation with my editor after my second book, The Perfect Distance (a novel set in the world of horse shows), was published. We were discussing what I might write for my third book.  My first book had been about a girl growing up in a family of con artists and I wanted to return to writing about a world I didn’t know.  “I don’t want to write another horse book right away,” I told her.  “I want to stretch. I mean I don’t want to just be the horse book writer.”

My third book, The Other Half of Life, was historical fiction set on a refugee ship during World War II—as far from horses and blue ribbons as you can imagine.  When I started to think about my fourth book project, I decided on my own to look at the sales figures for my first three books. 

The best selling book of the three, by far?  The horse book.  The horse book was also the book for which I received the most online customer reviews, and the one that generated the most emails from readers.  They often asked me whether I was writing another horse book.

I began to ask myself the same question. Why not write another horse book?

I know horses and the horse world inside out.  I love horses and riding.  I have ridden since I was six, shown on the A Circuit, and have been judging horse shows for over twenty years.  Why not use my insider knowledge to create books that my past readers, and likely many more readers lurking out there in the horse world, were eager to read?

While I didn’t love the idea of being pigeonholed, I did begin to realize if I wanted to establish a growing and dedicated readership, it might not be bad to be “the horse book writer.”  Along the way, while writing and publishing my newest book, Blue Ribbons, I learned some valuable lessons about the business of being an author.

 A Niche Can Be Nice

Unless you’re lucky enough to write standout literary fiction (think Ann Patchett), writing for a niche readership can be instrumental to your success.  A niche will help you interest agents and editors, and in a finicky publishing market, it’s easier to sell a book that's clearly quantifiable and describable—what industry lingo calls a “market distinction.”  Agents and editors like projects with a unique appeal and a ready-made audience.

If your niche audience is big enough (vampires, corporate thrillers, etc.), a big publisher may even be interested in it, while a smaller niche may be better suited to an independent press or self-publishing as an e-book (as I did via Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple’s iBooks and Kobo).  People are passionate about their interests, and often spend considerable money on the activities they love.  The more narrow the interest, often the more passionate and the more excited they are to find a book that targets their interests.  Publishers have passed on books they claim are “too niche,” only to have that book sell tens of thousands of copies as an e-book.

Nail Your Own Niche

Writing books about the world of horses, young riders, training and equestrian competition, was an obvious niche for me, given my background and work as a United States Equestrian Federation judge at major events.  Perhaps you have an obvious niche yourself.  Did you grow up playing, or have you shepherded a child through, a sport?  Do you know piano playing or spelling bees or gardening?  What kind of work do you do?  Do you know computers inside out, a segment of the medical world, or the retail world?  These are all possible settings for fiction, memoir, or general nonfiction.

Or, perhaps there’s something you’ve always wanted to learn more about.  Decide to make it your niche, and finally take those cooking classes, train for that marathon, travel to India.  Use what you learn and write about it.

Either way, you don’t need to be the foremost expert on a topic.  Yes, you need to know enough to describe the world and get the logistics and lingo right. But you can fill in details and double check facts with experts true experts, who are also  usually willing to be beta readers and help you get it right.

A Niche is a Nice Place to Land

I've learned how very gratifying it feels to write a book that people are interested in.  I love seeing the reviews, emails, and Facebook posts about my horse books in which people relate to the story, tell me how great it was to read a book that brought their world to life, and want me to know they are eagerly anticipating my next horse book.  I am so flattered and nearly giddy with the positive feedback!

Marketing your niche book is also more straightforward than marketing a general fiction book.  You probably already know all the blogs, websites, Facebook groups, and magazines devoted to your niche.  If not, they’ll be easy enough to find.  You won’t be competing for visibility with hundreds of other books, either.  Instead you’ll find there are probably only a handful of books in your chosen niche.

Some niches offer endless opportunities and you’ll never run out of ideas and books waiting to be written.  Others might run dry sooner.  But once you’ve built an audience, your readers might be willing to follow you if your next book falls outside that category.  Think of it like a spin-off from a successful sitcom.

For now, I’m sticking to horse books.  And I’m having a lot of fun writing about something I love and something that readers are passionate about.  I’m hoping to publish my next horse book, Summer Circuit, in the fall and a sequel to Blue Ribbons after that.  Maybe I’ll go back to writing other books someday and hopefully the readers I’ve connected with through my horse books might follow me.  Or maybe I’ll just be “the horse book writer.”  That’s fine with me!

Note from Lisa:  Kim will stop by the blog over the next week to answer any questions left for her in comments.  All those who comment by midnight, Saturday, June 14   21 , will also be entered to win a free download of Blue Ribbons, plus a physical copy of one of her three previous books (must have a U.S. postal address).

Write What You Know (and Love)? Worked for me.

Maybe I heard it somewhere when I was quite young: Write what you know. So that's what I did. As a teenager, I wrote about horses and riding and ice hockey. Later as a freelance writer (while in college, for fun, and in my early 20s, for food), I followed an edited version of the old adage:  Write what you don't know about what you do know.

Three-plus decades later, I'm still following that advice. At times. It's good advice, after all. That's why I share it with those I teach and edit and coach. The advice works, in various iterations, for literary markets and mainstream media, for writers who want to add to their publication credits, and even more seasoned writers who want to expand their reach to new reading audiences or add another quiver to their writing toolbox.

But it's especially good advice for newer writers, especially those seeking that first publishing credit. Start by writing about what you love.

I was horse crazy teenager, taking riding lessons, dreaming and reading about horses, hanging around shows. I subscribed to equestrian magazines and, at around age 14, sent a humor essay ("How to Know You've Gone Completely and Irreversibly Horse Crazy") to the now defunct magazine Horse, of Course.

In high school, my brother had season tickets to the New York Rangers and at first I only reluctantly went along. My essay about unexpectedly becoming a rabid hockey fan was published in the team's official magazine. When the Rangers traded beloved goalie Ed Giacomin, I sent a protest poem to the New York Times, which the sports editor printed.

I was writing about what I knew, and about what I loved.

My magazine professor at Syracuse University, suggested we write what we don't know about what we already know a lot about. By then I'd been a horse owner and competitor for a few years, so I sought assignments from equine publications to interview Olympic hopeful riders, star trainers, brilliant course designers.  I wanted to know what I didn't know:  the secrets of riding at a high level, how to teach a flighty horse to behave, the ways width, height, and spread of jumps determined course difficulty.

After graduation, I supported myself (though not my horse habit; that was Dad's gift) by writing about horses and equine sports for specialty and trade publications, and for mainstream newspapers and magazines. That led to a public relations job with sponsors of the United States Equestrian Team. When I stopped riding (marriage, motherhood, a mortgage!), I thought I was done with writing about horses. And I was, for a while. I went on to write about many other things I knew a lot about -- motherhood mostly.

But at some point, I always circle back.

A few years ago, I contributed an essay to WhyWe Ride: Women Writers on the Horses in Their Lives (Seal Press), which covered what I knew—my five horses and 20+ years competing—and what I was then only learning: how my equine passion could help me understand my teenage sons' responses to their own deeply held interests.  Another essay for the journal Sport Literate traced how an artifact of my horse show life – a tack truck – kept me connected to my past and provided courage to move on.

Given how well I've been served by putting my passions on the page, it surprised me, when I began teaching and editing, how frequently writers forget about, dismiss, or even avoid writing about the very things that they are most suited to write about, the things they love or that make them curious, engaged, intrigued. 

One student wrote about his children being grown and gone; losing faith in an old friend; a disastrous trip -- but never felt he'd written what mattered. I pointed out that in each piece, he referenced a strained relationship with his brother involving sports and financial ruin. Write about that, I urged. Out poured a series of essays and memoir pieces. He was writing fully and with intention about the one thing he knew most about, and in a way, loved – in the sense that he found it fulfilling to unravel the past on the page.

Two adult writers in a class were also reviving waylaid dreams of improving their musical skills, one on piano, the other the flute. Today, the piano player is a contributing essayist for a piano website, and the flutist recently published an essay about never having learned to properly count music. All of their pieces are about what they didn't know about something they already did know and loved.

Careers have been built this way, starting where you stand, or as my mother (and St. Francis) advised, "Bloom where you are planted."

Fiction writers too can plumb passion interests as a way to begin. Just ask Sara Gruen, who wrote the novel Riding Lessons long before Water for Elephants.  Attorneys John Grisham and Scott Turow set their early courtroom novels in the only world they knew. I have also worked with several novelists who generated publicity for their books by publishing essays about issues their novels' characters are passionate about.

Some tips for writing about what you know and love:

-         Think broadly about your topic (skiing as an active outdoor activity, for example) as well as specifically (how you felt missing a ski season due to a summertime injury).

-          Seek out local experts and "celebrities". I once found a retired ice hockey star living five miles from my home, quietly coaching a kids league.

-        Are you a curling lover taking that long-anticipated trip to the world curling championships?  Keep a journal to write from later. Or ask an editor if you can submit something about the experience. Live blog it for a sport site?

-          Double check facts, spelling.  Though I typically know my racing history, I once conflated the great racehorses War Admiral and Native Dancer, and came up with War Dancer.

-         Take notes about interesting people situations, conversations, experiences that you are privy to given your involvement in a specialized arena.

And getting it published:

-          Look for themed issues of  journals, magazines, websites. Themes can sometimes be interpreted broadly: a piece on a cat that helped you through grief might fit a "comfort" theme. Want to write about your illiterate grandfather?  Could fit an issue about "vulnerability".  Think outside, around, under the box.

-           Follow the calendar. If what you love and know about is connected to a season or holiday, write and submit months ahead. 
- Look for submission calls for collections in your sweet spot. I recently saw collections on knitting, tattoos, growing up Greek, and living near lakes.

-         Begin with the specialized publications, websites, blogs you like to read, then branch out.

Do I recommend you write only about what you already know about and love? No. How bored you might be after a while! But it's a great place to begin, return to, build from. Each time I write about horses now, I feel as though I hear the Cheers theme in the background -- it's the place I will always feel at home.