Most of what I know about horses and their people I learned from Michael Coester. Mike grew up on an Iowa farm where his mother, Betsy, was a famed horsewoman. The six Coester children were excellent riders and competitors. After high school, Mike apprenticed as a farrier in Kentucky. He taught me that rich people are often past due on their bills and that horses make people crazy.
He was the first person to tell me about Jane Smiley and her first novel, "Barn Blind." Smiley has an essay in "Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond," edited by Halimah Marcus. Smiley is the ultimate horse girl. She rides horses, breeds horses and writes horse stories. But her life's quest was to have a relationship with a horse like those she read about in her girlhood.
In other essays, Sarah Enelow-Snyder writes about growing up a Black girl and a competitive barrel rider in Texas. Year after year, Allie Rowbottom competed for the world championship title in the Junior Exhibitor Hunter Pleasure division of girls under 18 on their Morgan horses. Both girls were pushed by their fathers to ride and to win. Nur Nasreen Ibrahim rode horses with her brother and cousins in Nathiagali, a Pakistani holiday township, where her family summered.
Horses are expensive. They are not goldfish. Money problems are a recurring theme in many of these essays, as well as guilt about privilege.
The most important part of the bond between women and their horses, I think, is that it has created a world that is far more humane to equines and other domesticated animals. The writers of these essays speak to the power of the novels that they read as children. Books about horses stay with readers. These essays stay with you. Each woman's story is different. They all involve love, money, passion and sometime craziness. The collection's many voices cut across class, race, gender and generations.
Maureen Millea Smith is a writer in Minneapolis.
Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond
Edited by: Halimah Marcus.
Publisher: Harper Perennial, 304 pages, $17.
