Writing
When I was eight, I wrote a story. In the very first lines, the reader is dropped into the grave of a girl named Alice. She is stirring and waking. She discovers that she is a corpse, there are ants, worms, rot. She opens the doors of her front teeth; they swing heavily on the hinges of her desire to live again. Alice steps out through her teeth, out of the grave. I honestly don’t remember what happens after that. But it was a good story, of that I’m certain.
Alice never returned to the grave, but the story drew attention to the places in my mind that created it, shaped it, released it. Those places weren’t ready for attention. Are they ever? You are writer, they said. Write, they said. I was eight. I didn’t give a shit about being a writer. All I cared about was Alice. My characters are still my main concern.
My life has been like a sandpainting in a shot glass. I don’t understand how those layers of colors and shapes formed in there, but they did. They are the rich, raw, beautiful, and sometimes frightening landscape that is my life. I never stopped writing, but I stayed off the main roads. I wrote from the trails and fields where no one else seemed to be.
And then one day, Alice came riding along on a black horse. We sat down, and she told me stories. I wrote those stories down.
I write them down every time I sit at my keyboard, every time I hold a pen. I write them in my head when I walk my dogs on this wild New Mexico land.
Yes, writers write. But writers also live. Stories can live inside us for eternity, but they become something else entirely when they are shared.
River of Horses, a novel by Eden Hall
When nineteen-year-old Josie falls down a mountain and is severely injured in the wilds of Yosemite National Park, she travels through consciousness and memory to the river of horses and the great ancient prairie under Chicago where, as children, she and her older sister, Clara had fled the trauma induced by their father’s death and mother’s alcoholism. She is then visited on the mountain and saved by the beautiful ghost Alice, and her black horse, Will. Alice warns Josie of Clara’s imminent death prompting Josie to leave the mountains and return to Chicago, determined to save Clara’s life.
“I woke because the train sounded desperate. The whistle that had torn Henry and I apart now screamed frantically into the thin air of Nevada’s dusky high desert. Outside the train’s harsh fluorescents, the blood of the dying sun clung to sparse grass. The train screamed again. I bolted from my seat and wobbled to the fishbowl observation car where that soft light had stowed away on the faces of the passengers, the seatbacks and tables. Through the window the rangeland stood still, as if it was holding its breath until the train passed, until night fell and concealed its wonder from our prying eyes.”
River of Horses is about death, grief, friendship, love, family, the bond between humans and horses, and the price of progress and modernity. It presents us with a world where ghosts are real, and eternities can change, where horses are celebrated as characters, and life goes on.
River of Horses is a multi-layered work of literary fiction grounded in magical realism. It follows Josie Harrison’s coming-of-age alongside an exploration of modernity’s shift from horsepower to industry. Told in the dual narrations of Josie and the ghost of Victorian ere horsewoman, Alice Baxter, the novel examines our historical partnership with horses from both horse and human perspective, the bruised bonds of family and modernity’s discontents. As Josie moves from a chosen life of idealistic isolation through loss and grief toward humility, integrity and a weathered depth of character, the story foregrounds themes of love, friendship, horsemanship, sisterhood, and what is lost when horses became non-essential to human progress. While most works of magical realism bring magical elements to the common world, River of Horses gently bends the dynamic of this genre by providing accommodations for the reader in the afterlife of horses.
I took the images you see below and to the right on my iPhone during one of many research trips to Chicago while writing this novel and they each play a significant role in the book. This story is embedded in very real places, some of which remain untouched while some have become fields of urban rubble.
