Q&A: Novelist Molly Gloss
Margaret Bikman - Knight Ridder/Tribune
Mar 25, 2008
A fourth-generation, award-winning novelist Oregon author Molly Gloss shares her latest book, set in eastern Oregon during World War I, about a 19-year-old woman with a gift for "gentling" wild horses.
Question: What's the background of women and girls taking on the job of breaking horses, particularly at the period of time for this novel's setting?
Answer: Many girls and women took on the job of breaking horses in the 1910s. It was often the daughter of the farmer or rancher who was given that job, while the sons were off herding cattle. And girls or women (as you might perhaps expect) were more inclined to use "gentling" methods rather than bucking out the horses or subjecting them to force, inclined to use methods that we think of as modern, though it turns out these methods have been around since the days of the ancient Greeks.
Q: How did you "get inside the mind" of Martha, your main character?
A: I spent some time during the writing of the novel just getting reacquainted with horses -- some time on a big cattle ranch in Idaho, riding every day -- and then learned from Lesley Neuman, a horse trainer who specializes in mustangs, how to start a wild mustang. Lesley coached me from the rails as I got into the round pen with a green colt and in a few hours had reached the point of haltering him and beginning to acquaint him with leading.
It's all accomplished with body language, no force involved. Felt very much to me like learning an extremely intricate dance with a partner you've just met, who doesn't speak your language! Horses, it turns out, are very attuned to every nuance of our body language, and you have to learn to be attuned to theirs -- and react immediately to the slightest motion that indicates they are "giving" to you. Very hard! But oh!, so very satisfying when you manage to do it.
Q: Who were among your influences in writing about way Martha broke horses?
A: I read pretty much all of the well-known horse training books, including Tom Dorrance and Monty Roberts. But almost more useful and important to me were the training books written during the 1910s, of which there were several, and some of which surprised me with the "modernity" of their gentling.
I didn't want Martha to be a complete anachronism in her training methods, so I was very happy to learn about people like John Rarey, who went about the countryside before WWI betting townsfolk he could ride their wildest horse without a bit of bucking, and then went about it much as Monty Roberts or Robert Pierelli or any of the so-called horse-whisperers.
And, of course, in designing Martha's methods of horse breaking, I also drew very much on Lesley Neuman's methods, which I'd watched her do, and then done (poorly, slowly) myself.
Q: Why are many of the women you've written about (both in your nonfiction and your fiction) of an independent and adventurous spirit, women who don't mind (almost crave) isolation and solitude, and who can deal with the unpredictability of nature, be it weather, or horses, or the land?
A: Alice Day Pratt was a single homesteader in the 1910s in eastern Oregon who managed to make a go of it far longer than the men who were her neighbors, even though she had not enough money for the farm equipment she desperately needed, and was entirely alone in her work, with no family support at all. She's probably fairly typical of the kinds of women I like to write about, women who want to break out of traditional women's roles and do something adventurous.
I researched Alice's life after I'd written "The Jump-Off Creek," and was astounded at how much she was like Lydia Sanderson (my main character). And when I was almost finished writing "The Hearts of Horses," I read a piece in The Oregonian about a young girl named Corinne Elser living over in Crane (near Burns, Ore.) who was gentling mustangs for some of her neighbors, and she was so remarkably like Martha Lessen in my novel (right down to the cast on her wrist), anybody would have thought I'd used Corinne as my model.
So it turns out there are, and were, plenty of such women, and they are the ones I like to write about. I suppose in some way I'm living a surrogate life, the life I might have chosen if only I were braver, stronger, and hadn't married a city boy! (I went over to Crane and met Corinne Elser, by the way, and watched her work a lovely Kiger mustang mare. Was able to take a few of the things she taught me, and incorporate them into the novel before it was finished.)
Q: You've done presentations on the heroic myth of the American cowboy in the West. What themes do you touch on?
A: One of the things I think I'm writing about in all my fiction is the idea of community, set against the traditional mythology of the West, which is a mythology of the "Lone Cowboy." Martha, for instance, rides into (fictional) Elwha County at the beginning of the novel, much as cowboy heroes have done at the start of countless Western novels. But she doesn't save the town with violence and then ride out again at the end, as Shane and other Western heroes have done; instead she finds herself gradually taken in, and embraced by the community; and they learn something equally from her.
Even in my science-fiction novel, "The Dazzle of Day," I think I'm reconfiguring the Western myth, and setting community at the center. But truthfully, I try not to think about such things until after the book is written. Too dangerous to be that self-aware, that conscious of grand themes. Afterward, I just look back at what I've done and make up a story about what I was doing!
Q: What do you enjoy reading and which authors have influenced your writing style?
A: I don't think I can speak to the style of my writing. It is what it is. Or rather, it is what it has become. I'm sure I have been influenced, consciously or not, by the writers I've most admired, including Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, E.M. Forster, Dorothy Johnson, Ursula Le Guin, T.H. White.
But I've always been a very eclectic reader and I imagine my influences have also included all those cowboy novels from the 1950s, and Jack London, and Doctor Doolittle and on and on. When I'm writing historical fiction, I do spend some time during the research phase reading novels written during the period I'm writing about, and not only does that furnish me with a lot of details of everyday life, but it gives me a sense of the vocabulary and syntax of the times. And I think that helps me bring an authentic-seeming syntax to the page, when I start to write.
Q: Do you feel there is a growing awareness about the relationship/bond between animals, particularly horses, that can aid in the process of emotional healing?
A: I was just reading in today's paper about the change of policy that followed Hurricane Katrina, how the new laws and directives to rescuers now include people's animals and pets. And that in today's world there's a growing awareness of the importance of animals in our lives, and a sense that we are all part of the same community (there's that word again) with the same affections and obligations toward animals as toward one another.
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