Author recounts tales of horses in Eastern Oregon

A wise man once said, "God forbid I should go to any Heaven where there are no horses."

This famous quote echoed the prevailing sentiment as a herd of equine book lovers gathered Saturday evening for an inspirational talk by award-winning Portland writer, Molly Gloss.

More than 60 people were in attendance for the highly anticipated event, held at Paulina Springs Books.

Gloss is the acclaimed author of "The Jump Off Creek," "Wild Life," and a sci-fi novel titled "The Dazzle of Days."

Gloss began the program by reading passages from "The Hearts of Horses," her most recent book. It's the story of Martha Lessen, a tall, spirited teen who roams the Pacific Northwest training and breaking horses during World War I, while our boys were off fighting in the trenches of Belgium and France. Martha's gifted methods with horses and encounters with local ranchers during the winter of 1917 deliver us to a greater understanding of the intersecting paths between the hearts of humans and horses.

"It's not just about her, but also the people she breaks the horses for," said Gloss.

Gloss treated the room to her clean, natural prose rooted in a "precision of place" with exacting attention to detail. The writing lends itself well to live readings, and soon the rhythms of the words and her economy of language lulled the silent crowd back to 1917 with the sights and sounds of Eastern Oregon ranch life.

When asked by the audience if she had horses herself, Gloss said no and laughed, "But if anyone out there wins the lottery and wants to donate money for some horse property I'd be glad to accept."

A fourth-generation Oregonian, Gloss grew up poor just outside rural Gresham and as a child picked strawberries, raspberries, and pole beans for extra money.

"We didn't have any horses, but all our neighbors did and I was around them a lot," she said.

Gloss partly attributes her love for literature of the American West to her family's frequent road trips to Texas in a broken down station wagon.

"When I was 12, I started reading cowboy novels because that's what my father read," she recalled. "He was from Texas. It was during those trips back and forth from Oregon that it all came alive. So reading those books and seeing that rugged landscape imprinted certain images in my head."

The inspiration for "Hearts of Horses" came from several sources. One was the book, "Cowgirls: Women of the American West," which Gloss had read years earlier. In it was a certain sentence that stuck indelibly with her, about that same time period in Oregon, and "girls that came through the country breaking horses."

This statement became part of the absorbing opening lines to her novel. Another element came from a favorite book as a child called "Diamond Hitch," a rousing pulp Western about a rodeo rider's vagabond life. In the story, the charismatic cowboy takes a winter job breaking horses.

While researching the subject, Gloss located stacks of books specific to horse training circa 1910-1925 on interlibrary loan. She also reacquainted herself with horses by spending two weeks on a dude ranch in Idaho, riding out every day with the wranglers and ranchers. She then took a trip over to the BLM horse corrals in Burns where they round up Mustangs and hold wild horse adoptions. Trainer and clinician, Lesley Neuman was there demonstrating her "horse gentling" techniques.

"It was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen," Gloss recalled. "Lesley stepped into a round pen with a crazed Mustang off the range and within an hour she was petting, kissing, and haltering it. All done entirely without any ropes, tools, or gimmicks."

Gloss talked Neuman into teaching her these methods, and in a few days she had gentled and trained a young horse of her own named "Buck."

Many of the modern practices of "horse gentling" marketed by Natural Horsemanship guru Pat Parelli, and romanticized in the movie, "The Horse Whisperer," have been around since the time of the Greeks and were widely known in the years the novel is set.

Many in the Paulina Springs audience were interested in her daily writing schedule and the discipline necessary to undertake a novel.

Gloss said, "For years, when I had kids and a family, writing was limited to certain precious hours during the week. After my husband passed way and my son grew up, things drastically changed."

She explained that, suddenly, the writer is confronted with enormous blocks of time that can be intimidating at first, but one eventually finds a routine and falls into the story.

After that, she claims she would "get up, have breakfast, read the paper, then settle in with her thoughts and write as long as she could."

The book took Gloss a total of 3-1/2 years to complete.

The book has been very well received, and when asked about its overwhelming success, Gloss joked, "It's because the bright yellow cover shows up well on bookstore shelves."

Gloss is back at work writing a collection of science-fiction stories, a genre she enjoys as much as her accomplished Western fiction.