The Horses That Inspire Me: Rocket

December 15, 2019 at 8:24 pm · Filed under Thoughts

Hello, readers!

I thought I should maybe do a series of entries on the horses that show up in my work, since they appear so often and so insistently. Maybe you’d like to see them, too. And Lord knows I can find a million things to say about horses. When I was little, my mom once told me, “Honey, people don’t like to hear about horses as much as you like to talk about them.” I tell that story a lot because it shows how little some things change.

Chera and her first pony, Cinnamon

I’ve loved horses since my “adopted” grandpa, Papa Sonny, put me up on his bay mare when I was a year old. I wrote about horses, drew horses, only talked about horses. I didn’t have a lot of friends, which probably doesn’t surprise anyone. Thinking I was going through a phase, my parents promised to buy me a horse when my dad graduated college and got a better paying job. Several years later, the horse phase turned out not to be a phase, and they (bless them) kept their word. My first equine was an opinionated little pony, Cinnamon, who crossed paths with me when I was in fifth grade and she was on the way to auction. She bucked off every kid at the barn but me. She managed to finally get me off her back by holding her breath when I tightened the cinch before riding. As we trotted down the arena fence, suddenly I was looking at everything sideways, and then I was underneath her belly, and then on the ground, watching her run gleefully away, stirrups dragging the ground. The rest is history, as they say. I learned a lot about saddling a horse that day!

The first horse I’ll introduce you to in this series is Rocket.

Chera with Rocket after a ride.

He’s a 5 year old registered Tennessee Walking Horse. He’s solid black except for a white star roughly in the shape of Alaska on his forehead. I had been feeling very ill (I didn’t yet know I had Lyme disease) and had started to try to accomplish some of the things on my bucket list because it felt like I was running out of time. I had always wanted to saddle train my own horse, and Rocket was the perfect horse for me to try with. He was well within my very small budget, had been imprinted at birth, and had worked as a therapy horse for his first year of life. He loves people and is dog gentle. I bought him as a yearling, put 20 or 30 fifteen minute rides at a walk on him at age two and a half, then several more at three and a half, and we started gaiting then, too. He had a beautiful, smooth gait. My whole heart was wrapped up in him while we were training. He was the culmination of so many dreams. He symbolized so much I had overcome and wanted to overcome.

Rocket as a weanling

Rocket as a yearling

And we KNEW each other. When I first got my Haflinger mare, she would run from people, so I spent a lot of time just walking her down in the pasture, putting the halter on, patting her, then taking it off and walking away, rinse and repeat. One session, Rocket looked at her as if to say, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you running? Humans are awesome,” looked at me, looked back at her, then ran to block the arena gate so that the mare couldn’t get out and I could catch her. He drove her right to me. I didn’t particularly want him to do that but I was amazed at what he had done and how he had interpreted the situation, and how clearly I could read the succession of thoughts on his face. I’d never had one horse try to “help” me with another horse like that before and haven’t since. He was special, and he became my entire world.

Chera riding Rocket

But I often couldn’t sleep because I was worrying about him. There was just something that kept nagging at me. A bad feeling.

I noticed he wasn’t growing out of his baby awkwardness. He fell a lot in the pasture. He would trip and then get really upset at whoever was around him when it happened. He started balking under saddle. It was so strange. I had a chiropractor come out to see him. He had no soreness in his back but some in his hips. She said it was probably from learning to carry himself. She also found calcification on one shoulder. She said she’d guess he’d run into a fence or something as a weanling; she marked it as a grade one lameness.

Rocket kept getting worse, not better. Finally we ran some neurological tests, ruled out EPM, and determined on Wobblers, a calcification on the spine which puts pressure on the spinal column, causing neurological symptoms. It made a lot of sense based on Rocket’s build and his carelessness with his own body, which I had seen often when he played. The reason he would get so angry when he tripped was that he would lose feeling in his legs, and then it would suddenly come back, and it frightened him. I couldn’t afford the $15k surgery that would have given him a 50% chance of being rideable again. So, brokenhearted, I retired him at my parents’ house. Their land is flat and grassy and he has much less chance of injuring himself there. Since he has now achieved most of his height, the symptoms have leveled off. It’s hard to tell something is wrong unless you look for it. But if I were to grab his tail and pull, his entire hind end would collapse.

He’s still a lovable goofball, gorgeous to look at, tall and dark. And he is perhaps the horse I have loved best, because I raised him and trained him myself.  When I get out of my car at my parents’ house, I call him, and he comes to the fence and puts his huge head against me, and it’s almost like nothing ever happened. But losing all of his potential, when I was just understanding how sick I was and how much of my own I was losing, is something I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over. That said, I am truly grateful that I had the privilege of training him, and that we were able to find a way to keep him in our lives, and that he is comfortable.

Rocket following Chera

In my poetry, when I talked about “the black horse,” Rocket is who I mean. And the Icelandic horse Keeper, in my novel, is partially based on Rocket. I’ve never met a kinder horse than Rocket is, and I doubt I ever will.

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Thoughts on Research

March 19, 2019 at 1:34 pm · Filed under Thoughts

Hello, friends! I meant to blog over what was Spring Break for most local folks, but I didn’t have internet for awhile during and after the “land hurricane,” and when I got it back I had to prioritize some other projects on which I’d fallen behind. Friday, my day off, was spent with my husband repairing and strengthening the fences that had been affected by Wednesday’s 64 mph sustained winds (with gusts to 84… It was brutal). We were lucky– things could have been much worse, and were worse for many people.

Anyway, I’m here now, and I’m talking to a colleague’s composition class tomorrow about research. Namely, the importance of specifics, and how I use research in my own creative writing.  This is a guess, as I haven’t technically kept track of it, but I suspect that I spend about 25% of my writing time actually writing; 25% reading new publications, reading submissions, networking, submitting work, and taking care of other, related business; and 50% doing research.

I love research because I’m a curious person. I grew up without the internet, and it still seems miraculous to me that I can find the answer to nearly any question, even the most random one, within a few minutes. In the course of writing various projects, I’ve researched many current events / contemporary issues, as well as things like why onions make people cry,  saddle making, laws regarding home burial, the birth rate of mustangs, how sound behaves in space, the timeline of development within a turtle egg, wild animal baiting and its consequences, and courtship etiquette during the Dust Bowl.

I never know where my research might take me, but I know that it is important. It helps my work to be true.

Not to mention the added benefit of knowing all the Jeopardy! answers, because I have filled my brain with such a strange but wide range of facts…!

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So I’m Trying to Write Through Personal Trauma…

January 18, 2019 at 12:31 pm · Filed under Thoughts

Dear readers: I spent a lot of time this week working on writing a personal essay. It took so much time because writing it was a genuine, chewing-fingernails-to-the-quick kind of difficult. You see, the essay concerned a Very Sad Thing that happened in my past. This thing has loomed over me every time I sat down to write for years, but it was too painful to turn and face. So I would end up facing it halfway, and the results often weren’t very good; they didn’t say everything I intended. I usually ended up throwing them out. But this week, I finally decided to try to write through the Very Sad Thing and get it out of the way, once and for all. Because my writing is often how I process experiences, good and bad, and emotion: love, anger, fear, grief, sometimes all of those together. I know myself, and it felt like I couldn’t fully process this event until I really sat down and wrote about it.

If you know what to search for, you can find an article in the Albuquerque Journal detailing a murder at a drive-in restaurant in that city. It says the victim, a man with a family and a reputation for kindness, was found near the restaurant dumpsters by a coworker. There was no known motive for the killing, and the murderer was never caught. The victim still had a weak pulse when found; the article doesn’t mention that. I only know because one of the first people who stumbled upon the scene was my ex-husband, a truck driver, who developed PTSD as a result. That tragic day changed everything– for the victim’s family, who lost a husband and brother, of course. And for the two of us.

So I wrote the essay, I changed the names, I tried not to cry and after I had finished, I had a sort of meltdown and deleted it all, just like I always had before. Because writing about past trauma can put you right back in that trauma, as if no time at all has passed, and the scars revert to open wounds. This is not something to be done lightly. And this is why trained counselors or psychologists should guide groups of people who are writing about their traumatic experiences as therapy. I decided I would never try to write about it again, because I seemed incapable of doing it well.

The next morning, however, the strongest emotions seemed like they had been depleted, so I restored the file from my file history and revised it, trying to view it more as a Writer, someone telling what happened, and less as the person who experienced it. Thinking of it that way gave me just enough distance. This time, I was able to say exactly what I wanted to say. And it finally felt like the dark cloud that had been looming behind me for so long was getting smaller, not because its significance had diminished, but because I was getting farther away from it. I was reorienting myself to the disaster.

Sometimes, when a person experiences trauma, it takes a long time to process it in a way that allows them to translate it into something others could understand. Sometimes a person can’t do it alone. Sometimes it takes a long time to know what they themselves want to say about it; they have to come to understand its many complexities and implications first. Sometimes, a writer has to write something over and over and over, and it will never be right, until one day, it is. In the meantime, we should practice kindness– to others, as well as to ourselves. This world can be hard, but we are in it together.

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Unplaced Poems: “What I Taught Them”

January 11, 2019 at 2:07 pm · Filed under Thoughts

Hello, readers! I hope everyone’s holiday season went smoothly, and that all of you came through it in one piece– or, if not, in at least a few salvageable pieces that can be glued back together.

I’ll admit I took a bit of a break from the blog, but I have now returned– so you see, your confidence that I would come back was not in vain. Today’s entry won’t be a complicated one; it’s just about something I sometimes think about (gosh, we’re off to a good start, aren’t we?).

I’ve discussed with poet friends before an interesting observation: that the poems to which audiences tend to react most favorably at readings often seem to get the least amount of attention from journal editors. I haven’t been the only one in my group of friends who has noticed this. I’m really not sure why this may be, though I can tell you that, when picking poems for a reading, I tend to go for the ones that have strongest emotional impact, perhaps at the cost of some complexity or nuance that might be more accessible to a reader than an audience member, for whom a poem only occurs once. I’m wondering if other poets out there have noticed something similar.

Anyway, in tribute to my favorite “unjournaled” pieces, I thought I’d start sharing some poems from my books that audiences seem to enjoy, but that never got picked up by journals. This week’s is “What I Taught Them,” from The Traveler’s Guide to Bomb City. It got some personal rejections from places like Blue Mesa Review, but it never got picked up, though I love reading it because it’s a piece that gets both (good) laughs and “ooohs,” which are mother’s milk to a performing poet.

“What I Taught Them” from The Traveler’s Guide to Bomb City by Chera Hammons

A man I’ve never seen before is chasing my two horses,
running them across the pasture and waving his arms at them
while his slim girlfriend watches, black sunglasses astride
blowing blonde hair as she raises her phone
to document his bravado, the shorts that flap in the wind
and his fleshy arms arcing out like wings that have been plucked.
The horses, because I have taught them to trust,
seem more surprised than frightened at first,
flying over the yucca in bursts, then turning to see
if the man has been satisfied, but he keeps coming at them.
They are used to standing still and lifting their feet for the farrier,
who files down their rough edges every eight weeks.
They know to take the bite of the vet’s needle without flinch or kick.
That is why, if this man wanted, he could walk up to them,
rub the swirls of hair under their forelocks,
breathe them in, their wildness and joy and
the sun and sweet-hay smell of their windswept coats.
It is why he is able to sweep them away
for sheer nothingness, giving them no reasons.
I would hurt him if I could, this man
who has no idea, who says he was running
because he wanted to run,
not chasing my two horses on my land
because the woman who came with him
is impressed by that sort of thing.
I follow him to his shiny white car with its dealer plates,
watch him drive slowly away because he is not sorry enough.
The horses pace as I walk back to them, eyes white-rimmed,
and I worry they will fear me again,
having just been treated unfairly.
But they recognize my voice and let me step among them,
lay their warm heads against me for comfort,
snorting and blowing from their flight.
Then— this is how much I love them—
they ask if they did what I would have wanted of them,
and I say yes.

For a video of the poem being read, click here.

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From Potboiler to Promising

December 21, 2018 at 11:14 am · Filed under Thoughts

Good morning, friends,

I don’t have much profound to say today, as I’ve been feeling unwell all week– first with a mild cold, and now with a hovering migraine, which I am staving off as best I can with coffee and Tylenol and darkness. I am in quite a bit of pain, actually! So please forgive any typos. This week, I managed to crack the 20,000-word mark in my YA novel and do a fair amount of research for what comes next; write two poems; revise the query letter for my first novel; and read submissions for poetry journal One (through Jacar Press). I intend to close out the week today and tomorrow with a few submissions of my own. I expect some rejections any minute now which will free up more work for me to send elsewhere. (That’s how rejection works, in case you didn’t know!– Each rejection is an opportunity to send work to a journal that might provide a better home for it than the last one would have. So remember that.)

I wanted to take a moment to talk about the importance of having other people– people you trust, who will also be honest with you– read your work. Even if you are already a famous, award-winning writer, for some reason reading my humble blog post right now instead of working on your next great masterpiece, this is true. Everyone has a different level of experience and a different perspective to offer, so guess what– even the opinions of friends and family who aren’t experienced writers themselves can tell you if your work communicates the message you intend it to. You will learn, with experience, what sort of critique is helpful to you, and what isn’t. When you try something someone suggests to you, if you end up not liking the change, you can always change back. Often, other people can see things that you can’t, simply because you can be too close to your own work.

I finished a literary fiction novel last year, and had sent it around a few places, but have been trying to find a publisher in earnest only the last four or five months. I have a 50% “success” rate with agents, by which I mean that my query letter 50% of the time has triggered a request from an agent to see the full manuscript. I gave up on agents fairly quickly, however, because I realized early on that the story does not have mainstream appeal, though the writing style itself is good (and this has also been what the agents I dealt with have told me). Though sales are always nice, of course!, I am predominantly interested in craft and expression with this book. I have opted to try to find a small press instead, one that specializes in this type of novel (literary fiction with elements of suspense / noir and wilderness / survival), and is perhaps less driven by factors affecting the mainstream market. The protagonist of the book is an elderly, chronically ill woman, someone who would traditionally be ignored by society. When her husband is murdered, she must defend her property from poachers on her own. She is an unreliable narrator and often doesn’t do what she “should.” She is a character who is trying to adjust to life changes, trying to survive, and sometimes makes bad choices in an effort to do so.

I hadn’t allotted the book a great deal of importance, aside from personal significance, I suppose because I wrote it mostly for myself, and it is my first novel, so I very much wanted to have realistic expectations. (For the record, I’ve often felt I would be more successful if I had a bigger ego– I’m just not sure how to go about nurturing one.) But when I told my talented editor friend about the book, and he asked to see the synopsis, he pointed out that it deals with important issues such as isolation and care of the elderly and chronically ill; it has a subversive aspect in that the female character successfully takes her husband’s place; it has a concern for the environment and the treatment of animals. “These are the elements you should be marketing,” he told me.

And magically, a light went on. My perspective changed. These are the wonderful moments as a human being, I think, when the world shifts around you, not because the world itself has changed, but because your viewpoint has. This is why the risk of showing your work to someone you respect, making yourself vulnerable, is often worth it. Suddenly, I understood that my little book had more weight than what I myself had been giving it. The issues I had cared about when actually writing it had shone through. I remembered why I had written it in the first place. Sometimes we get so involved in the business of our own lives, we forget ourselves.

I have revised my query letter accordingly, and it is ready to send to several small presses I have my eye on that are opening January 1st. Many thanks to my friend, who took the time, despite having a busy week of his own, to look at my work. I will keep everyone posted with the results.

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