Horse Show by Jess Bowers
SFWP, 2024
Jess Bowers’s Horse Show, published with SFWP (Santa Fe Writers Project) in April 2024, is a feat. In a slim but wholly dynamic collection, Bowers skillfully weaves stories from fact and her imagination to bring these incredible animals and compelling characters to explore the exploitation of horses in human industry. In riveting, intelligent, and heartbreaking scenes, Horse Show is like no other book I’ve read. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to interview Bowers before her collection was published.
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Jennifer Fliss: Where nonfiction books are dry and dense. Horse Show, which melds both fiction and nonfiction, is an exciting and informative book. You’ve blended the two seamlessly, and in the pieces that are based on real events, you’ve managed to keep the reader on the edge of their seat, tension-wise. How do you balance writing the true aspects of something with the stylings and pacing of fiction?
Jess Bowers: I’m a fiction writer who likes history. I sometimes call what I write historical fiction, but everyone disagrees with me! That might be because I like to play with formal experimentation and critical narrators, which isn’t the norm for what a lot of people associate with historical fiction. Most of my source material is ephemera—stuff like advertising copy, newsreels, photographs, and catalogues—so there’s a lot of narrative intervention necessary to create a story out of it. I take it as a compliment when people mistake my work for nonfiction—it means the parts I invented felt as true as the facts.
JF: Many of these pieces take place during a certain timeframe. I noticed how the language used mirrors both the time and setting well. Was this something you had to research for? Did it come naturally?
JB: I studied 19th century Anglophone fiction and visual culture in grad school, as well as film history, so I guess I absorbed a lot of period language through osmosis. I also watched a ton of Nick at Nite as a kid, which helped with more modern-set stories like “Of Course, Of Course,” and “Based On A True Story.” And I’m a found text junkie. Incorporating authentic language, as it was written on a business card or a handbill, helps anchor my fiction in the history it’s based on and set the tone. It’s just a happy bonus that so much old ad copy is unintentionally hilarious in its hyperbole.
JF: I love setting when I read, and in the varied settings in Horse Show, you use very specific details so well to evoke those settings. I am thinking in particular of the electric beaters in the Pyrex, the scalloped bathing suit, and the macramé owls in “Of Course, Of Course,” and the upper crustiness of Harvard in the 1870s in “Fred W. Loring and his Mule, ‘Evil Merodach,’ 48 Hours Before Death.” However, Horse Show is filled with these kinds of details that lend to the verisimilitude of their settings. Similar to my previous question, how much research did this involve? What does the role of these details do to further your stories?
JB: I tend to write from instinct when it comes to visual details and set dressing like the objects you mention. First, I imagine what would be around back then, then I fact-check myself during editing—when was Pyrex invented? Were those creepy ubiquitous macramé owls a 60s or 70s fad? “Fred W. Loring” was more challenging, because although I’ve visited Harvard, it’s changed a lot since Loring’s day, and I wanted to make sure I captured the queer experience back then with respect. For that context, I was lucky to find books like Douglass Shand-Tucci’s The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture and The Romantic Friendship Reader: Love Stories Between Men in Victorian America, edited by Axel Nissen, as well as Loring’s own poetry and fiction, which is set at Harvard and full of juicy period detail. Unintentional anachronisms can break the spell, so I work hard to avoid them.
JF: My heart was in my throat for so much of this book. In the story “One Trick Pony,” you describe the horse and the chute being chucked of the cliff, and it was so visceral and heartbreaking. For some reason, depictions of animal cruelty often hit us harder than cruelty against humans. Why do you think that is?
JB: Man’s inhumanity to man is often depersonalized through abstractions like war, religion, gender, race, and nationalism. Humankind’s mass cruelty to animals raised for food is similarly abstracted through processing, packaging, and marketing. But I think when we read about or see an individual human doing cruel things to an individual animal, the power imbalance is obvious and undeniable to everyone in a way that’s difficult to deny using prejudice, especially when it’s a domestic animal, like a horse.
JF: Why did you decide to write about horses?
JB: Horses have captivated me since I was two, which is when my mother says I realized dinosaurs were extinct, and pivoted hard to horses because they were the largest animal I, personally, had any hope of owning. I know the Kentucky Derby and My Little Pony were also involved. But I avoided writing about horses for a stubbornly long time, because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as “weird horse girl.” But I finally wanted to “go there” because I think the species occupies a singular niche in humanity’s shift to modernity. Horses were humankind’s partners in nearly every aspect of creating modern life, from the obvious arenas of transportation and sport to more surprising fields like medicine, architecture, entertainment, exploration, communication, and commerce. These animals used to be a huge part of literally everyone’s everyday life, and no one really acknowledges that.
JF: How much of these stories of exploitation did you already know, and how much did you have to research?
JB: I wanted to find obscure incidents to write about, for the most part. My only real criterion was “is there a horse in it?” Even when I was familiar with the general territory, as in “Based On A True Story” or “Of Course, Of Course,” I had to do a lot of research to make sure I saw all the angles of each idea. Research is my number one cure for writer’s block. It’s going back to the well. If the horses feel real, I owe that to decades spent being around them, riding them, caring for them—which didn’t feel like research at the time, but absolutely was!
JF: Something that always fascinates me in literary storytelling is omissions. Where the narrator (or character) will spend time to create an image of something that did not happen. Maybe it’s a hope or expectation they describe, and then in the next moment, we are told that no, that didn’t happen. In doing this, I feel the depths of the loss of those expectations. It’s done in several places in Horse Show, but one that stuck out was in “The Mammoth Horse Waits”: “I wish I could say that we evacuated the theatre clean and efficiently…I want to tell you that her velveteen divan broke his fall…that the momentary aura of danger…suffused Carter’s flagging career with a new vitality…” Talk to me about how you use this device in your writing.
JB: I’m fascinated by the idea that life is a series of possibilities or expectations that may or may not come to pass—“everything could have been different, but it wasn’t.” I think a lot of us view our lives that way, for better or for worse. The paths not taken. This is also a device that allows me to remind the reader that although these stories are based in history, there’s a mythic quality to many of them, and with that comes retelling, omissions, rumors, mistakes, he-said-she-said, the obfuscation of truth by parties with skin in the game. Unraveling facts from the legends that have grown around something like the Mammoth Horse was a large part of my research process, so it felt right to make the doubling-back/self-correction part of how the narrator of that story remembers it.
JF: You meld fact and fiction so well in Horse Show that you often don’t know what you’re getting. What was that like to write, and then what was your journey like to get this published? Was it a challenge because it didn’t read as a typical fiction or nonfiction book?
JB: The road to publication began by placing most of these stories in national literary journals. Then my agent sent the whole manuscript to the big publishers, who liked it but didn’t think they could sell it without a forthcoming novel, which I didn’t have. So, I decided to go the small press route on my own. Santa Fe Writers Project was the first indie press I approached, and I’m lucky they immediately understood what the book was, genre labels be damned!
JF: The parallel between women and horses came to me so clearly in the last story, “Of Course, Of Course.” Throughout history, both were considered useful for a designated period of time, being caged in, as window dressing. How intentional was that parallel for you as you wrote?
JB: Very much so. Horses and women are intertwined throughout history, art, and popular culture, with Carl Jung seeing horses as representative of the feminine unconscious, all those gross schoolyard rumors about Catherine the Great, and “big horse girl energy” used as a meme to scold preteen girls who are enthusiastic about horses to the exclusion of interest in boys, which is somehow supposed to be a bad thing? Even in the 21st century, there’s something transgressive about a woman on a horse, the strength and power we can borrow from them. Many horsewomen, me included, have experienced male opposition to horse ownership at some point in our lives, whether it comes from a husband, a father, or some other source. “Of Course, Of Course” was fun because I got to subvert that scenario—what if a man’s obsession with his horse allows a woman in the 1960s to find freedom she never could before?
JF: You use photography a lot in Horse Show. Can you talk a little about that and how you employed it to get your stories across?
JB: The history of photography and film is a major interest of mine. I love finding some mysterious image or scrap of film and then sleuthing to figure out what the heck’s going on in it, who those people were, why they were filmed. Whenever there’s a photograph included in the book, it’s the germ that started the story.
JF: The horses are the main point of the collection, but the human personalities that surround them are impressively, to the reader, almost fully formed, but not quite (in a good way), as they were the exploiters. What was it like to write this balance?
JB: Anthropomorphizing is a major pet peeve of mine when it comes to animal writing. I wanted the horses in Horse Show to feel like real animals, not cartoon representations or mouthpieces for human emotions. Black Beauty was my blueprint for what I didn’t want to do—no first-person narration from a horse’s POV, no horses who seem more human than horse. Some of the human characters in Horse Show are horrible people, but others are quite kind, or some nuanced combination of the two.
JF: You’ve given us some sections told in the horse’s POV. Did you think about doing that or did it come naturally? Did you want to play with this idea more? Less?
JB: Whenever I make that move in a story, I’m always thinking of the lion in Hemingway’s “The Short, Brief Life of Francis Macomber.” It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the story, but he seamlessly shifts into the lion’s POV, and it’s a bit alien. I think to write animals authentically, they should feel a little alien. They’re motivated by different beliefs, impulses, and desires than we are, and I want to honor that instead of giving them human motivations, even if those are easier for us to understand.
JF: There are some incredible word choices and imagery in this book: “A mincing suited business man,” “We recall that Miss Lucille’s heart is rawhide, cured in salt,” “…only the nicest things are said, in Bible voices,” “…even a salesman with lean earthworm fingers.” I couldn’t get enough of the language you used. It was so very thoughtful. How do you write these? Do they just flow out of you? Do you do this in revision?
JB: Thank you so much! Honestly, phrases just sort of come to me, sometimes when I’m doing something other than writing, like gardening, riding, cooking, or walking, but mostly when I’m at the desk chasing that magical state of mind where the writing feels automatic.
JF: The more “essay-like” pieces enhanced short stories very well. Would you consider doing this style of collection again? I loved reading it, and it’s very different from typical literary fodder. I felt like I learned so much.
JB: I’m working on a new collection in a somewhat similar vein, because while I was researching Horse Show, I kept getting ideas about non-equine animals. I don’t think horses are entirely out of my system, but I want to expand my focus to the rest of the animal kingdom and the ways in which we’ve constructed humanity around them and in opposition to them.
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Jess Bowers lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she works as an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Maryville University. Her short stories have won the Winter Anthology Prize and Laurel Review’s Midwest Short Fiction Contest. When not writing or reading near cats and aquariums, she can be found riding horses, exploring museums, and watching too much television. Find her on Twitter @prettyminotaur and Instagram @bowersjess.
Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is the writer of the story collections As If She Had a Say (2023) and The Predatory Animal Ball (2021). Her writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.