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The Year in Review (or, Where Did 2023 Go?)

12/28/2023

Between finishing the manuscript for The Kentucky Oaks: 150 Years of Running for the Lilies in February, working my way through the proofreading and indexing process for Dream Derby: The Myth and Legend of Black Gold and then The Kentucky Oaks, releasing Dream Derby in September, and traveling to Kentucky for an appearance at the Kentucky Horse Park and the Kentucky Book Festival in October, it's been a busy year. I've also been privileged to read several of an excellent crop of books related to Thoroughbred racing. (If you haven't read The Foxes of Belair, Lexington: The Extraordinary Life and Turbulent Times of America's Legendary Racehorse, Broken: The Suspicious Death of Alydar and the End of Horse Racing's Golden Age, Landaluce: The Story of Seattle Slew's First Champion, and Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey, you should. Really, you should.)

I have several non-book writing projects currently on the table as well as an invitation to submit a proposal for yet another book (more on that when it actually becomes a thing), so between these and a probable trip to Kentucky in the spring to promote The Kentucky Oaks on its release (scheduled for April 30), I don't think my pace will be slowing down much in 2024. I wish all of you a happy New Year, and hope that you'll continue to enjoy my work in time to come.

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Book Review: Isaac Murphy (Katherine Murphy)

12/21/2023

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After our deaths, most of us are remembered mostly by our friends and loved ones. A few who have achieved greater fame outlast living memory, becoming known to later generations through archived news articles, preserved letters, journals, and books; yet even then, most survive in memory as only a portrait composed of a few facts and stories that are continually repeated.

So it is with Isaac Murphy. The portrait that has survived is one of a man who was both a superstar athlete—one who could be called America’s first nationally known sports hero, and a man still regarded by many as the greatest jockey ever to ride in North America—and a paragon of modesty, restraint, and quiet dignity in his public demeanor. He was also Black. That fact passes with bare mention nowadays, yet little is known of how his heritage and experiences as a Black man one generation removed from slavery affected his upbringing, his thinking, and the public demeanor that he chose to adopt. Equally little is known of the Black racing community in which he learned his craft and to which he remained connected throughout his life—a community in which many were respected by whites for their skills but not as fellow human beings and fellow citizens.

Katherine C. Mooney’s biography Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey (2023, Yale University Press) takes us back into the period he lived in, which spanned the decades following the end of the Civil War up into the Gilded Age. Slavery was officially ended, but in the brave new world of postwar race relations, both Blacks and whites wrestled painfully with what it meant to both races to shape a new political and legal reality from attitudes and patterns of life carried over from a time when the heavy majority of Blacks in the United States were legally owned by whites.

Murphy did not leave personal letters or journals testifying to what he thought regarding these matters, and what he chose to say in public was carefully considered in light of his need to maintain his professional image and his employment. To her credit, Mooney does not presume to speak for him. Instead, she focuses on bringing to light the web of relationships in which he lived and his status as the most iconic member of a Black community that had a degree of prosperity and respectability but at the same time faced ongoing legal disabilities, varying degrees of racism, and the need to maintain at least some degree of goodwill from the wealthy whites on whom their professions depended. Mooney also explores the other difficult reality of Murphy’s life: the burden of being in a profession which placed ever-increasing demands on his health that, in the end, could not be sustained.

Those looking for either a tale of Black triumph against all odds or a polemic against the evils of American racism will be disappointed by Mooney’s work. What the reader will find is a carefully-crafted narrative portraying the life of an intelligent, thoughtful man who was in the difficult position of having influence without power, and who was attempting to navigate complex realities regarding race, community, and personal needs while living in the public eye of a society that demanded conformity to its terms. How well he succeeded, and whether his story raises more questions than answers, is left to the reader.

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Backing Up

12/14/2023

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Our society has cheapened the meanings of terms such as “trauma” and “existential crisis” to the point that minor annoyances and inconveniences are labeled with terminology that used to be exclusively applied to the aftermaths of horrendous experiences such as rape, prolonged childhood abuse, exposure to combat zones, and realizing that the core ideas on which you have founded your life are profoundly inadequate and/or morally wrong. Losing material one hasn’t backed up properly doesn’t come remotely close to trauma or life-changing crisis. It is royally annoying, exceedingly inconvenient, and usually representative of a significant loss of time and effort that will have to be reinvested if work is to proceed, but that’s all it is.

By this time, the alert reader has doubtless deduced that I just did this to myself and have been talking myself out of making a mountain out of a molehill. And, no, it isn’t a disaster. All I’ve done by some carelessness regarding my backup files is lost about a month’s worth of slogging through archives that I can readily re-access—really, a first-world and modern-life sort of problem. Compare that to what faced a pre-computer author who had to type everything out—or, better yet, write it out by hand—and then somehow lost the manuscript. (This is said to have actually happened to no less a figure than Sir Isaac Newton, who according to the story had just finished writing out a manuscript for publication but had not put it safely away before taking a break. He returned to find that his pet spaniel, Diamond, had gotten hold of his work and [depending on the source] either knocked a candle over onto it, starting a fire, or enthusiastically used it for a chew toy. Either way, he ruined everything. Some people would probably have flung the dog out of the nearest window if this had happened to them, and never mind if the window was on the third story or was closed. All Sir Isaac did was take his pet’s head between his hands and say, “Oh, Diamond! Diamond! Thou little knowest what mischief thou hast done!” before picking up his quill pen and beginning the tedious task of rewriting.)

Having been through this, I will probably be more careful about my backups, at least for a while—I’m human, after all, and prone to shoving relatively uninteresting things to the back burner. (I suppose some would say that I should start using a cloud backup service with automatic uploads, but—call me paranoid if you want to—I don’t trust either hackers or Big Tech with that easy an access point to my computer and my personal business, given the frequency of data breaches these days.) In the meantime, if my little cautionary tale encourages the writers among my readers to avoid losing their work by avoiding my error, I suppose some good will have come out of it.

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Researching

12/7/2023

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The process of doing research and beginning to structure a book varies from author to author. Some build outlines as a scaffolding for research and eventual book development; some use storyboarding, often emphasizing plot turns and emotional beats; some swear by index cards or notebooks that can be easily cross-referenced. The point isn’t to create a rigid “how to build a book” method; it’s to gather information and organize it in a matter that works with an author’s styles of thinking and writing.

Since the plot of a nonfictional history is largely fixed by actual events, my own method is character-driven, with information collected into profile sheets for each of the dramatis personae. (I use the term “sheets” loosely, since the one for the horse Epinard is already 27 pages long). Having learned from grim experience about the difficulty of relocating references (especially the ones I was “sure” I’d remember where to find), the sheets also contain all the necessary information for the endnotes.

I won’t use all the information I collect, of course; some will prove irrelevant or redundant. Still, I’d rather have too much and have to pare it down, for this is the foundation of my writing, and I’ll probably spend at least four hours researching for every one I spend on actually writing the book (and that’s likely an underestimate of the ratio). Fun? It is and it isn’t. It’s a treasure hunt for the interesting and the unexpected; it’s also a slog. My hope is always that the quality of what I do at this stage will be reflected in the quality of the end product: a good book.

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The Year in Review (or, Where Did 2023 Go?)

Book Review: Isaac Murphy (Katherine Murphy)

Backing Up

Researching

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