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On History and Storytelling

7/27/2023

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​Before history, there were stories. True stories, preserving events in common memory. Stories told to shape cultural narratives, or to challenge them. Stories meant to instruct the young. Stories embodying great truths, and stories told purely to entertain.

History, as commonly defined today, began with the written word—a vast achievement that allowed information to be passed between generations, long after the deaths of those who originally observed or discovered events and facts. Thanks to the written word, we can draw on knowledge built up across centuries and cultures on a scale unavailable to our distant forebears.

Nonetheless, Homo sapiens remains a storytelling species, and this has a bearing on our histories. For histories are more than dry recitations of facts. Cultural, social, religious, and political pressures have a bearing on which facts will be recorded and remembered and which will sink into legend, or be forgotten entirely. Some things are emphasized; others become historical footnotes, or lie neglected until the dust is blown from some journal, paper, or letter that brings them to light again. Individual historians, too, act as curators, for even in a tiny portion of history—say, the biography of one prominent person—there is simply too much information for every bit of data to be given equal prominence. Thus, the historian invariably becomes storyteller to lesser or greater degree, choosing—sometimes consciously, often unconsciously—which matters will be given emphasis, and filtering the emotional content that invariably becomes attached to facts through his or her own psyche, with all its experiences, shaping influences, emotional reactions, and biases. No matter how dedicated the attempt to be objective, the fingerprint of the individual historian inevitably becomes attached to the history he or she presents.

Like many another horse-crazy youngster, I first became acquainted with Black Gold’s story through Marguerite Henry’s Black Gold. Like several others of Henry’s fictional works for children, it followed the story of a real-life horse primarily through the fictional or semi-fictional point of view of a young character with whom her juvenile readers could identify—in this case, teenaged Jaydee Mooney, whose real-life model, J. D. Mooney, rode Black Gold to victory in the 1924 Kentucky Derby at the age of 22. Aided by the work of noted illustrator Wesley Dennis, she was able to fit both the basic facts of Black Gold’s life and some legendary elements into the theme of the success of an underdog (underhorse?) against the odds, aided by someone who saw him as special when few others did. That Henry took some liberties with the actual history does not detract from her writing. Her purpose was to produce a historical fiction story suitable for children, winning their sympathy for her hero horse and his special human, and she was obviously successful in doing so. Many years later, with the one-hundredth anniversary of his improbable Derby win approaching, Black Gold emerged from whatever corner of my memory I had kept him in and trotted out, demanding that I give his story another look. Dream Derby: The Myth and Legend of Black Gold is the result, representing five years of planning, research, and late nights spent bending over a computer keyboard.

Dream Derby is history, not historical fiction, and so the constraints on telling this story have been those of history: to remain true to the available facts recorded close to a century ago, supplemented by later records of the recollections of those who lived through or witnessed those events. I was and am not interested in recounting “history as it should have been,” which is generally no more than dressing up the presenter’s personal beliefs and biases about the present in period guise. That approach may reveal a great deal about the historian, but little about the era and people supposedly under review. For good or ill, they are what they were, not what we might wish them to be. Where I become storyteller as much as historian is in trying to discern the real, breathing human beings and horses whose lives made the history so that the reader can see the world they lived in and the events they were part of through them. Their story is now mine and, through me (I hope), yours, bringing back a world that was very different than our own, yet (because of our shared humanity) very much the same.
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Book Review: The Foxes of Belair (Jennifer S. Kelly)

7/20/2023

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​Just as the late Jim Bolus became the unquestioned historian of the Kentucky Derby, Jennifer Kelly is staking her claim to be the historian of American Thoroughbred racing's Triple Crown. Following on the heels of her outstanding Sir Barton and the Making of the Triple Crown, The Foxes of Belair explores the history of William Woodward and the two American Triple Crown winners that he bred at his Belair Stud, Gallant Fox and his son Omaha. Painstakingly researched and exquisitely detailed, the book provides both in-depth portraits of its heroes and a sweeping overview of the long-range influence that Woodward and his champions exercised on Thoroughbred history, all in an easily read style that shows Kelly to be a master of her craft. The Foxes of Belair deserves a place in the libraries of both serious historians and more casual horse lovers, and I will definitely be looking forward to her next project.
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Welcome to Horse Tales: The Beginning of a Journey

7/13/2023

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I suppose I was born doomed when it comes to writing. My grandmother dabbled with writing poetry. My mother and an aunt both taught English and were thoroughly at home with both classic literature and popular fiction. My father wasn’t as literary but had an endlessly inquisitive mind that thrived on the variety of topics found in the likes of Reader’s Digest, National Geographic, Encyclopedia Britannica, and various Time-Life series. Small wonder that I was reading by age 2, fascinated with books and words before I was old enough to make any lasting memories of how I became aware of them. They were always there, part of my family’s life and, by osmosis, part of mine.

Books, then, were part of my heritage. Horses were not, but I found my way to them anyway, and not much later than I discovered reading. One of my father’s cherished possessions was a photograph he had taken when I was about three—four at most. We were living in Louisville, Kentucky, then, and we had stopped by the side of the road during a drive. A fence separated us from a pasture full of mares. The photograph tells the tale: the white-railed fencing and cropped grass, the animals grazing peacefully—and, in the lower right corner, a little girl with long blonde hair, a frilly little dress, and the patent Mary Janes that were popular at the time as children’s footwear, at least for occasions such as going to church or visiting relatives. Not exactly an outfit suitable for climbing fences and dashing across a horse pasture, but clearly that was exactly what I had on my mind if that was what it took to get to the objects of my fascination. I don’t think I got very far up the fence before Dad peeled me off and returned me to the safety of the car, but he snapped the picture first. Later, he had it enlarged, matted, and framed. His handwriting is still on the mat; it reads, “Dawning of a Love Affair.”

I never got any further with getting close to horses, at least not in regard to owning one; multiple moves and a parental divorce got in the way. That didn’t stop me from reading everything horsy I could get my hands on, including everything by Marguerite Henry, Walter Farley, and C. W. Anderson in school and local libraries. By the time I was fifteen, I was starting to accumulate notebooks full of everything I had scrawled down about the pedigrees and histories of Thoroughbred horses. Where those notebooks are now, I have no idea: most probably fell victim to mildew, water damage, or a house fire years ago, along with my early attempts at writing short stories and fantasy fiction. Some were still around when I acquired, among other things, a husband and then a couple of children.

Now, said husband has been well aware of my horse-craziness pretty much from the get-go, along with other quirks that he didn’t share but loved anyway, and probably would have been perfectly happy to get me a horse except for minor problems such as eternally having more bills and other priorities than money to cover them all. In all honesty, I didn’t have the energy to spare either, between family matters and a demanding full-time job in mental health. So, by the time my thirties were sneaking on by, I had rather resigned myself to horselessness. I kept reading, though. I kept making notes. And I kept revisiting favorite books, among them Sir Charles Leicester’s Bloodstock Breeding. I was endlessly intrigued by how he presented the Derby Stakes winners of the 20th century, weaving together their racing histories and their backgrounds. One fine day, probably late in 1999, I was griping to my patient spouse--not for the first time—about the lack of any books in the American market that provided the same information about the winners of the Kentucky Derby and the other American Triple Crown races.

“Well, why don’t you write it?” he joshed.

He should have known better. For the next three years, he handled most of the housekeeping and child care on top of his own full-time job while I spent nights and weekends researching, writing, and wrestling with dial-up Internet access that could be counted on to go down right when I was in the middle of something crucial. By the time I was done enough with the manuscript to search for a publisher, I was ready to nominate him for sainthood. His work and mine were rewarded when Jackie Duke at Eclipse Press accepted the proposal and manuscript that became American Classic Pedigrees 1913-2002. And that’s how this whole crazy business of being an author got started, with the book that became the ancestor of this website.

There’s more to tell, of course. And at some point, I may ask some of you who suffer from the same insanity about combining horses with putting pen to paper if you’d like to share how your journey got started. Until next week….


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    Author

    I'm Avalyn Hunter, an author with a passion for Thoroughbreds and a passion for writing and storytelling.

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