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Under Saddle and Spirit: Emma Hudelson’s “Sky Watch”
by Rory Gould

Sky Watch: Chasing an American Saddlebred Story by Emma Hudelson tracks the narrative of the wild birth and remarkable life of Sky Watch, one of the most well-known names in Saddlebred showbiz. Ever since he was foaled in 1977, the young up-and-coming electrifying stallion had a winning air about him, which resulted in him taking home the prize for 4 five gaited open World’s Grand Championships and 5 stallion World’s Grand Championships. Sky Watch stands as an in-depth account of a showhorse like no other, written by a woman who has been deeply inspired by his existence.

Spanning much of the Midwest, in a true memoirist’s style, Hudelson paints the biographical picture of her own life, her daughter’s birth, and Sky Watch’s success alongside the lives of riders Mitchell Clark and Michele Macfarlane in such a way that makes it impossible not to root for all of them in tandem. She does so while also highlighting all the necessary research, communal ethics, and relevant statistics needed to both commentate on equestrian sports and recount the life of a horse that shook the American Saddlebred community. 

Emma gives an audience who previously might not have known or cared about American Saddlebreds a glimpse into a world only someone as dedicated as she can explain. There’s simply  no other way to communicate how intrinsic, natural, and inspiring Hudelson’s deeply personal  connection to horses is than to quote her experience riding one of Sky Watch’s descendants in  her last chapter, “Let the Horse Lead the Way.” There, she says, “We pointed straight for the opposite wall, heads up, and marched. One, two. One, two. My fingers tingled. My spine crackled. A sun was burning in the center of my chest.” Throughout her life, Emma has been no stranger to hardship, which she expands upon by detailing the experiences she has had with self-harm, assault, and overdose. Naturally, the only thing that seemed to be able to draw her back from the edge of her teenage depression was her connection to Saddlebreds.  

With the publication of any book, the author is expected to have a certain love for the topic they’re writing about. Emma is unique in the sense that her purpose and soul seem to be so intertwined with horses that she cannot exist without them, even if that means riding while pregnant or bringing her six-month-old up on the back of her mare in the hopes that her daughter, Fern, might help sustain the uncertain future of Saddlebreds.

Through writing Sky Watch:  Chasing an American Saddlebred Story, Emma reckons with the fact that the community she holds so close to her heart is entangled with a brutal history; it’s strapped into the stirrups of Confederate soldiers. Amidst a recollection of Sky Watch’s successes, (spanning 11 years and 14  chapters), Emma gracefully sheds light on the classist faults and racist foundations of the Saddlebred community – effectively condemning them where they need to be condemned – while also finding a place to speak up about her own mental health and engage with feminist themes such as motherhood.   

In her epilogue, Emma Hudelson says, “To ride an American Saddlebred is to trot with  God.” And even though she describes only horses as “portals to an otherworldly place…outside of time,” her braided narrative tracing Sky Watch’s accomplishments and her own upbringing as a self-proclaimed horse girl can be seen doing similar work. With the recent publication of her first full-length book, Emma has cracked open her own kind of portal into a world of profound emotional connection between both horses and humans alike.

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“Sky Watch: Chasing an American Saddlebred Story“ is available now, from The University Press of Kentucky

About the reviewer:

Finding “A Life of One’s Own“

On my first solo trip since having a fourth baby, after beginning a new career as a writer in midlife, I entered a corner bookshop in Alexandria, Virginia, deliciously alone. There I stumbled upon and purchased a copy of Joanna Biggs’s literary memoir A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. The title beckoned for obvious reasons and hinted at answers to questions spinning through my overloaded maternal mind: “How to carve out space for myself as a writer as I simultaneously inhabit the roles of woman and wife and mother” had recently become the chief project of my existence.
Indeed, the imperative against and amidst existential midlife panic.

The alluring title spoke directly to my inner urgent, terrifying quest: to delineate the borders separating me from my offspring and social load-bearing. To discover how to thrive both within and outside of the walls of maternal responsibility. Who the hell am I anyway? And how can I write in all this noise?

In this, her first literary memoir Biggs lays her cards down, too. A transplanted divorcee grieving the loss of her marriage as well as the decline of her mother, Biggs found herself bewildered and deeply depressed. Her revelations chronicle the painful sloughing off of what she thought was expected of her, what she had believed would make her happy and satisfied. As she sheds an old life and gradually grows a new one, she charts what it can mean to live as a free feminist woman in the 21st century. 

Alongside her self-assessment, Biggs profiles the parallel trials of eight prolific women writers who also once groped through life and love and work. Her study insists that all three of these strands are inextricably entwined, informing everything about an author’s process and confidence. Biggs takes encouraging familiarity with her author-subjects, titling each section by the author’s first name: Mary, George, Zora, Virginia, Simone, Sylvia, Toni, Elena. (If you don’t immediately know to whom each name refers, familiarity with each is helpful but not a requirement.) In doing this, Biggs draws these foremothers closer, forces them and us readers into close proximity that exposes their (and our) vulnerabilities, fears, and failures. In insistently setting aside the canon, the literary feats, and the patriarchal surnames, Biggs arrives at each person beneath: the fully realized woman, her name, her self. 

The literary genre where A Life resides also needs a name, what I call bibliophilic critical literary memoir, a realm of writing that I discovered only recently. The term describes memoir specifically centered on love for and experience of a particular book(s) or author(s) and explored through an informed critical lens. The previous title I encountered in this genre was Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch which, I discovered on Goodreads, and inspired intense debate about the nature of the as-yet (to my knowledge) unnamed genre. For instance, the book was downgraded by some readers as not adhering to its own proposed formula: it had Middlemarch, it had Eliot, but the author’s life that the title promised it had not. Although by my accounting Mead admirably disclosed interweaving stories of her youth, parents, graduate studies, and personal awakenings, for some readers her biography was not baked into the book in sufficient proportion to the subjects of her study.

But to me, Mead’s My Life and Biggs’s A Life were more than a little successful–rather, they were indescribably influential. They cracked open a new way of reading, of seeing, of writing for me, a fellow writer-reader, a fellow feminist. Biggs’s book takes the next natural step beyond Mead’s, evolving from Mead’s case study of one colossal, perennially beloved and admired novel (George Eliot’s Middlemarch) to a longitudinal study of the biographies of a lineage of women writers, each of whom (Eliot included) birthed colossal, canon-forming, canon-breaking works in an array of literary genres and historical-political moments. Each writer, Biggs contends, stood on the shoulders of the sister-mother-writer-teacher (friend) who came before. And each surmounted (or didn’t) the obstacles of love, loss, self-doubt, lack of education, childrearing or childlessness, death, and suicidality that plagued them. Their struggles, like ours, were universal–prescriptive even–for women. Yet the particulars were utterly unique. 

Like Biggs and Mead, I too aspire to complete a particular memoir, one that I began years ago about the life and death of my mentally ill, suicidal mother and her impact on me. One might note that my premise sounds familiar–other notable titles in what I call the mother memoir genre include Daughter of the Queen of Sheba by Jacki Lyden, Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman, and recently, the provocatively-titled I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeannette McCurdy. Why on earth, you might ask, do we need yet another mother memoir, another recounting of the personal revelations of a daughter who strives to make sense of her mother’s illness? The answer is that my story is both universal and unique. Perennial and particular. I stand on the shoulders of the other feminist memoirists who came before, and who light path markers for me. Women writers don’t crowd each other out with exclusivity; instead, we usher the next one in. As Biggs shows me and other readers in A Life of One’s Own, charting one’s path through a feminine and feminist existence in this world is all of many things: fraught, fragmented, disappointing, unfair, bewildering, terrifying, exciting, and mundane. It does not, though, have to be lonely. We women writers and readers are in good company. 

On occasion, Biggs’s reverence for our mother-authors can seem gullible (such as when she takes at face value Toni Morrison’s claim that she would happily jettison her career if a young single mother with aspirations to perform brain surgery needed a nanny). Yet her humane, patient, painstaking perusal of each writer’s biographies, writings, notebooks, manuscripts, archives, and letters is breathtaking. In the end, and throughout, I am grateful to Biggs and her excellent project. Her landmark bibliophilic critical literary memoir offered a soul-nourishing, sisterly walk arm-in-arm through the lives and hearts of accomplished women writers and readers, including the ones who came before, herself, me, and – I hope – you, too.

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“A Life of One’s Own“ is available now, from Harper Collins Publishers.

About the reviewer:

Juliana Lamy’s You Were Watching from the Sand arrives with praise from Kevin Brockmeier and Laura van den Berg, two practitioners of the weird, and for good reason—her debut short story collection is, itself, weird. It’s a weirdness that announces itself right off the bat, at the beginning of the first and titular story, in a declaration that barrels past introduction, and past orientation, forcing familiarity with the protagonist and, perhaps, the reader: “Of course I remember you.” It’s a masquerade of a sentence, revealing nothing of the knowledge it claims but asking to be questioned all the same. The narrator hovers, disembodied but solid in voice. What follows then is a chant, incantatory, a loudness whose intent is to intimate and obliterate in the same breath. Consider this passage which comes halfway into the story—

You can’t remember, you don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know because before it even started you’d left your body behind, you’d swam to the shore. You were watching it happen from the sand, some tiny Black boy with a face as blank as the rest of the universe, eyes so empty you couldn’t believe they’d ever been anything but.

—after a long evocation of the protagonist’s birth on a day when “all the branches of Exhaustion the River empty out inside their [everybody’s] stomachs,” after a lyrical detailing of secondary traumas, after the brief interpolation of a mother’s neurotic fixation on a religious apocalypse. It comes in a scene of direct trauma, the boy dissociating, vacating his body and the crime scene. He is unable to fully see himself for the duration of this story, the burden of intimation taken up by a divine witness (and architect) who he can’t not recognize when they meet in the coda which is at once a promise and a curse. In this opener, everything, including beauty and tenderness, is yolked inside with disaster and this is the mood of the collection.

Che, a secretly ajar girl, squats with Nadia on the upper floor of a bodega in “The Oldest Sensation is Anger”. Their relationship is rough-and-tumble, textured with minor provocations and unruly emotions, almost like cohabiting lovers. The latter is so legible in her desire for transcendence that she falls back down to earth each time she tries—“Bungee jumping when I swear, I bet anything, your ass couldn’t skydive.” The former is a riddle, a regenerative two truths and a lie, her life so disruptive to her Haitian town that she has been sent into exile in the United States. She has a “Simpsons suitcase,” a flimsiness in the specificity, as though she could have left it behind or could cast it aside any moment now and just go again.

Lamy’s collection is most comfortable in liminality and the instability of both geographical and metaphysical borders. No one is fully at home anywhere. They are either arriving or departing, appearing or disappearing, breaking in or escaping, running from or towards something. Sylpha from “Sylpha” is obsessed with Voyager (most likely the 1991 film about the post-disaster odyssey of a construction engineer), Kiki has to lay low in her mother’s sister’s house because she is in trouble in “Manticore,” Eli in “Eli” is kidnapped from his street and transported and transported for thirteen pages. And so on. 

By the final story, “Mermaids!”, all these instabilities have taken on a more logistical form: papers. “We both know that the government can send you back for not having papers,” the first-person narrator says and, a little later, “I wonder out loud if anybody’s ever tried to split papers before.” 

Despite or because of this, the characters carry their home, the Caribbean, within them like a vital organ, their minds tuned to the finer details of the histories and myths of their heritage. They are conduits and conductors for ancestral and spiritual practices. Take Sylpha’s explication of dreams for instance. 

Before Sylpha had any children, she’d wanted, more than anything, to train her dreams. All the Haitian women she knew had had dreams of the number of children they’d have before they existed in the world, and what kind of people they’d be, and Sylpha started to think that the dreaming was the point. The dreaming made a funnel of itself and forced real life to drip right through, forced real life, molten, to run here or there. And if she could train her dreams, she could control the pour of reality through them.

A private and quiet event is made into a communal and ritualistic spectacle. This is quite different from Jung’s and Freud’s dream theories although an alter ego saunters through “Belly” later. Rather, it harkens back to the arcane art of indigenous black cultures whose dream practices proceed against psychology’s run of play, the dreamer inducing the dream, coaxing something tangible out of it. In “Sylpha,” it is specifically “a Haitian thing.” 

Sylpha dreams up twins and gets, instead, a single beautiful child with a full head of hair. One auspicious phenomenon is replaced with a different one as though a token of compensation. A successful birth is, of course, cause for celebration, and yet there is despair. The fulfillment of her wish is truncated, maybe merely deferred, and in this is contained an alienation from all the Haitian women she knew. The inverse is the case in “Manticore.” Two adult sisters offset from their origin, desperate to figure out a daughter who may be possessed by godhood, pool their knowledge together to conjure their grandfather’s ghost using the vodou religion they inherited from him. It is a moment of preternatural connection between the living and the living, then the living and the ascended:

We kneel in close to each other, gathered together like fingers in a fist. I turn to my Grandpa’s picture, and I pray truths too ugly for Elijah’s god. The first? That when Kiki crashed into Arley outside of that D&B, ruptured him, a part of me wishes that I could have watched.

There’s something insistently inflammable about the bodies in You Were Watching from the Sand. They are fragile and often in danger; their identities are fluid or interchangeable with other peoples’ depending on the beholder’s desires; they are dead or incarnations of death. Their souls, however, are sturdy and ‘wayward’ in historian and writer Saidiya Hartman’s broader sense of the word: “To claim the right to opacity. To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. To be lost to the world.” 

Not unlike Hartman in her ethnography, Lamy fills her prose up with the world. She hyphenates traditions and genres. She stacks up impressions and sensations to the point of almost synesthesia. The collection roils with extended metaphors, a live-wire lyricism, and mythic language. Her stories appear to talk back to other writers. Is that a whiff of Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” in “The Oldest Sensation is Anger”? Does “July in New Orleans” bear a note of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods? As earlier mentioned, Freud’s psychology manifests androgynously in “belly,” incandescent like the book they come in.

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“You Were Watching from the Sand” is available now, from Red Hen Press.

About the reviewer: