UUnniivveerrssiittyy ooff SSoouutthheerrnn MMaaiinnee UUSSMM DDiiggiittaall CCoommmmoonnss All Theses & Dissertations Student Scholarship 2015 TThhee HHeeaalliinngg PPoowweerr ooff HHoorrsseess:: OOnn RRiiddiinngg,, WWrriittiinngg && GGrriieevviinngg Cathy La Forge MFA University of Southern Maine Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/etd Part of the Nonfiction Commons RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn La Forge, Cathy MFA, "The Healing Power of Horses: On Riding, Writing & Grieving" (2015). All Theses & Dissertations. 137. https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/etd/137 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at USM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of USM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE HEALING POWER OF HORSES: ON RIDING, WRITING & GRIEVING ______________ A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE STONECOAST MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING BY Cathy La Forge _________________ 2015 THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE STONECOAST MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING December 1, 2015 We hereby recommend that the thesis of Cathy La Forge entitled The Healing Power of Horses: On Riding, Writing & Grieving be accepted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts. ____________________ Advisor Debra Marquart ______________________ Reader Justin Tussing _______________________ Director Justin Tussing Accepted _____________________ Interim Dean, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Adam-Max Tuchinsky         ii Abstract This thesis, The Healing Power of Horses: On Riding, Writing & Grieving, is a collection of essays that bring together the three stated themes—grieving, writing and horseback riding— as a means of healing that I discovered following the death of my husband. Each essay centers on one of these themes contributing to the telling of an entire story. Through scenes containing dialogue and description, I have tried to depict a universal world that many have experienced, but without living it no one can understand.         iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface: The Annoying Parts of Process 1 The Healing Power of Horses: On Riding, Writing & Grieving Redford 14 Gone 20 Daddy 36 Thailand 47 Granny 71 Lord Fauntleroy 78 Finn 85 Caw Caw 93 Memorial 108 Freedom 125 My Sweet Demon Horse 128 The Closet 140 Bibliography 147         iv Preface: The Annoying Parts of Process Three themes that have resonated throughout my experience of earning an MFA from Stonecoast all revolve around one concept—process. Normally, I find process boring and difficult, but over the last six years the challenge in my life has been accepting and, yes, even embracing process. One of those challenges came to me through tragedy and two came by choice. First, the death of my husband catapulted me into the process of grieving; second, I began to take horseback riding lessons two months after his death; and third, I enrolled in Stonecoast and began to write again after a long hiatus. All these challenges came together, in enhanced and intensified form, during my time at Stonecoast. November 4, 2009 was the day when my life changed forever. It was the day my husband died. I had been married for twelve years and in a relationship with a smart, hilarious, and artistic man for fourteen years. I won’t say that our relationship ended on that day because it endures in my memories and in the changes he wrought in me while he was alive. An alcoholic in recovery for twenty-three years, he taught me to take life as it came, to stop incessantly worrying and planning. A minute at a time, a moment at a time is the skill that I’ve had to embrace in the years since his death. Why am I here? Why did Jon die so young, at the age of fifty-one? I’ve had to explore these questions, acutely prompted by the loss of Jon. I’ve questioned my place in the universe and the other pressing question—What am I going to do? I asked it seconds after the doctor told me Jon had died, and I have never stopped. Then I cried it out in despair, now, six years later, I say it—what am I doing to do?—with some wonder and anticipation about what good things life can bring.         1 Grieving. Above all, I knew that I needed to allow myself to move on. Even at the bottom of the well, feeling isolated and weak, I was determined not to get stuck and not be bitter. In the days after Jon’s death, I said those exact words to my therapist. I knew it was a possibility for me and I would need all my strength to resist the temptation to retreat from life into a fantasy in which I pretended that Jon was still with me, where I could never love again, where no one would ever live up to his memory, where I became a dusty shell of myself. Writing. When I was nineteen years old I moved to New York City. A friend had a rent-controlled apartment and when she asked if I wanted to be her roommate I accepted. I always felt a bond with the City and was unhappy after my freshman year at the University of Vermont. I deferred my sophomore year at UVM and took a job as an escrow clerk at the Manhattan Savings Bank in mid-town New York. After working there for nine months handwriting escrow tax payment and deadlines in huge ledgers every day (I felt like Bartleby the Scrivener) I realized I needed to be back in college. I was accepted at Columbia University and began working on my degree in English/Creative Writing. Like many writers, I began writing as a child, small poems and even a twelve- page short story/fairy tale in fourth grade. Throughout high school, writing was the place where I felt safe. I could choose whom I wanted to read my work or if I wanted anyone to read it at all. I told the story of my difficult childhood to the pages of my notebooks, and I didn’t even know that is what I was doing. Everything I held inside of me came out in short stories and poetry. The topics went beyond typical teenage angst to the root causes of my shyness and anxiety.         2 I grew up in a small Vermont town with frequent visits to my paternal grandmother’s home in one of the wealthiest areas of Connecticut and the country. My mother, brothers and I lived in a mobile home for a time, but my grandmother’s solid stone house was where I felt most loved and safe. Even though my father had abandoned the family when I was barely out of toddlerhood, his mother made it her mission to welcome us into her home and bestow us with unconditional love. All of this contributed to an extremely uneven childhood and writing quickly became my escape. In my early thirties, escaping a dead-end ten-year relationship, I picked a place on the map that wasn’t New York and moved to New Hampshire where I eventually met my husband and soul mate. By that time, writing had gone by the wayside. I loved my life but maybe I just needed to live more in order to have something to write about? Aside from professional writing, I didn’t write creatively for over a decade. Riding. By the time Jon died we had lived for six years in a small New Hampshire town full of horse barns and boarding facilities so it wasn’t hard to find a place to take lessons. I had wanted to learn to ride since I was a small child, but was never given the opportunity. It was something I’d joked about as an adult, how I never got to have a pony, but now I wonder how my life would have gone if I’d actually learned to ride as a child. I probably wouldn’t have spent twelve years living in New York City which means I wouldn’t have moved to New Hampshire when I was thirty-two, and wouldn’t have met Jon when I was thirty-four. Horseback riding immediately became my refuge from grief—the barn, the place where I felt most at peace. Being around horses got me through the most difficult time in my life, and it led me to owning my own horse and to a complete change of lifestyle. I         3 remember standing out in the field on a blustery February night helping the barn owner to mend a fence and saying out loud, “How did I get here from the Upper West Side of Manhattan?” But I wouldn’t have it any other way. Horses have brought so much joy into my life. My first day at Stonecoast was terrifying. It was my first time in school since I earned my undergraduate degree in 1985. I had written on and off over the years but let work and relationships get in the way. I was stepping way outside my comfort zone. In my grief I wanted to hide from the world. I felt like an imposter among all the students busily chatting with each other, and with faculty about their own work and writing as a craft. My writing seemed woefully inadequate, sophomoric and incomplete. That, coupled with my grief and the fact that I was writing about that very grief left me in a whirlwind of super sensitivity and insecurity. I wondered why I was admitted to the program. Was it a huge oversight? I had a feeling the admittance wasn’t unanimous by my reviewers. Or was it just my own paranoia? I didn’t want any of these questions answered but these were moments and ways that I tortured myself. My first workshop didn’t do much to alleviate my insecurity. The instructor was hard on my work. Looking back, I realize she was completely right and I knew it then too. Yet, as a creative non-fiction writer I bared myself to the group and it was painful. She compared the death of my husband to getting a divorce and I was floored. She wasn’t kind or gentle in her critique and although I had experienced tough critique and more before when I was at Columbia, my heightened fear and sadness, as well as the newness of the environment, magnified the experience. I understand where she was         4 going with her critique. What, indeed, was unique about the hospital scene when my husband died? It was unique to me, but if I wanted to be a good writer, a writer that other people would want to read, I needed to go beyond a dispassionate description of a hospital scene. Lesson number one. What I did get from that workshop were friends. Friends who were also writers. Friends who would comfort me after a tough workshop. Friends who would tell me the truth about my writing. Friends who would look for me to see if I was okay. Friends to go to dinner with, to talk about writing ad nauseam, who were never boring and always supportive. What a gift. A whole new community that transcended place. We were scattered around the country and the world. Lesson number two. There was no handholding from any of my mentors. I learned if I wanted to be a good writer, I had to do the work. No one was forcing me to do this program. How did this affect my writing? It made me take responsibility for my work, my schedules, my own and my mentor’s deadlines. I learned that I am that person that waits until the last minute to get work done, but that deadlines are not variable. They are set. So, if I procrastinate, that is on me, and I still have to get the work done. But, my work doesn’t start to come alive until a deadline is bearing down on me. It is stressful and painful at times but unless I can figure out a way to change this characteristic I have to accept that it’s the way I write. That is actually a big relief for me. Rather than beating myself up, I can accept myself the way I am. Whoever said writing was easy? Lesson number three. We come to the piece I wrote entitled, “Thailand,” which is included in this thesis. I submitted this piece to be critiqued in the first workshop of my second residency and it created a storm. Naively, I had written a piece about being in         5