ROBIN SOMERS – This Award Winning Author Helps Rescue Wild Horses

Sep 19, 2024 | Action & Adventure, Crime, Mystery, Thriller, Westerns | 8 comments

Award-winning author Robin Somers spent her middle years in the foothills of Tuolumne County in the Sierra Nevada, where she wrote for the daily newspaper, taught high school English, and kept a horse. Today, she lives in Santa Cruz, California. She retired from the University of California, Santa Cruz faculty, where she continues to teach an occasional class and is a volunteer ambassador for the American Wild Horse Campaign. She is a founding member of the Coastal Cruisers chapter of Sisters in Crime and is also a member of Western Writers of America and Mystery Writers of America. She is the author of Beet Fields, a murder mystery, and Backyard Burning, a collection of poems. Her book Eleven Stolen Horses, a Wild Horse Mystery, launches September 17, 2024, with Sibylline Press. She returns frequently to Gold Rush Country, where the Wild Horse Mystery Series is set.

Pitch In Eleven Stolen Horses, a woman disappears without a clue from her home in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and her best friend, a reporter for the town’s daily newspaper (and the story’s protagonist), stops at nothing to find her—dead or alive. Along the way, she discovers secrets about her missing friend while crossing paths with the dark world of kill buyers and the horse slaughter pipeline.

I was thirty-seven when I started to write my first novel. I’d returned to school at the University of California, Santa Cruz, majoring in Literature and taking as many creative writing courses as possible. My creative non-fiction writing teacher, Page Stegner, announced he was taking his class on a week-long rafting trip down the San Juan River on the border of the Navajo Nation. I came away from that river with a bad case of hyperthermia, a passion for Indigenous culture, and a lasting belief in the spirit of landscape, which formed the perspective from which I write.

This first attempt brought me to a village of stick huts and tamped earth floors on the eastern slope of the Sierra de San Pedro Martir in Baja, California, where the Kiliwa live. The chief, whose name was Cruz, only spoke Kiliwa, a disappearing language. He believed I was there for the gold; I explained I was writing a novel. I wrote that book on my electronic typewriter and packed it away in a briefcase. Since then, I’ve written four more novels, one stored on a floppy disc, one in a file on my laptop, and another self-published. My most recent book, Eleven Stolen Horses, a Wild Horse Mystery, launches September 16, 2024, by Sibylline Press, an ass-kicking publishing company that specializes in the work of women over fifty. This is my first traditionally published book.

What took so long? As the late author/teacher Jim Houston (Continental Divide) said, “Writing is an evolutionary process.” I’ve taken many forms as a writer since I began forty years ago. I’ve reported and written essays, columns, features, lots of poetry, and fiction, narrowing the fiction to the mystery genre. I wrote freelance for the alternative presses in Santa Cruz and landed a full-time job as a beat reporter for a daily newspaper in the Sierra Nevada foothills. I was briefly an editor for the Forest Service. I taught high school English in that same town before moving back to Santa Cruz to attend San Jose State’s fledgling MFA program in Creative Writing, where I finished my second novel, Tornado, Kansas, which took a decade to write. I began the Olive Post eco-mystery series based on my son’s organic farm, Dirty Girl Produce. I self-published the second book in that series, Beet Fields, a murder mystery, in 2020, the year of Covid. All these parts of my evolution as an author launching her first traditionally published mystery at 75 affirm, “Never give up.”

Are my stories real or imagined? My stories are born of reality until my imagination takes over due to a trained journalistic mind that resists confinement to fact. I’m a pantser, which means I write the story as it comes to me, and sometimes the dang thing won’t come. But I got to the end of Eleven Stolen Horses. The story is about two women, one who goes missing and the other her best friend, who will not give up the search to find her—dead or alive. The premise came from the tragic disappearance of my friend Patty Kelly Tolhurst, who disappeared in the Sierra Nevada ten years ago and has not been found. Patty helped me pick out my first horse, which became a scene in the novel. My fiction is my way of processing experience. Eleven Stolen Horses is a prayer for my missing friend.

What kind of research do I do? Eleven Stolen Horses took me to a working horse and cattle ranch in Northeastern Utah, in the nape of the Jarbidge Wilderness, where ranchers bring their truths to the page and the geological hoodoo formations lend their spirit. The story also drew me to the Modoc Forest in Northern California, home of the Devils Garden Wild Horse herd, where I observed the round-up helicopter of these beautiful thriving horses, one of many roundups in one of many government wild horse management areas throughout the western states. Those mustangs not adopted into homes far too often live out their lives in holding facilities or, worse, are sold to kill buyers for slaughter. To keep my Wild Horses Mystery Series informed, I serve as an ambassador for American Wild Horse Conservation volunteer at a local wild horse rescue farm, scooping horse poop, stuffing hay bags, and grooming Sunset, a beautiful sorrel gelding.

Reaching out to an association member: In 2019, some NorCal Sisters in Crime wanted to create a chapter in the Santa Cruz/Santa Clara area. I live in Santa Cruz and jumped on the opportunity to help create the Coastal Cruisers chapter of SinC. I met women for whom publishing books was as natural as buying groceries. I was looking for an agent for my mystery Beet Fields. My SinC sister Alec Peche suggested I query a certain number of agents, say, eleven, and if I didn’t get results, to self-publish. I queried a few, then took the self-publishing leap. Alec, like so many women in SinC, was eager to help. I followed her instructions, put out Beet Fields, and became an author. If you’re starting, I can’t recommend enough joining your local chapter of SinC.

Who’s your favorite author(s): Louise Erdrich. Favorite book: Love Medicine. I’ve read each book in her Ojibwe series and taught Round House to my university students. Now: Everything by Peter Heller. He canoes and flyfishes, knows rivers, loves wolves and writes killer mysteries with an environmental twist. I wallow in Jane Harper’s dry land mysteries and Molly Gloss’ historical fiction about women and horses. When I’m stuck, I read these and other masters until their words open a door, and I can write again.

Yet, how to weave subplots into my working manuscript’s arc baffles me: Book coach Anne Janzer, author of The Writer’s Process, advises: 1) Clarify the problem and 2) form a question. Then, 3) walk away and do something mindless, like making the bed or weeding the walkway. Meanwhile, your deeper mind works out the solution. I’m writing the draft of Three Marys, the second book in the Wild Horses Mystery Series. My subplots don’t cohere, and this is problematic. The question I articulated was, “What do arson and homicide have to do with rescuing wild horses, and how do I weave these disparate and geographically distant subplots into the novel’s arc?” My mind came up with this: The solution is the arc. While a homicidal arsonist pulls a shroud of darkness over a community, the protagonist restores the light by returning a pair of endangered wild horses to freedom.

Are my settings real or fictional locations? Real until they must don a disguise. That said, the very real spirit of landscape has remained the lens from which I tell a story ever since that San Juan River trip with my first creative writing teacher, where I was lucky enough to experience the transformational power of landscape and live through it. That spirit entered me; I hope it will always reside in my work and, with any luck, touch my reader.

Here’s the link to preorder Eleven Stolen Horses

Website: https://www.robinsomers.com/

My new email: info@robinsomers.com
Facebook: RobinSomers
Insta: r_somers
TikTok: Horseygrandma