Arcadia Books

Ginger Gaffney in conversation with Pam Houston

Wednesday July 22 | 7:00PM - 7:50PM

Register for this online Zoom event HERE.

“Ginger Gaffney writes the intricacies of the equine-human relationship as well as I have ever seen it written….She knows a horse’s mind as well as she knows her own. You will remember the tenacious and utterly winning people that populate Half Broke for a long, long time, and you will never forget the horses.”- PamHouston, author of Deep Creek

A top-ranked horse trainer’s gorgeous, life-affirming memoir that offers profound insight into the fascinating ways both horses and humans seek relationships to survive.

At the start of this remarkable story of recovery, healing, and redemption, Ginger Gaffney answers a call to help retrain the troubled horses at an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico, a facility run entirely by the prisoners. The horses are scavenging through the dumpsters, kicking and running down the residents when they bring the trash out after meals. One horse is severely injured.

The horses and residents arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many: the horses are defensive and terrified, while the residents, some battling drug and alcohol addictions, are emotionally and physically shattered. With deep insight into how animals and humans communicate through posture, body language, and honesty of spirit, Gaffney walks us through her struggle to train the untrainable.

Gaffney peels away the layers of her own story―a solitary childhood, painful introversion, and a transformative connection with her first horse, a filly named Belle―and she, too, learns to trust people as much as she trusts horses. As her year-long odyssey builds toward a dramatic conclusion, the group experiences triumphs and failures, brave recoveries and relapses, as well as betrayals and moving stories of trust and belonging.

Resonant, smart, and beautifully written, Half Broke tears at the heart of what it takes to find wholeness after years of trauma and addiction and offers profound insight on how working with animals can satisfy our universal need for connection.

Ginger Gaffney is a top-ranked horse trainer. She received an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and her work has been published in Tin House and Utne Reader. She lives in Velarde, New Mexico.

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On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.

In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief… to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”

Pam Houston is the author of two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me. She is professor of English at the University of California–Davis.

All in the Family: Martha McPhee & John McPhee on the Writer’s Process

Wednesday July 29 | 6:00PM - 7:00PM

Register for this live online Zoom event here.

Arcadia is honored to host Martha McPhee, author of the novel An Elegant Woman, and her father, author John McPhee, for a discussion of the writing process, their relationship through writing, and his guidance over the years.

Martha McPhee is the author of the novels An Elegant Woman, Bright Angel Time, Gorgeous Lies, L’America, and Dear Money. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Gorgeous Lies was a finalist for the National Book Award. She teaches fiction at Hofstra University and lives in New York City.

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University (Class of 1953) and Cambridge University. His writing career began at TIME in 1957. He began contributing to The New Yorker in 1963 and has since written more than a hundred pieces for the magazine.

In 1965 McPhee published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In the years since he has published another 33 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2006), Silk Parachute (2010), and Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process (2017).

McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for Annals of the Former World (1998). In 2008 he received the George Polk Career Award for his “indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career.”

McPhee has taught writing at Princeton since 1975. To date, nearly 500 students have taken his course. In 1999 he received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching from Princeton.