Call It Horses by Jessie van Eerden
Set in small-town West Virginia in the twilight of the eighties, Call It Horses tells the story of three women—niece, aunt, and stowaway—and an improbable road trip.
Frankie is an orphan (or a reluctant wife). Mave is an autodidact (or the town pariah). Nan is an artist (or the town whore). Each separately haunted, Frankie, Mave, and Nan—with a hound in tow—set out in an Oldsmobile Royale for Abiquiú and the desert of Georgia O’Keeffe, seeking an escape from everything they’ve known.
rankie records the journey in letters to her aunt Mave’s dead lover, a linguist named Ruth, sketching out her troubled life and her complicated relationship with Mave, who became her guardian when Frankie was orphaned at sixteen. Slowly, one letter at a time, Frankie exposes the ruins of herself and her fellow passengers: things that chase them, that died too soon, that never lived.
With lush prose and brutal empathy, Frankie tells Ruth—and herself—the story of liminality experienced by a woman standing just outside of motherhood, fulfillment, and love.
Publication Date: March 23rd, 2021
Hardcover: 256 pages
ISBN: 978-1-950539-25-3
Also available as an eBook
PRAISE FOR CALL IT HORSES
"Call It Horses is so many wonderful things at once: a road novel—three women trying to outrun grief, from the limestone caves of Caudell, West Virginia to the canyons of Palo Duro, Texas; a portrait of the artist as restless skeptic; a meditation on language itself. I know of few writers who write as well as Jessie van Eerden about the sacredness of language, the way it calls forth the world by naming it. Van Eerden doesn’t just write about it; she enacts it formally—the shapeshifting magic of words, the acrobatic possibilities of sentences, the beautiful, yearning, fail and fail better lengths to which we all go to make our minds heard.." -Maud Casey, author of The Man Who Walked Away and The Art of Mystery
"Call It Horses is a spectacular novel. With the gorgeous language of Jayne Anne Phillips, the compassion of Carson McCullers, Jessie van Eerden follows an unforgettable cast of women through their lives and longing in West Virginia with precision and insight. An original, beautifully structured, and deeply moving book.." -Karen E. Bender, author of The New Order and Refund, finalist for the National Book Award
"Jessie van Eerden manages, in prose so luminous it feels backlit by the golden hour, to give familiar topics—family, history, grief—their monumental due. But as exact are its descriptions of Appalachian bog and the dusty canyons of West Texas, Call It Horses locates its mystery in the liminal. The westward journey these three women take is filled with take-out meals and cheap hotel rooms, but the novel’s most illuminating route is an unsettling and compassionate search for solace." -Michael Parker, author of Prairie Fever and All I Have in This World
“Call It Horses is so many wonderful things at once: a road novel—three women trying to outrun grief, from the limestone caves of Caudell, West Virginia, to the canyons of Palo Duro, Texas; a portrait of the artist as restless skeptic; a meditation on language itself. I know of few writers who write as well as Jessie van Eerden about the sacredness of language, the way it calls forth the world by naming it. Van Eerden doesn’t just write about it; she enacts it formally—the shapeshifting magic of words, the acrobatic possibilities of sentences, the beautiful, yearning, fail and fail better lengths to which we all go to make our minds heard.” -Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory and Render / An Apocalypse
"A rich and lyric meditation on love and individuality, Call It Horses depicts three women fleeing—literally, in a stolen, rusty Oldsmobile—the fixed narratives of gender, family, home, and death they’d been coaxed into. Filled with poetry, working class grit, and undogmatic spirituality, this novel shows us what we gain when we become outlaws in our own lives.." -John Englehardt, author of Bloomland
“Call It Horses is a novel of grit and grace. Jessie van Eerden, in language both lean and lush, tells this story of women on the run—women who discover that in leaving they find exactly where they’re meant to be. The final scene is one I’ll remember always.” - Lee Martin, author of Yours, Jean
“I was so moved by this one, I sobbed at the end. And the language! What a gifted author..” - Peg Alford Pursell, author of A Girl Goes Into the Forest
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jessie van Eerden is the author of two previous novels, Glorybound and My Radio Radio, and the portrait essay collection The Long Weeping. She has won numerous prizes, including the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction and the Foreword Editor’s Choice Fiction Prize. She teaches creative writing at Hollins University.
