Molly Gloss Reads from The Hearts of Horses at Porter Square Books Tonight

One of the characters in the book, Tom Kandel, suffers from cancer. How did you research ways of addressing the condition in the time period? Radiation seems to have existed at the time--was it just not practical for use in rural areas?

The details of Tom's cancer as it progressed are from my own experience watching my husband die. As for treatment as it was practiced in the 1910s, I read the memoirs of two country doctors of the period, and combed the medical literature for specific cancer beliefs and remedies. Radiation wasn't practiced in 1917, and certainly not by small town doctors. Surgery was sometimes an option in large cities but rarely if ever in the countryside, and in any case not for certain cancers that were/are always lethal.

The characters are interestingly attuned to one another, with Martha in particular watching others for social signals of appropriate behavior--much like animals might do. Did you intend to suggest this relationship?

The short answer would be yes. But I was a country girl from a low-class family myself, and so have had experiences similar to Martha's--watching others for clues to proper behavior in new social situations.

That said, some of the characters seem almost impossibly nice. Was the "Wild West" really so sweet, or was it just starting to get tamed by this time?

The "wild west" is to a large extent a figment of fiction. And in any case the west we think of as "wild" amounted to only about 25 years of our national experience, and by 1917 it was a good 30 years in the past. Read a memoir such as Isabella Bird's "A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains" or Mary Hallock Foote's "A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West" and you will discover that even at the height of the "wild" west, women traveled alone and safely almost everywhere in the west; that most people were as kind and helpful and good hearted then, as I believe they are now. You've been sold a bill of goods by decades of two-gun western movies and paperback novels!

Martha has surprisingly few incidents with the horses she works. Is that realistic? These are green horses, after all, and it seems like she might have at least gotten stepped on a time or two, or had a few more spooking incidents.

Hmm. I think she has plenty of trouble with those green horses. She certainly mentions being bucked off, or nearly bucked off, several times. The women I've talked to who do this sort of work have had relatively few incidents of injury, and that's the template I used for Martha's experience.

Knitting socks seems to be the main activity that the women take up to support the war; Martha's question about whether the items she can make are needed is never quite addressed. Were there other major ways women (or men who couldn't join up) demonstrated their support for the troops, particularly in the west?

Knitting, yes, buying bonds, going meatless a couple of days a week, giving up wheat flour and sugar, growing a Victory garden, all of which are mentioned in the novel. Ranch men were plenty busy growing cattle and wheat for the troops.

What horse trainers did you work with when researching the novel? Do you feel an affinity for a particular trainer, like Pat Parelli or John Lyons? What are your feelings about the "horse whisperer" movement that surfaced after the movie, and still continues to some extent?

I worked with Leslie Neuman, who trains mustangs and gives demonstrations for the Bureau of Land Management in their mustang adoption program; and Corrine Elser, a horse trainer in Burns, Oregon, who also works with mustangs. Every trainer has a different way of going at it, but all of them--including Parelli and Monty Roberts, who are perhaps the two best known--come from a similar tradition, and it's a tradition that goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks. The term "horse whisperer" is a new term but the movement is anything but new, and was known and practiced, especially by women, and written about even in the 1910s when Martha was using it.

You ruminate on the cowboy spirit in the novel. What is the next "frontier" for our society?

I'm more concerned with thinking about the ways in which a cowboy mythology has shaped and informed American culture. Our cowboy mythology chooses independence and freedom (along with loneliness and isolation) over the obligations (and the embrace, the love) of community. Our cowboy mythology is a mixed bag that includes not only courage, self-reliance and honor, but misogyny, lynching and vigilatism, and of course a penchant for solving problems with violence. What's next for our society, I hope, is a new mythology in which our heroes are not the ones who ride in and solve our problems with a six-shooter and then ride on, but the ones who find a way to solve problems within the law, or by consensus, and who settle among us and live on the land generation after generation in a web of community.