Lynda Miller recounts her experiences learning how horses communicate through posture, movement, touch, and sound. She takes the reader on a number of her adventures with horses, including encounters with rattlesnakes, jumping in the rain and mud, playing equine tag and hide-and-seek, and riding her horse friends through the uncluttered landscapes of Colorado before the population began to explode in the 1970s.

Miller describes the many and varied adventures she shared with her equine friends, gradually unspooling the story of a girl suffused with the joy and beauty, as well as the pain and sorrow, of her life with horses as she moves from girlhood to the complexities and opportunities of adolescence. Throughout the memoir, Miller shows how her parents, especially her father, foster her knowledge about horses, as well as human nature.

As one reader describes it, reading More Horses Than Cars is the same as being on the back of a dependable and smart horse, easygoing and yet vivid, surefooted and agile.

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Bev Magennis was born in Toronto, Canada. After a long career as a visual artist, she began writing in her sixties, inspired by a remote region of New Mexico where she lived for seventeen years. Bev was awarded a 2010 PEN Center Emerging Voices Fellowship and received a Norman Mailer Fiction Fellowship in 2011.

Bev Magennis was born in Toronto, Canada. After a long career as a visual artist, she began writing in her sixties, inspired by a remote region of New Mexico where she lived for seventeen years. Bev was awarded a 2010 PEN Center Emerging Voices Fellowship and received a Norman Mailer Fiction Fellowship in 2011.

Bev Magennis was born in Toronto, Canada. After a long career as a visual artist, she began writing in her sixties, inspired by a remote region of New Mexico where she lived for seventeen years. Bev was awarded a 2010 PEN Center Emerging Voices Fellowship and received a Norman Mailer Fiction Fellowship in 2011.

Bev Magennis was born in Toronto, Canada. After a long career as a visual artist, she began writing in her sixties, inspired by a remote region of New Mexico where she lived for seventeen years. Bev was awarded a 2010 PEN Center Emerging Voices Fellowship and received a Norman Mailer Fiction Fellowship in 2011.

A few years ago, while going through some files in my studio, I came across detailed notes and the journal I had kept during a desert trek I made in 1979 with nine other people. The adventure was called Desert Dance. I set about transcribing them into the story that follows. They told of a 29-day journey that tested me in unimaginable ways. It is a tale of internal and interpersonal struggles and alliances, severed relationships and conquering fears. The account is of the month I spent in a harshly beautiful place discovering my confidence, courage and strength.

I was 33 years old at the time and now, at 74, I can look back with a mature perspective and clarity at how the experience changed me in very profound ways. Writing this account brought that month in the desert alive for me once again. From my vantage point I appreciate and respect the woman I was and became as a result of the Desert Dance.

This is the story of that journey.

Anne Cooper is a transplanted Texan, having lived in the Albuquerque area for 38 years. She is a visual artist who sometimes writes stories. To the Edge: Desert Notes is an account of an experience she had at the age of thirty-three in Big Bend National Park.

To order her book, contact her at annecooper@annecooperstudio.com.

“In her stunning memoir, Jill Root takes us on a journey through dark hallways of remembering and then healing the aftermaths of childhood abuse. To my colleagues who pathologize what we call ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder,’ and to the ones who deny its existence at all, take heed. This book is a game changer.”—TINA CARLSON, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Psychiatry, Author of Ground, Wind, This Body

In a remarkable memoir that reads like a novel, Jill Root’s mind shattered without warning one morning, and a strange child’s voice crashed like a stone through the surface of her apparently normal life. Beneath that surface lay an abyss of confusion and denial that ripped Jill’s consciousness into unrecognizable pieces that would take years of work with three very different therapists to reassemble.

The mystery of her symptoms unfolds layer by layer, along with her struggle to accept a reality quite different from the idyllic childhood she had believed in. Dialogues with her charismatic father and emotionally distant mother create portraits of denial, and actual transcriptions of therapy sessions provide unique insight into the process of healing. This book will give reassurance and hope to survivors of trauma, and guidance to the partners and mental health professionals who struggle to help them.

For forty years Jill Root was an editor and publications manager for environmental consulting firms, government contractors, and academic publishers. She is the author of several nonfiction books and is enjoying a busy retirement near her children and grandchildren in a Northern California suburb with her husband and her English Labrador Retriever.