Horses, Dreams, and Evolving Interests: An Exclusive Guest Post From Faith Erin Hicks, Author of Ride On

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When I was a little younger than the characters in my graphic novel Ride On, I read every book that had a horse on its cover. There were the classics: Black Beauty, National Velvet the entire breadth of Marguerite Henry and Walter Farley’s catalogue, and I particularly loved the grounded, character driven stories of Jean Slaughter Doty. But the Saddle Club, a book series by Bonnie Bryant about three horse crazy girls who were also best friends, was in a league of its own. It was everything I wanted, a perfectly crafted world of friendship, social ups and downs, conflict, and horses, horses, horses. When my favourite member of the Saddle Club, Carole, got her very own horse, I felt like I was seeing one of my best friends achieve the dream of every horse girl. A dream that was, unfortunately, out of reach for me.  

I took riding lessons religiously as a kid and teen, but there’s one thing that the Saddle Club never talked about: riding is an expensive sport. As I grew older, my starry-eyed dream of owning my own horse faded away. I worked part time jobs to afford riding lessons, and owning my own horse was just never going to happen. My parents supported my riding habit, but the money needed to commit to owning a horse was beyond their means. So, I made myself content with weekly lessons, and with the friendships I made at my local barn. Saturdays were magical, waking up for an hour-long lesson, then spending the rest of the day mucking out stalls and socialising with the other horse girls. I was a horribly awkward pre-teen, but among horse girls, I could relax. We all had one wonderful thing in common: we loved horses.  

Then I got a little older and while I still loved horses, they somehow weren’t enough. I started reading different kinds of books, science fiction and fantasy. I was swept up in Lloyd Alexander’s spectacular world of Prydain and Monica Hughes’ challenging and complicated Isis stories. Instead of searching for books with horses on the cover, I looked for the “sci-fi & fantasy” sticker on the spines of books at my local library.  

When I was a teen, I found Star Trek: The Next Generation. You know that rush of joy you get when you discover something that has been made for you? A book or tv show or movie that hits all the right spots of what you love? Star Trek was that for me. I particularly adored Data, my first TV crush. When you are a deeply awkward teen terrified of her own feelings, an emotionless android seems like the best boy ever.  

As an adult, Star Trek is still a part of my life, but horses aren’t. I stopped riding when I left home for university but kept watching Star Trek and reading science fiction and fantasy. I really like the new Star Trek animated show, Lower Decks, which seems to be made by people like me: geeks who grew up with The Next Generation and imagined themselves living in that world. I just finished re-reading The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, a sci-fi series about a grumpy cyborg killing machine that really likes to watch TV. 

I haven’t read a horse book since I was a kid, but that’s okay. One of the things I wanted to emphasize in Ride On is that it’s okay to grow and change and develop new interests, maybe leaving old passions behind. I’m not a horse girl anymore, but it was an important part of my life for many years, and Ride On celebrates that. It also celebrates the joy and excitement of finding a TV show (or book or movie) that was made for you, and the friends you can share that thing with. That’s what’s most important, after all: to share what you love with friends, be it horses, comic books, drawing, writing or whatever version of Star Trek speaks the most to you.