Quarter in Review: Three Horse Girls, Two Horses, One “Vol. 01”
In 2001, a woman named Sarah Dodd developed an Australian-Canadian TV series called The Saddle Club, based on 144 children’s books of the same name by a writer named Bonnie Bryant. The series featured three teenage girls: Carole Hanson, Stevie Lake, and Lisa Atwood—and then their horses. Think The Clique, but more wholesome, more winsome, and with giant animals capable of jumping over hedges and galloping home in an emergency. The Saddle Club followed “the adventures of three girls . . . who are passionate about horses and ride at Pine Hollow, the equestrian club of their town, Willow Creek,” reads the fan site for the show, which ended gracefully and appropriately in 2009.
As a tween, I watched The Saddle Club as I shined my ankle boots feverishly and laid out my jodhpurs for my riding lessons. I wanted to be in The Saddle Club. I wanted to be The Saddle Club. These girls (my girls) were best friends who helped each other with math homework and laughed in unison, yes, but they were also horsewomen: responsible, knowledgeable, diligent, disciplined, and most importantly, wholly dedicated to the act of caring for the large behemoth of an animal that is the horse: a creature at once at the whims of its caretaker; only as good as the human who leads it, yet never entirely capable of being tamed.
As a recovering horse girl—perennially “misunderstood” but “only really care(s) about the opinion of their horse, anyway” according to one 2021 Vice dek—I was particularly excited, ecstatic even, when our talented designer Angelo Maneage decided to lean into horse iconography for our latest run of merchandise (horse flies, rainbow horses) and the cover of our second ever print issue, Vol. 01 (three men, big horse, a fourth, a fifth, a minor fall, a major lift). You could call this the year of the horse, even though it won’t occur again until 2026. The new issue is hot off the presses. It smells ripe, it wears leather, and it will get angry if you walk behind it.
Among our staff, in conversations and in the Google Drive (not an ad), we have been referring to the current era of the magazine as CRB 3.0. For while Cleveland Review is still the same regional-meets-national-meets-global project it has always been, it has also aged, grown, and changed shape like a nursing foal. It’s learning to balance on its wobbly legs. It’s bucking, rearing. This is not only the first time a valiant stallion graces our issue’s pink cover (and its rare, fifty print run black one, for those lucky enough to snag Dark Mode). This printing of the magazine brings with it a new trim size; bespoke tactility and book design details hatched in collaboration with our Cleveland printer, Outlandish Press; an extremely difficult crossword puzzle; and fiction and poetry for the very first time. We must extend gratitude to our subscribers and supporters, public and private, whose contributions and donations have made the printing of Vol. 01, higher pay rates, and our current roster of print and web writers possible.
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Some people say the horse is a dangerous animal—and they may have a point. The average horse is 15.2 hands, or five feet and two inches tall. It weighs between nine hundred and two thousand lbs, and walks on hooves twice the size of a human palm. The horse is easily startled, fast, loose. Christopher Reeves was paralyzed riding a horse. King Alexander III of Scotland died when his ran off a cliff. But the truth is that the horse is really quite a gentle, intelligent, and inviting being if you care for it correctly. Like editing a magazine, leading a horse is a delicate process. Horses are finicky, with their own personalities. You have to learn to understand their quirks and anticipate their actions. The best ride, as with an editor and its essay, comes from a true sense of collaboration, alignment, and partnership between the horse and its handler.
The work inside Vol. 01 was completed with this sensibility. One such piece is a never-before-seen essay in which Sophia Stewart examines the life and work of the infamous American journalist Robert Caro and his wife Ina: little-known writer of French history books and “the only researcher with whom he has ever collaborated.” Ina, like the wives of many a history’s male writer, hovered in the distance throughout Caro’s life, from their early days in Long Island to the writing of all 1,336 pages of The Power Broker. Stewart’s essay is an intricate look at Caro’s labyrinthine legacy, two different visits to the New York Historical Society on two different days in two different moods, and what it means for two lovers to have literary ambitions. “What matters more: being a Great Man or a good one?” Stewart asks. Does she want to marry greatness, or inhabit it herself? Can both be true? Of course. But it’s not that simple.
Gerke was only five years old the first time he saw Stanley’s Kubrick’s The Shining. He was far too young to see icicles on the face of a frostbitten Jack Nicholson and hear the sound of a shrieking Shelly Duvall. Of course he blames his father—“a man given to anger”—whose misguided parenting led him to believe the best way to quash a child’s fears was to force him to bear it, no matter how many times he said “no,” eyes wide shut through widespread fingers. Gerke’s weren’t bleeding, but his heart was. The film would force him to think of nothing more than his parents’ own relationship, which was marked by “a pained duplicity.” In the absence of reliable authority, The Shining raised Gerke. He developed a love for film, a lust for Kubrickian madness, and a world of perspective on what it means to resent our fathers. At CRB, we pride ourselves on publishing essays like Stewart’s and Gerke’s, which use the cultural object to observe the self and circle back around again, like a pony in a hot walker.
In Hilary Plum’s print essay, the professor takes a trip from Cleveland to Hollywood. It’s lonely out there in the lecture hall. Writing for the screen is so much more social, so much more collaborative. You’re not toiling away on administrative bullshit (pour one out for David Graeber). You’re writing real things, real jokes. But in many ways, it’s not so different from being a professor, wherein your work is exploited for the benefit of the institution, and any hope for the good ’ol days is gone. Lacking impactful organizing in her own workplace, Plum joined the frontlines of the WGA strike: a place for her frustration—and reflection—on the similarities and differences between adjuncting and writing for the screen. She joined screenwriters, showrunners, actors and directors up and down LA’s crosswalks—in their demand for creative autonomy over AI, inoculation from shrinking writers rooms, and better pay from big studios—not because she would be a benefactor from such demands, but because as a professor, she dreams for better, well-paid days for her adjunct counterparts. “It’s very hard to change culture. But also every little thing you do is culture.” Don’t give up, she urges. Get back on that horse.
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An ever-crowded, high-quality pitch inbox means print is not the only place our best reviews and essays live. Most of our work lives on the web. One such piece is contributing writer Taylor Dorrell’s on Ohio’s own Hanif Abdurraqib, the city of Chicago, and Chance the Rapper, a poet in his own right. Architecture shapes prose, according to Adburraqib: “There’s a vastness to even the writing of and around [Chicago] that feels really vast because Chicago sprawls in so many ways.” He rejects regional tradition, Dorrell explains, but not without forging new connections between the Rust Belt and the coast.
Elena Kostyuchenko’s I Love Russia takes a different avenue as a work of nonfiction. A reporter by trade, the war in Ukraine led Kostyuchenko to write about herself this time, for the first time, because she believed it would have been dishonest not to do so. As Signe Swanson writes in her review of the book, “the personal essays in I Love Russia make it clear that everyday life has taken a similar emotional toll on [Kostyuchenko] as it has on her journalistic subjects.” As a woman living in relative comfort for many years, it was hard for the Russian journalist “to perceive her government’s precipitous but quiet rightward turn until it was too late,” Swanson explains. This realization ultimately led to the writing of this book—whose cultural context is wholly crucial for the American reader to take account of, Swanson urges. Swanson is gentle, yet assiduous with Kostyuchenko’s material.
And what would our magazine be without its reviews and excerpts of books from small and independent presses? This season we published Paige Oamek on Irene Silt’s sister books from Deluge, Cary Stough on Laura Mullen’s EtC from Solid Objects, and Ilana Bean on Christine Hume’s Everything I Never Wanted to Know from The Ohio State University Press, among others. In one recent essay, Zack Schlosberg continues this time-honored tradition of ours in his review of Fanny Howe’s short novel from Semiotext(e), London-rose. “For years, she has stared at the invisible, the unmanifest, and seen it anyway,” he writes of Howe’s wider literary project encompassing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Suffering, seeking, and seeking some more, Howe’s narrator in London-rose “must show up at her desk and work, even though she hardly knows who her work benefits.” She’s fighting a Sisyphean battle. She’s depressed, as one is when they go to work. “Is the modern world so evacuated . . . that no amount of wandering can lead one to the right words?” Schlosberg asks. Poof: our narrator is a poet. In fact, she has been one since she was fourteen.
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From here until next season, our editors will keep posting. We’ll keep reading your pitches. We’ll keep our eyes set on Vol. 02. Like embarking on a new piece of writing, getting on a horse involves a certain amount of risk. It might not go as well as you envisioned it. Your nerves might ruin everything. You might get thrown off. But don’t worry: We’re mounted. We’re riding every day. We’re giving each other taps when we’re moving too slowly (trot, don’t walk). Some of us are learning how to jump. So send us your stuff, and we’ll handle it with steady hands. After all, we’re horse people.