Why We Ride
Non-Fiction Short Story Collection
Women and their horses – a symbiotic relationship based on trust, camaraderie, friendship, and love. In Why We Ride, Verna Dreisbach collects the stories of women who ride, sharing their personal emotions and accounts of the most important animals in their lives.
This collection of stories includes the heartfelt thoughts of a range of women – those who rode as children, those who spent their girlhood years dreaming of owning a pony, and those who have made a lifelong hobby or career out of riding. Each story reveals how horses have made an impact in the lives of these women. With a foreword by best-selling novelist Jane Smiley and chapters by Dobie Houson, Jane Ayres and other women writers, Why We Ride offers a reflective view on the relationships between women and horses.
Published – May 2010
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Eleven Years With Houdini
Non-Fiction
When she first meets Bear, an angry and imposing dapple-grey, Houson has no idea that the unruly gelding will eventually become hers. Part escape artist, part rebel, Bear was sired by a champion, and bred to jump. But he rebels during his training and almost kills his trainer, an act that threatens his destiny and his life.
As Houson comes to know him, she learns that Bear’s issues are all in regard to timing and that his challenge in this lifetime is to master the art of surrender. But far from surrender, Bear defies everything. When his impending sale to a jumping barn threatens to seal his fate and end his dreams of freedom, Houson makes a life-changing decision to buy the difficult hot-headed horse to save him from a future she knows will destroy him.
She quickly discovers that this horse will test everything she thinks she knows about riding and training and will make her relearn everything. On his terms and in his own sweet time. Through her relationship with Bear, Houson comes to a deeper understanding of the complexity and sensitivity of the animal kingdom. And she learns that animals experince love, anger, grief, and hope just as humans do.
While Houson enters the relationship believing that she was put in Bear’s life to be his teacher she ultimately learns that he is here to teach her.
Publish Date – To be determined.
A True Way of Being
Fiction – Novel
Most people would have said that Jessica Heartwick had it all. And they would have been right. At just 36 she did have it all. Beauty, brains, talent, success, family, and love. But Jessica’s well-ordered world is about to slip through her fingers. Without knowing why, Jessica begins a search for a new riding instructor and begins training with Christo Canseo, handsome, aloof, and hypnotically charismatic. Soon after meeting Christo, she has a vision. In it she is walking by a stream with him. The vision leaves her with two revelations: that she and Christo have known each other before and that they loved each other with an intensity that most people only dream of finding.
Jessica finds herself hopelessly unequipped to process the onslaught of emotion that has been rekindled by reuniting with Christo and unable to fully be with him. Determined and desperate for answers, Jessica turns to Giselle, a gifted intuitive counselor and physic. It is here that Jessica’s real journey begins.
Jessica learns that she and Christo are twin flames, one soul with two identities, and that they have reincarnated lifetime after lifetime throughout eternity. In this lifetime, they have promised to resolve a karmic past life tragedy in which Christo was murdered by another man and right the wrongs from the past.
In the process of self-discovery, Jessica’s intuitive gifts blossom and her awareness of the multidimensional spiritual realm evolve in ways that leave her, and her well ordered world, forever changed.
Publish Date – To be determined