Jane Smiley read this excerpt from her book A Year at the Races.

Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse. If the specifics of desire are what differentiate one personality from another, then my yearning for a horse was one of the founding characteristics of my being. Horses came to me by television ("Fury," "My Friend Flicka," Roy Rogers) and by the pony rides that once occupied a corner at the intersection of Manchester Road and Brentwood Boulevard in St. Louis County, Missouri. The ponies wore Western saddles with horns. The helper hoisted onto the pony, then strapped me into the saddle, using a leather strap that wrapped around the horn. Then the pony was led out and it trotted around a three- or four-corridor maze - out into the twilight, back into the light - maybe twice, but certainly never as many times as I wished. In retrospect, the best thing about it was that the ponies trotted. If I wanted to ride, then I had to do it the hardest, bounciest way, but the strap held me in. It was an excellent beginning and removed all fears of going fast, but there was no relating to the ponies. I was lucky if I found out their names, if I could give them a little pat before I got on or after I got off. But it was okay; it was enough. The times we drove past and got a long look at the ponies tied to their hitching post under the lights were almost as satisfying as the times we stopped.

After that, there were summer horse camps. At the first of these, Playschool on the Farm, the saddles were old U.S. Calvary saddles, the kind with a high, curved pommel in the front, a matching cantle in the back, and a mysterious fissure down the middle. They were big and impossible to sit in (and, indeed, how did men arrange their genitals against injury in these contraptions?) The next camp, in Wisconsin, had a sad string of eight horses and a small riding ring - you had to hike through the woods to get to the barn. The first-class activities at that camp were canoeing and sailing. When I was thirteen, I found Teela -Wooket, a bona-fide horse camp in Vermont, where there was a huge barn, several arenas, many horses and many levels of riding. Campers were not allowed in the barn, but we could request our favorite horses and imagine ourselves in relationships with them. The head of the equestrian activities was an old man who wore what looked like a uniform and was called Cappy. On the wall of the barn was a row of pictures of Cappy as a young man performing dressage movements. Looking back, I am guessing piaffe or passage, on an Andalusian or a Lusitano. In the winter, Cappy and the horses worked at a boarding school in Massachusetts. The riders were ranked. The most experienced of them (I was not one) went to the two horse-shows of the summer. Other enthusiasts (I was one) got to go along as spectators. Two girls brought their own horses. I seemed like a permanent member of the envious class.