Playground Play and Posing with Lexi

Goal accomplished: Lexi stands quietly while I
take a picture on the way back from our ride.

With these snowy conditions, I haven't been able to do much riding, but I have been able to work on small projects with Lexi that might otherwise get designated to another day. One of my goals has been to work with her on stopping and standing when we're out in the orchards. She likes going out and has a nice forward walk for a small horse, but she doesn't like to stop and stand. I've tried to convince her that if she would just hang out beneath an apple tree she'll be well rewarded, but she hasn't been convinced. And in Kevin's "playground," a part of the farm that's dedicated to fun, she gets anxious. It's a lovely spot with a small pond (though not one we can take the horses into) and some flat and hilly ground for galloping and lots of little logs for jumping. In the summer there's a water complex too, but it's full of snow today as is the playground in general. Every time we got out there, she wants to take off, which would be fine if there weren't gopher holes hiding under the snow and the potential for slipping. So my goal has been to get her listening even when she's feeling spicy.

The challenge with clicker-training Lexi in particular is that she's not food-motivated when she's tense. She has broadened her view of acceptable treats, but until two days ago I could rarely get her to eat one when we were out. When she did, she usually gobbled it down while she tried to charge off or held it in her mouth as she stared at whatever goblin might be up ahead. 

But we've been doing a lot of click/treating while walking out in the snow the past couple of weeks, and two days ago we ventured into the playground and walked around the pond and up the hill past the cross-country jumps that usually get her wired up. As usual she would start getting high-headed and "looky," but this time I asked her to walk figure-eights on the ground around me, then disengage her hind quarters, with plenty of clicking and treating for a quiet response. And pretty soon she was offering me behaviors. What if I drop my head to the snow? Click/treat. What if I stand quietly with my ears pricked? Click/treat. What if I touch this log? Click/treat. And so on.

And yesterday we rode out in the orchards and for the first time she stopped to take treats quietly and appeared to be trying to sort out what behaviors might get her a click/treat. What if I walk faster? Drop my head at the walk? Stretch my nose forward? How about a trot transition? The beauty of the click is that the response to what she's doing is immediate. She gets instant feedback. "Yes, that's a lovely walk." "Yes, rounding your neck and lifting your back is absolutely the right thing to do." And so she does it again. And again. And if I respond with perfect timing (hah!), theoretically I could make rapid progress towards whatever my goal is. 

The challenge for me is sorting it all out. Clicker training teaches mindfulness, because it's very easy to miss a clickable moment, or worse, to click the wrong thing because you're a split second late. So, for example, when tied for grooming, Lexi has her little buoy to target as I'm grooming. She has a small repertoire of behaviors which I'm working to "microshape." That is, I want to take her from touching the buoy with her nose stretched out and her neck flat and change her "shape" to an arched neck, her weight balanced and slightly rocked back so that she lifts her back at the halt. It's something Alexander Kurland calls "the pose."* We've been working on the pose over the last few days and today, as I was grooming her, I had her standing closer to the buoy, her neck lifted and her head more perpendicular to the ground than it has been, as well as her ears pricked. I was working to click her only when she gave me a more attractive look as she touched the buoy, a step closer to the pose (I'm not asking for the finished product. It's too soon!) If you were watching, you would have seen her moving her head quite a bit. What if I touch the snow? No? OK, how about wiggling my lips on the buoy? No? What about looking out across the distance with my ears pricked, with my nose almost on the buoy? Click/treat. Hurray! OK, what about pricking my ears with my nose on the buoy. Click/treat. Yeah!!!!! 

And so on. But if I mistime the click, I'm clicking her for turning her head towards me, or for pinning an ear, or for taking a bite out of the buoy, so I have to be absolutely mindful in order to click at the right moment. I don't always get it right and that's why it's a slow process, but it's always fixable. If something isn't working, I just go back to the previous step. 

Next up: Using play, and fixing as I go.

*Make sure to watch this video by Alexandra Kurland to see what "The Pose" will lead to (I hope) as my work with Lexi progresses.

Engaging Readers, Conversations about Writing, and the Wisdom of Combining Horses and Words

My previous post, with its question about how to engage readers, generated a microscopic blip on the "stats" for my blog -- but more importantly it also generated a couple of helpful conversations. My friend Peter Reed wrote, "I believe that current social media is moving towards a visual sense only. Check out Instagram or snap chat. Both are predominantly visual .... It's getting more and more difficult to get people to read something longer and more complex."

The chart to the left, shared by my friend Jill Widner, reveals some sobering facts about reading and books. My novel faces an uphill slog towards publication for a good reason. But still: 43% of books are read till the end, savored I hope, and loved. And if 70% of adults haven't been in a bookstore, perhaps at least a certain percentage of those bookstore-deprived people have ordered books online, or directly from an author's site, as I've done on occasion. Why pay the middlepeeps when you don't have to?

As a child, I read voraciously. While my sisters and their friends usually used their 20-pence pieces to buy Cadbury's chocolate or other sweets at H. Williams* in Dundrum after Mum picked us up from school on Wednesday afternoons, I always bought cheap volumes of Enid Blyton's Secret Seven and Fabulous Five series. I read them by flashlight under my duvet at night, but loved more furiously Watership Down and The Yearling, which brought me to sobs in the silence of my room. And now I want to do what writers did for me so many years ago; they replaced the cold blue of my room with sailboats and islands and horses galloping down shale slopes and rabbits in deep underground warrens and dying fawns. (I read The Yearling only once, and can't imagine reading it again. It turned me against guns and hunting and any desire to eat meat; I cried for days, and while that might sound devastating and terrible, I think it's not: "The more a child reads, the likelier they are able to understand the emotions of others," the chart above says. Yes. That.)

Pam, a long-time, now-retired colleague, asked me a couple of provoking questions: "But the question in your blog is how does a writer engage readers. So, who will the readers be? How do you expect or anticipate them to show engagement? Are they going to be readers or reader/writers?"

I had to think about the answer for a while. I wasn't thinking of an audience for my novel Entangled Time as I wrote it. My sister Moira had read the draft and said it reminded her of a cross between Maya Angelou and the novel The Help. I think that works. It's literary, I hope, somewhat historical fiction, and perhaps is written in an accessible enough way to be appealing to an audience with an interest in topics such as racism, dying, love, the nature of God, physics, intergenerational secrets and family dysfunction. 

But that brings me to the question of the audience for my blog. I began it to track how I'm doing connecting with my formerly abused horse Lexi without a sense that I was writing "to people." That was the plan, anyway.  Then I got self-conscious and started writing for an imagined audience, so my writing took on a more structured, formalized feel. And now I'm throwing in writing as a topic and I'm wondering how few of my potential readers might love both horses AND writing. Should I split the blog up? Two blogs: Horse training (via the clicker), and a sabbatical-theme blog about writing and engaging readers? 

Oh, screw it. That's getting entirely too complicated. People are multi-faceted. If you're like my dad and you think horses are worthless creatures that "bite at one end, kick at the other and consume a hell of a lot of money in the middle," then ignore the horse posts. And if you just want Lexi stories and not all these words about writing and readers and theories about humanity, ignore the writing posts. Yes?

It's a work in progress, that's for sure. Now to figure out how to get the visuals that will hold the attention of increasingly visual readers!

*H. Williams image scanned by Brand New Retro and found here.

Percolating

Places to Percolate

I woke last Saturday with a sense of shock. I was done; I had turned in my grades. I was looking at six months without teaching. Vertigo -- immediate, unprecedented. I've been working in some way or another since I started babysitting at 12 years old. I had summer breaks in college and for my first few years of teaching, and years ago I had a quarter-long sabbatical to write about Sebastian Barry closely followed by another one to work on the breast-cancer memoir that I wrote with my mother.  But that was 16 years ago. Since then I've been teaching straight, including summers, without a break.

At the end of every quarter I turn in my grades and breathe a sigh of relief. Then I wake the next morning and think about prepping. It's who I am. It's how I've lived. I can't imagine what it's like not thinking about what I'm going to do for my next set of classes -- tweaking curriculum, adding a new activity, figuring out state-of-the-art software. So a moment of giddy joy on Saturday turned almost immediately into a kind of panic. But before I could plunge too deeply into the void, Azalea came in to remind me we were going Christmas tree catching the next day and I was able to focus my energy on the familiar -- getting out the decorations, moving things around to make room for the tree, not-thinking not-thinking not-thinking about having nothing to do for six months.

What I know about myself is that the best way for me to write is to not write. I have to do nothing* in order to write freely. It's how I think. And it's impossible to do enough nothing when I'm working.

So Saturday I prepped for the Christmas tree, and Sunday we went and chopped down our Charlie Brown tree in the woods in a wee bit of a snow storm, then drank hot chocolate with Peppermint Schnapps to get warm before the drive home, and Monday I paid bills and cleaned things and continued not to think about the nothing that is waiting for me, and Tuesday -- which is today -- I ran on the ditch bank through snapping cold air, feet breaking through the thin crust on the snow that fell last week, and finally allowed myself to think about the nothing.

And this evening, after Azalea left to hang with her boyfriend, I made a plan. Right now I have a journal where I will write morning pages, and I will have this blog which is my baby-step move towards fulfilling my sabbatical promise. And tomorrow I will ask the Peoples of the Internets what you all think about how a writer who writes best by doing nothing can do something to engage with readers in the new world beyond the garret. 

For the moment, that's enough. I await your suggestions, peeps.

*And by "nothing," I mean I need time to be mindless, walking, running, cleaning the house, riding (for although riding itself is mindful, many of the chores around riding allow space for that "nothing" in which writing develops).