Please contact Ginger for private individual sessions. She is available for public clinics and workshops. Contact her at: ggaffney@newmexico.com. Ginger Gaffney’s debut memoir, “Half Broke,” is a memoir about events that take place over a year and a half at a special ranch. Gaffney specializes in training horses and helping owners. Ginger Gaffney is a top-ranked horse trainer. She received an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and her work has been published in Tin House and Utne Reader. She lives in Velarde, New Mexico.
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookworm
“Half Broke: A Memoir” by Ginger Gaffney
c.2020, Norton $25.95 / $34.95 Canada 272 pages
The last time you went riding, the weather was perfect.
Did you notice that? Or were you thinking about something, some niggling issue, a thorny problem that needed to be solved from the back of a saddle? They say that the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man. In “Half Broke” by Ginger Gaffney, the same goes for the inside of a woman.
She knew she wasn’t going to get paid for the job.
That was fine. Ginger Gaffney had a calendar full of work that paid the bills for the small homestead she and her partner shared. No, a gig working with a New Mexico ranch that served somewhat as a transitional option for inmates was Gaffney’s way of giving back. Gratis work was gratitude for a good life.
Ginger Gaffney Partner
It wasn’t always good, though.
Ginger Gaffney Horse Trainer
To say that Gaffney was quiet as a child is putting it mildly: she didn’t speak until she was six years old. She felt like a “genderless thing,” she was angry, scared, hurt, mistrustful, had little self-control, and she sometimes lashed out. Then she got a horse.
And now she’d volunteered to work on this “alternative” ranch with horses that had gone feral because nobody knew how to handle or train them. She knew exactly how those animals felt because she’d been like them once, as had the ranchers Gaffney was asked to teach: former addicts, lawbreakers, alcoholics who’d been tossed aside, who’d applied for a opportunity to work with horses, and who were constantly monitored and mentored to give them the best chance to avoid being imprisoned again.
Every horse has a story to tell. Every rancher had one, too, but the rules were strict about when they could share them so Gaffney really knew very little about the people she taught: Eliza, who’d been nearly mute; Flor, an admitted liar; Randy, who dieted to ride; Tony, who had anger issues. Sarah, the biggest enigma of all. And Marco, who leaves this book with a surprise ending.
The first time you were on a horse happened so long ago that it’s like having a finger or a nose: it never wasn’t. You probably don’t even remember it, but you won’t forget “Half Broke.”
Swinging timelines like a lariat, author Ginger Gaffney tells her own barnboard-rough story, but that absolutely takes a back seat to tales of horses she’s known and people she knew at the prison ranch near Santa Fe. Her tales are told with deliberateness, and quietly – even the ones that pulse with anger or gnashing teeth – but the graciousness and generosity here comes out loud and clear, leaving readers with a sad smile, a good chuckle, a gasp, and the thought that books like this just don’t last long enough.
Yes, the skies can be cloudy all day in this memoir, but it’s a wonderful one that horse lovers, armchair cowpokes, and reform workers shouldn’t even try to resist. If that’s you, you should know that “Half Broke” is a heckuva ride.
The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. Terri has been reading since she was 3 years old and she never goes anywhere without a book. She lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 15,000 books.
“Written with clarity and compassion, this memoir is about the astounding power of horses to heal broken human beings. HALF BROKE shows a side of New Mexico that is seldom seen—the poverty and the struggle, but also the hopefulness and odd beauty of spirit within the people and the horses.”
Half Broke
An alternative prison ranch in New Mexico conducts a daring experiment: setting the troubled residents out to retrain an aggressive herd of horses. The horses and prisoners both arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many— the horses often abandoned and suspicious, the residents, some battling drug and alcohol addiction, emotionally, physically, and financially shattered. Ginger Gaffney’s job is to retrain the untrainable. With time, the horses and residents form a profound bond, and teach each other patience, control, and trust.
As Gaffney peels away the layers of her own story— a solitary childhood, painful introversion, and a trans-formative connection with her first horse, a filly named Belle— she, too, learns to trust people as much as she trusts horses. Half Broke is a resonant memoir with a spirited, memorable cast that describes the fascinating ways both horses and humans seek relationships to survive.
Praise for HALF BROKE by Ginger Gaffney
“Half Broke is a love song to the broken ones, be they human or beast, and all the ways they find to mend. Ginger Gaffney’s prose is as clean and lovely as the land she describes, and this story is one that hinges on some of the deepest truths. Among them, the facts that loving well is the best medicine, and though we may not recover in a way that preserves the person we were, such loss is not without mercy.”
Ginger Gaffney Half Broke
“Written with clarity and compassion, this memoir is about the astounding power of horses to heal broken human beings. HALF BROKE shows a side of New Mexico that is seldom seen—the poverty and the struggle, but also the hopefulness and odd beauty of spirit within the people and the horses.”
“This book astonished, excited, enlightened, and humbled me. I loved it, loved it, loved it. At its heart, Half Broke is about the myriad conscious and unconscious ways we communicate with one other, and with creatures of different species–language both spoken and wordless. This marvelous memoir, peopled with folks in serious trouble of one kind or another, and the horses they care for, creatures with their own sophisticated ways of communicating, taught me as much about language as have my 77 years on the planet. Hard earned wisdom, the best kind.”
Ginger Gaffney Book
“Ginger Gaffney is a writer’s writer, a bold and original talent. This poignant, positive story of human and equine transformation subtly combines the author’s own healing with the challenge of teaching difficult people to work with deeply scared horses. The characters leap off the page and into your heart. Savor this book and then buy one for your best friend.”
“You will remember the tenacious and utterly winning people that populate this book for a long, long time, and you will never forget the horses.”
“Perhaps you’ve heard of equine therapy, of how time spent with a horse can stitch a person back together, tethering mind and spirit back to the body. It’s easy to doubt such magic. But reader, trust me: no matter your belief or understanding, prepare to be changed, because in the pages of Half Broke is the rare gift of story exquisitely told, a book that shows us how to save ourselves by saving what we’ve left behind—our animal body and its necessary connection to the animal world, specifically to horses, even those troubled, half-broke beings just as damaged as us. In these pages is wisdom that will gallop in your blood, calling you to experience what Ginger Gaffney found in the stables and fields of a drug rehab facility in New Mexico, calling you to then use that healing for yourself and those creatures who need it most, both human and not.”