{"id":28440,"date":"2021-01-08T00:29:18","date_gmt":"2021-01-08T05:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=28440"},"modified":"2021-01-14T20:26:57","modified_gmt":"2021-01-15T01:26:57","slug":"chasing-painted-horses-is-2021-one-book-one-aurora-pick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/chasing-painted-horses-is-2021-one-book-one-aurora-pick\/","title":{"rendered":"Chasing Painted Horses is 2021 One Book One Aurora pick"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As he headed in the direction of a fairground attraction, five-year-old Drew Hayden Taylor stopped in his tracks to look at a small horse taking his fellow youngsters for a \u201cride\u201d in small circles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was tethered in place, limited to that circle, day in and day out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt just looked down and never looked up,\u201d Hayden Taylor recalls decades later. \u201cEven as a little kid, it looked so sad to me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It may have just been a daytrip to Campbellford he took with his grandfather, but this takeaway was anything but.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the years, this horse has fuelled both his imagination and his creativity. Now, the resulting novel, Chasing Painted Horses, has been selected by the Aurora Public Library (APL) as its One Book One Aurora selection for 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One Book One Aurora is APL\u2019s initiative to get all of Aurora reading from the same page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With multiple copies of the book ready to be released throughout the community over the coming months to be picked up, read, shared and passed on, it will form the centrepiece of a year\u2019s worth of Library programming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chasing Painted Horses begins with Ralph Thomas who comes across graffiti of a horse in an alleyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe recognizes the horse. A half-asleep Indigenous homeless man sees Ralph\u2019s reaction to the horse and calls out to him. Over the course of a morning\u2019s worth of hot coffee on a bitterly cold day, Ralph and the homeless man talk and Ralph remembers a troubling moment from his childhood when an odd little girl, Danielle, drew the most beautiful and intriguing horse on his mother\u2019s Everything Wall, winning the competition set up for children on the Otter Lake Reserve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRalph has lived with many questions that arose from his eleventh winter. What did the horse mean \u2013 to him, his sister, his best friend, and, most importantly, the girl who drew it? These questions have never left him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor has the story of the horse left Drew Hayden Taylor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A resident of Curve Lake First Nation near Peterborough, Mr. Hayden Taylor has had a storied career as a writer. His credits include episodes of The Beachcombers, Street Legal, and North of 60, a number of novels, and short story collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chasing Painted Horses began life as a short story in his collection \u201cFearless Warriors\u201d under the title The Girl Who Loved Her Horses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t happy just being a short story, so I wrote it into a one-act play for a young audience,\u201d Hayden Taylor tells The Auroran. \u201cIt was my favourite thing I ever had the opportunity to write but, again, it still wasn\u2019t happy being a one-act play for kids; it kept telling me it had more story there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hayden Taylor didn\u2019t start out wanting to be a novelist. In fact, he was often discouraged from writing by his mother and \u201coddly enough, my Grade 11 English teacher.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGrowing up on the Reserve can be quite boring, so I read a lot and the more I read the more I realized I wanted to be a writer. I gave up wanting to be a writer and it wasn\u2019t until I was in my 20s\u2026that it wasn\u2019t so much of me finding my art, but my art tracking me down and kicking me in the ass,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He started off writing magazine articles before turning to the film industry. He turned in his first television script at the age of 25, but didn\u2019t really feel he had found his voice until his late 20s when his first play became a hit. He published his first novel nearly 15 years ago, with his second novel, Motorcycles & Sweetgrass, becoming a national hit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI never thought I was a novelist, that involves real effort \u2013 novels are like a marathon \u2013 but I realized I could write it and this story had been sitting in the back of my mind for so long that it eventually came forward and said, \u2018Don\u2019t forget us.\u2019 So, I decided to blow the dust off the horse, Danielle and Ralph, sit down and just create their world once more and give them much more freedom, dimension and life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, this story, with its complete freedom, dimension and life, is set to become the heart of a community conversation and Mr. Hayden-Taylor says the fact that \u201cit was picked for something like [One Book One Aurora] that lets other people feel the resonance of what I felt from the story and wanted to share on a larger scale means so much to me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGetting face-to-face, one-on-one interactions with [Aurora readers] is what I am most looking forward to,\u201d he says about One Book One Aurora. \u201cI hope they like the book and [I look forward to] learning what they liked about it. As a die-hard lover of reading books, as well as writing them, sitting down and talking about literature is just so much fun. A lot of people talk about movies, a lot of people talk about television\u2026. I do that, but I also like to talk about literature. I miss authors festivals and all my usual lectures where we get to talk about the wonders of Indigenous literature. I am very, very flattered.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drew Hayden Taylor has recently completed work on a 13-part documentary series for APTN called \u201cGoing Native\u201d and is presently working on a non-fiction book that will form the fourth installment of what he calls his \u201cMe\u201d series. Previous volumes include Me Funny, which \u201cdeconstructs\u201d Indigenous humour, Me Sexy, which explores Indigenous sexuality, and Me Artsy, which looks at how Indigenous heritage influences art. The latest, Me Tomorrow, looks ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is about Indigenous futurisms, where we will be in 10, 20, 50 years from now,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople are always thinking of Indigenous people, including ourselves, where we came from, what was lost, what we\u2019re trying to get back, our connection to the past. I want to turn that lens around to see where we will be in 10, 20, 50 years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more information about One Book One Aurora, including programming as it takes shape, visit onebookoneaurora.com.<\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As he headed in the direction of a fairground attraction, five-year-old Drew Hayden Taylor stopped in his tracks to look at a small horse taking his fellow youngsters for a \u201cride\u201d in small circles. It was tethered in place, limited to that circle, day in and day out. \u201cIt just looked down and never looked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/2021-01-07-03.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-7oI","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-24 16:21:26","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}