InFocus Magazine

Driving on Headquarters Road heading northwest out of Courtenay on a spring day, the world reads like a rapturous ode to the ideal of ‘rural.’ Fluffy white lambs frolic alongside their grazing mothers; green fields unfold gently under golden sunlight. The plum and cherry trees are losing the last of their blossoms, releasing pale petals out into the gentle wind where they spiral and eddy like confetti.

Roadside signs advertise eggs, free-range meat, horse rides and bedding plants. The farmhouses and barns suggest lives that follow the rhythms of the earth, rather than the non-stop rush of cyberspace that seems to drive much of the Western world these days.

At the end of a quiet gravel road is a grassy driveway that winds past grazing horses, sunny pastures and a well-kept barn, ending up at a welcoming country home. And in the house and up the stairs is a small room with a desk, computer, well-stocked bookshelf, and a view up the driveway—a writer’s den.

This home—fields, barn, den, all of it—is where Susan Ketchen has done two remarkable things.

One of these is tangible: a book. In her upstairs room-of-her-own, Ketchen produced Born That Way, a young adult novel she wrote in a three-month period and which was picked up by one of the first publishers she sent it to, Oolichan Press. No easy feat these days, when the vast majority of manuscripts submitted end up feeding the publisher’s paper shredder.

The other remarkable thing is not tangible at all, but is perhaps just as rare: Ketchen has realized her childhood dreams.

Pretty much from the moment she was old enough to think about her future, Nanaimo-born Ketchen knew she wanted two things: to ride horses, and to write. Although her life has taken her in a variety of directions, not all of them necessarily leading directly toward these two desires, she somehow ended up just where she wanted to be.

“Miraculously, I now live on a small hobby farm in the Comox Valley with my husband, two cats, two horses and a flock of chickens. I write and I ride,” writes Ketchen on her website.

Riding and writing meet in her book, Born That Way. The 185-page novel tells the story of Sylvia, a 14-year-old self-confessed ‘horse-nut’ who, much to her frustration, has no horses in her life, beyond clandestine visits to a chestnut mare who grazes in a field near Sylvia’s home.

Her mom is an overzealous psychoanalyst who, in spite of good intentions, smothers Sylvia with her psychological theories, seeing Electra complexes, unconscious sexual drives, and potential neuroses in Sylvia’s every thought and deed. Her dad is friendly and easy going, but distracted and unengaged.

On top of all this, Sylvia is abnormally short. Why isn’t she growing? How can she convince her parents to let her ride? How can she take charge of her own life?

The novel answers all these questions in an engaging, wise and often very funny account in which Sylvia gets help from unexpected allies including her pet barnacles, the Internet, a mysterious blond stranger, and a perceptive psychiatrist. But perhaps most important to her journey are her inner resources: a series of vivid and increasingly lucid dreams, and a deep determination that pushes her forward. Once she learns to trust and direct these inner powers, she begins to transform her life.

“I wanted to write something that would be uplifting for me,” explains Ketchen. “It was winter when I was writing it. It was dark and raining. I wanted something light, not oppressive.

“I’d been doing some research on plot. I’m part of a writers’ group and in response to [my earlier work] they kept saying this is all really well written but where’s the plot? I became curious about ‘what is plot?’ I was reading Jack Hodgins’ book, A Passion for Narrative, and he had a quote from someone saying plot is a character struggling toward the light. That really appealed to me.”

Born That Way reflects Ketchen’s interests—horses, psychology and neuroscience—but it is not autobiographical, she says. The characters and events in the book originated in her imagination and were fleshed out with research when necessary.

“You know, writers say things like, ‘Oh the character showed up and was in the room with me the whole time.’ Well that’s nonsense really, they are in our brain,” she says. But not necessarily the rational, logical part of the brain. The work of the imagination is still very much a mystery and Ketchen really doesn’t know quite how she came up with all the vivid and powerful details of her story.

“The book came to me in little pieces. I had the initial idea that begins the book—a girl riding a horse in her dreams. I started with that, and then things came to me. It unfolded itself to me—in my brain and on my computer.”

Writing, she says, has something in common with riding. “Both are tremendous challenges. You need to think of several things at once and also, you need…” She hesitates a long moment before continuing… “not to think.

“Riding, physically, takes a lot of special muscles you don’t use otherwise. But it’s not just strength that you need. It demands a certain relaxation. You need to flow with the movement of the horse.

“In writing, there are rules and conventions of grammar structure, but there is also the creative side. You can’t write good fiction just out of a rule book. Some of it has to come out of your more intuitive side.

“I can have some intentionality—I’m going to come up here and work on Chapter 3 and I have an idea of where I want it to go. But if I plan it out too much, it’s not as good as the times when I let stuff come to me.

“And that’s where the fun is, when the flow happens. Some of this book just came to me out of left field, I don’t know why or from where, and that’s what’s the most fun,” she says.

This balance—keeping a degree of conscious intention while going with the flow—applies to Ketchen’s journey through life. “I very much believe in keeping my wits about me, but going with things as they happen as well,” she says.

By the time she was 20 Ketchen was already competing in equestrian sports and had published a couple of short stories in Miss Chatelaine, a national magazine. She was obviously on track with her two goals, but a practical inner voice was pointing out that she might need to explore other fields if she ever wanted to make a living.

And explore she did. Her university career was marvellously varied: “I studied everything that interested me: psychology, anthropology, sociology, creative writing, philosophy, economics, social theory, law, business. Just one problem: to earn an actual degree, you’re supposed to focus on something. And ideally, you don’t travel around the country sampling one university after another,” she writes.

Well-educated but degree-less, she still knew exactly what she wanted: to have time to write, to have horses, to live on a farm. So she began a career as a financial policy and procedures writer with the provincial government. She invested in property, hoping to make enough to buy a rural acreage, but was stymied by a market crash. She leased a horse for a while, hiked, kayaked and kept at her job.