The first issue of Gallop, a new literary equestrian magazine edited by author and journalist Jody Jaffe, is now online. The magazine is a horse of a different color — not your nuts and bolts “how to” equine magazine. You won’t find articles on treating colic or achieving perfect lead changes. Instead, Gallop features short stories, creative non-fiction, movie reviews, book reviews and poems.
The magazine will be published quarterly initially with the possibility of going monthly.
“If you had a Venn Diagram with one circle of horses and one circle of arts, where those two circles intersect, that’s Gallop,” said author and journalist, Jody Jaffe, describing her latest venture – Gallop, an equine literary magazine as a “smattering smorgasbord where the confluence of horses and art meet.”
The first issue features a new mystery series, “Commander Speaks,” by Jaffe, who’s known for writing the Nattie Gold horse show mystery novels in the 1990s, a comic strip about two elder horses who find love late in life, “The Adventures of Trilby and Rio” by Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, a memoir about Marilyn Monroe and a horse named Golden in 1950s New York City, another memoir about a girl going to the racetrack with her father and a prose poem about the four horsewomen of healing – a riff on the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Jaffe explains that she chose to publish a literary equine magazine because there aren’t any out there. As a journalist and a novelist, she has the ideal qualifications to bring a magazine like this to life. In fact, Jaffe has been thinking about publishing a literary magazine for a decade. Being locked down during the pandemic, spurred her to make her dream a reality.
We’re very locked down here in Virginia,” she said, “and I could play crossword puzzles all day or start a magazine and it seems a lot more fun to start this magazine.”
My two leading passions in life, besides my children and husband, are words and horses so it’s the most natural, organic thing. I love horses, I love reading, I love writing [it] seemed like a good idea to blend them. We horsewomen, I’ll speak for myself and my friends, we can spend hours talking about horse minutiae, so I thought horse people would love the opportunity to read high-quality pieces about horses.”
Jaffe is the author of the horse-show mystery series: “Horse of a Different Killer,” “Chestnut Mare, Beware,” and “In Colt Blood,” featured in People Magazine and translated into German, Japanese and Czech. She also co-authored the novels, “Thief of Words,” and “Shenandoah Summer.” As a journalist, she was on the Charlotte Observer team that won the Pulitzer Prize and she’s had articles published in many major newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and Washingtonian. You may have read her columns for The Chronicle of the Horse and Practical Horseman. In addition, Jaffe taught journalism at Georgetown, Washington and Lee and Hollins universities and taught fiction writing at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Md. She lives on a farm near Lexington, Va., with way too many horses.
My vision is to offer high-quality reading material and art for the horse crazed or even mildly interested. Short stories, essays, memoirs, poems, book excerpts, photos, drawings, book reviews etc. Think Granta, Ploughshares but just about horses. So please send any of the above to me a Readgallop@gmail.com. At this point, I can’t offer payment. Just the glory:) of being in “Gallop,” and the gratification of helping one horse-crazed woman realize a dream.