When asked what drew her to historical fiction, historian and author Sarah Barnes has an answer at the ready.

“We can never really know what happened in the past,” says the author of the coming-of-age story She Who Rides Horses: A Saga of the Ancient Steppe via phone from her home outside Boulder, Colorado. “We [academics, scholars, and scientists] do our best to piece it together…but there will always be a gap between evidence and what really happened. As an author of historical fiction, I can be in that gap, and that’s where I get to use my imagination.”

Growing up in rural Wisconsin, Barnes had plenty of exposure to both stories and horses. The latter faded when her family moved to the Chicago area, but she kept reading. And when it came time to choose a career path, Barnes drew upon her childhood, earning her doctorate in history from Northwestern University and beginning an academic career.

But as time passed, she found she missed stories as well as horses. “As happens often when people pursue their youthful passions, once you get into [a] professional context—college, graduate school—the structure of the discipline takes over a little bit,” she says. “And you ask yourself, why did I get into this?”

Barnes married, had daughters, and kept teaching, specializing in European history from 1300 to the present. Eventually, she and her family moved to Colorado, and though her husband is allergic to horses, Barnes and her daughters began to ride at a nearby barn. Becoming “increasingly discouraged with academia,” she began to teach and train riders and eventually formed her own business, acquiring horses of her own.

“When I woke up in the morning and thought about making the world a better place, I [felt] I was having more impact as a riding instructor,” she says. “And [seeing] the smile on a little girl’s face when she learned to trot, or [teaching] the woman who came back after loving horses as a kid, I felt like I was making the world a better place with what I was doing with the horses.”

It was horses that led Barnes to write her own novel. She’d attended several equine-facilitated personal development retreats at Linda Kohanov’s Eponaquest Ranch, south of Tucson, Arizona, at the base of the Santa Rita Mountains. After publishing a bestselling memoir, The Tao of Equus, Kohanov held a retreat focused on writing. “What Linda and her equine partners offered was something much more elusive—access to another realm, a passageway leading to a mythic landscape between the worlds,” Barnes writes on her blog. “Guided by the wisdom of the herd, we would be invited to discover the place where stories dwell, awaiting the power of a storyteller to summon them to life.” At the end of the retreat’s third day, after activities with horses and a guided meditation designed to awaken creativity, Barnes sat down with her laptop, and a story of a girl—specifically, the first person to ride a horse—began to flow. By morning, Barnes had her first chapter. 

She Who Rides Horses follows teenage Naya, the daughter of clan chief Potis, who lives on the Pontiac-Caspian Steppe of Eurasia over 6,000 years ago. Shunned by her peers for her red hair and adventurous spirit, Naya comes upon a band of wild horses while exploring and is especially drawn to filly Réhda, whose chestnut-colored coat resembles her own locks: 

Looking into the setting sun, the horses were hard for the girl to distinguish against the pale gold of the drying grasses. All except the filly. Her red-gold coat, lit by the sun’s last rays, stood out like a flame against the predominating brown and yellow tones of the surrounding landscape. Naya reached up to rub a lock of her own coarse hair between thumb and finger. It was almost exactly the same startling shade of copper as the filly. Turning to go back the way she had come, the girl cast one last glance at the disappearing herd. Tomorrow she would be back, with a rope.

Even while attending Kohanov’s retreat, “I didn’t set out to write a novel!” Barnes exclaims. Encouraged by that first chapter, however, she kept working on She Who Rides Horses while maintaining her teaching and training business. Two years after that fateful retreat, the pandemic hit, and everything changed.

“When Covid came, my training business was going through a natural evolution anyway, where some of my students were moving on,” Barnes says. “I didn’t make a big effort to go out and find new students.” She continued to spend time with her own horse but shifted her focus to completing Naya’s story and drawing on her academic background by conducting interdisciplinary research. “I was no longer wearing the riding instructor hat and started thinking of myself as a writer and author,” Barnes recalls. “The draft of the second book took much less time than the first, and then I started revising the first book and getting it out the door.”

Kirkus Reviews calls She Who Rides Horses “an impeccably detailed novel…with a well-developed setting and characters.” Since its release last March, the novel has earned multiple positive trade reviews as well as the Best Indie Book Award for historical fiction. Barnes is now working on the second and third books of the trilogy, which she calls “a feminist critique of the hero’s journey,” and channeling her passions for horses, history, and storytelling every step of the way.

“My training as a historian and academic definitely informs what I do in terms of having that curiosity and willingness to read in a lot of different disciplines and draw inspiration,” she says. “But I actually think that it’s my love of stories from being a little girl and reading…the words of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and all those wonderful children’s book authors who created believable worlds using imagination. I think that’s the biggest inspiration for me.”

Lauren Emily Whalen is the author of five young adult and new adult books. She lives in Chicago.