Readers Up #11: Merindah Park
“Earnest on main” is, in social media parlance, pretty much my brand. Irony is fucking exhausting; how much of your early twenties did you lose to maintaining a facade of gritty carelessness? Being cool is untenable in this economy. Nevertheless, the dominant culture (White men with curated vinyl collections and/or a volume of flash fiction published by a university press that only their institutional library owns) is still trying to convince me that a couple of things, in particular, are deeply uncool:
- Romance novels
- Horses
Funny coincidence, but that just so happens to be an intersection in which I have a vested interest. No matter: the business of Being Cool is in the past, and we can now get down to the business of genuine enjoyment. Romance, as a genre, is interested in enjoyment, in character pleasure and reader satisfaction. Since it has historically appealed and been marketed to women, one expects a certain amount of crossover with pony stories, also a popular feminine pursuit. This mainly appears in the form of cowboys--but, despite the strapping stubbly specimen on Merindah Park’s cover, Renee Dahlia’s newest contemporary romance is all about horse racing. When Captain Marvel came out, there were many jokes from female viewers about feeling pandered to. “Is this what straight White guys feel like all the time?” we thought, watching Carol beat the shit out of alien baddies to a No Doubt soundtrack and Maria execute spaceflight maneuvers that would make Han Solo weep. There’s nothing wrong with experiencing things that seem as though they were made specifically for you. The fact that this needs to be stated speaks to a lingering suspicion that the non-dominant consumer is permitted enjoyment only within certain parameters. “Am I enjoying this too much?” is not something a reader or viewer should worry about, but here we are.
Reader enjoyment stems from character enjoyment, if the writer is adept. I’m no horseplayer, but Toshiko’s pleasure in punting came through vividly and deepened my appreciation of her story. In male-dominant spaces, women are often expected to defend their right to enjoy ("Do you actually like hockey?"); the other side of the coin is derision for female-dominant spaces ("Romance novels aren't real books"). Situating a stereotypically masculine pastime, horseplaying, within a romantic heroine’s inner life results in a scenario where female readers--and more to the point, female racing fans--get to have it all. Toshiko makes baller money betting? Absolutely. Toshiko has a cool career caring for powerful animals? Yep. Toshiko gets to nail an Aussie-accented heir to a racing stud, emphasis on stud? She sure does. All this, and somehow the purest reader enjoyment is still derived from the fact that the characters love what they do. They’ve built lives around racehorses, without apology but with eyes open. They revel in the sport at a time when US racing, at least, is looking pretty indefensible and unlovable. I've been feeling beleaguered lately, caught between love of a thing and guilt for loving that thing, trying to create a space within that thing for myself as someone who is not, by any metric, horse racing. Dahlia's characters are a welcome re-positioning, a reminder of where the sport has been and where it can go, a global embrace and a multicultural portrait wrapped up in banter and sizzle.
"If you hate gambling so much, why not sell the racehorses and breed cattle?" [Toshiko said.] "Why stick with a business founded on the punter?"
John held his hands out wide. Wasn't it obvious? "It's the horses. I do it for the horses."
A common hook for romance and indeed for most genre fiction is the neophyte, a character new on the scene for readers to relate to and through whom worldbuilding information is delivered. Dahlia bypasses this in favor of two experts, veterinarian Toshiko and breeder John, a choice that allows for deeper examination of racing as more than set dressing or backdrop, but as the fabric of the characters’ lives. US racing is dynastic, a tendency echoed by the Japanese and Australian farms featured in Merindah Park. Family drama, literature’s bread-and-butter, is heightened within a sport that runs, literally, on bloodlines. Toshiko’s duty to her family places her heart at a distant second, while John is desperate to strike a path different from the one his gambler father left behind. Racing’s tangled cultural norms provide another avenue for character development--one centered on the most visible and vocal aspect of the sport. Punting creates a rift between the protagonists that moves beyond too-easy communication mishaps to dig at the heart of what drives John and what makes Toshiko tick. There is no facet of racing--from extreme wealth to blue-collar heroics, from family inheritances to gender politics--that cannot be amplified and finessed by romance’s tropes to incredible effect.
As LeVar Burton says, you don't have to take my word for it. Renee Dahlia was kind enough to chat about her writing and racing background, some of her favorite tracks, and creating fictional worlds for a real sport.
Hi, Renee! Thanks for chatting about Merindah Park and your writing life. Please giveus a glance into how you decided to begin writing racing stories.
Thank you for wanting to chat about my book! I came to writing about horse racing in an upside-down fashion. My degree is in physics and mathematics, and while I was studying I worked as a strapper (hot walker in USA terminology). Writing wasn’t on my radar until much later, when I was given the opportunity to combine data analysis and horses into a series of Thoroughbred mythbusting articles for an Australian magazine--using statistics to look at different breeding theories and writing up the results. Eventually another opportunity came up, to ghost write a project for a bookmaker, and from there, I realised that I enjoyed writing. There is such a depth of historical stories in horse racing with over 300 years of history to draw from. For example, in Merindah Park, the hero’s father uses a catch phrase ‘Money lost, nothing lost, courage lost, everything lost’ which was the motto used by Australian punter Eric Connolly between 1900 and 1930. I wondered about what impact a gambling addict would have one a family farm, and the Merindah Park series was born from there.
Catching the attention of the publishing world can be difficult for writers creating Thoroughbred stories. What drew you to romance rather than another genre as your form of choice for racetrack literature? Have you written in other genres as well?
I’m a longtime romance reader and when I decided to try my hand at fiction, it seemed obvious to write what I enjoy reading. The addition of horse racing makes sense from the same point of view--I write non-fiction horse racing articles for my day job--so to combine the two has been fun. I’m currently writing an interesting series for Bluebloods magazine on horse racing statues across Australia and New Zealand--I get to write up the horse or person featured, as well as interview the artist.
The racing industry is a global one, as revealed by the Japanese and Australian protagonists of Merindah Park. Have you traveled to any North American tracks? Do you have a favorite Aussie or Japanese racing spot?
I haven’t been lucky enough to travel much in my life yet, although I do have a list of tracks I’d love to see that is like one of those cartoon scrolls that unfurls! Most of my ‘want to see one day’ tracks revolve around the big races--Kentucky Derby, Breeders Cup, Dubai World Cup, Japan Cup, Grand Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, and the Victoria Derby in Australia. I’d also love to see the more quirky events, like St Moritz where the riders ski behind gallopers, the beach races in Ireland, and the Velká Pardubická Steeplechase in the Czech Republic. Locally, I have a soft spot for Canterbury racetrack as I live in the neighbouring suburb and they have summer Friday night races which are a ton of fun.
How do you balance writing for racetrackers versus a wider audience who may not be familiar with the ins and outs of Thoroughbreds?
This is a tricky problem. It’s very easy to fall into horse racing slang because I’m comfortable with it, and because in my day job I tend to write for a horse racing audience who doesn’t need anything technical explained to them. I included a glossary in Merindah Park as a way of trying to bridge this gap.
Merindah Park features Japanese and Australian industry professionals, as well as a mix of fictional and real-world racehorses. Can you talk a bit about striking a balance between breeding/racing histories for horses and backstories/emotional arcs for humans? How important is verisimilitude to depicting a sport in fiction?
Details are the key to creating a story that feels real, and with my background as a strapper and horse racing writer, the details come out organically in the story telling. I don’t have to do a lot of research because I have the practical experience to back up the story, and that leaves me free to tell the story and stick to the romance. Of course, there are some things that require research, and I’m lucky that my day job gives me many connections to discuss any issues with. I’ve never been on a horse air transporter, or to Japan, yet I found several people with those experiences who could answer my questions about the process, as well as the little details like the smell of the air and grass in Australia compared to Japan.
This book is the first in a new series. How does the racing backdrop and setting offer or restrict opportunities to expand a single book into an in-universe series of connected stories?
This series has a very typical rural romance set-up with four siblings who own a farm each getting their own romance in their own book. The oldest son, John, is featured in Merindah Park, second son Shannon has to wait until book four, while the twin sisters Rachel and Serena get books two and three. Both Rachel and Serena are jockeys--Rachel is a career driven city jockey, while Serena is more a farm girl content to ride in the country and avoid the limelight.
What was the first story you ever wrote?
A teacher in primary school once wrote on a school report, “Renee would be a good writer if she wrote about something other than horses.” I feel a petty delight in having built a career writing non-fiction articles about horse racing, and now am branching out to write fictional horse racing romance. The first full length novel I wrote was published in 2017 as To Charm a Bluestocking--it has nothing to do with horses and is instead loosely based on my great-grandmother who was one of the first women to graduate medical school in Holland. The third book in that series, The Heart of a Bluestocking, has a horse racing/betting mystery sub-plot.
What’s next on your project list?
I’m currently writing a historical lesbian romance set in 1919--one of the heroines is the daughter of Josephine (the heroine of To Charm a Bluestocking). Lady Eleanor St. George has worked as a veterinarian during WWI, and her boss, Captain Jones, asks her to return his horse to his farm in Wales. She meets his daughter, and romance grows.
What’s a book in the racing canon that you’d recommend to any reader?
This is a tricky question. So many fiction novels that feature horse racing get the details wrong, and much of this is because they are written by people who have some connection to horses, but not to horse racing. Owning a horse for leisure gives some insight into horses and how to care for them, however, it often misses the athletic side of racing. The training, the feeding, the personalities, and the history of our sport. For ‘any’ reader, I’d be more likely to recommend a non-fiction story written by a racing writer, and there are so many wonderful stories out there from Phar Lap, Secretariat, Seabiscuit, through to Shannon, and Takeover Target.
If Renee's naturalistic approach to Thoroughbred romance whets your appetite, Merindah Park is available in e-format now! Check out more about her books and journalism, and find Renee on Twitter for publishing news and Australian racing.
Yours among the kissing books,
Diana