Emily Haworth-Booth’s novel, Mare, explores the intricacies and dynamics of relationships with others, yes, but more specifically, with a horse. The unnamed protagonist is emotionally struggling with loss; loss of her dog, loss of the expectations of her body, loss of a life imagined. To cope, she lets a horse as a way to fill her time and her emotions. She learns the difference between need and obsession as she navigates learning and loving her new companion. Mare is a soulful ride that will pull at your heart if you let it.
I talk with Emily about writing for children versus adults, what having a strong literary community means to her, and what’s next from her pen.
Tsahai Makeda: I love this cover. Though I have a lot of animals at home because my husband is the animal lover in our family, I am not an animal person, but horses are my second favorite animal, the majesty of them, the beauty, the grace, the breadth of them, but still so gentle. Horses are second to tigers, which I’ll never get close to, but they’re gorgeous. This cover really got me. The font and just the subtlety of it. Using the structure of the title, Mare, to mimic a horse, is just genius. Did you design the cover?
Emily Haworth-Booth: No, I wish I could say I designed it, but one thing I like about it is that I could sort of pretend that I designed it because I am a drawer, an illustrator. I love line work, and I feel like I can almost pretend that I designed it if I were being cheeky, but I actually didn’t. It feels very much like if I’d had drawings in the book, that they might have been in that spirit, and there was a period at which I was thinking of putting drawings in the book, and they would have been black and white drawings, so quite gestural. So that’s one reason I love that cover so much. It’s got that sort of slyness or surprisingness where the horse kind of disappears and you suddenly see the M, right? You don’t see it straight away and I felt like that was what my experience of this horse coming into my life was a bit like. It was quite like, oh, this is unexpected but once you see it, it’s like it’s always been there.
TM: Yeah, I love that. Alright, so the story in itself is so much deeper than what the jacket lets on. It’s beautiful in this warm, familial kind of way. And sort of like a horse, it’s grand, but there’s this gentleness to it, to the story, to the through line. So tell me about the book. Tell me how it came to you. What was the inspiration for it?
EHB: Well, I was just coming off a quite intense kind of nonfiction children’s book project, which I was doing with my sister. The book is a history of protest, a history of genocide and massacres and all. When you get into the history of protests, you don’t necessarily realize it would be quite so dark. And it was a great, interesting, amazing project to work on, but it’s for children and as we came to the end of that, I was really needing a place where I could go to be creative in my own way to sort of escape from working on that very particular subject matter. So I started taking a lot of poetry classes online. It was during the pandemic and there were these classes being offered during the summer at the Poetry School, which is in London, and there were nine classes. I just got addicted to the way that poets think. I don’t consider myself a poet, but I’ve always loved poetry and wrote quite a lot at university. It was a lovely space to kind of come back into my writing. I feel like it’s such a huge thing, poetry, and there’s no right way to do it, you can do it any way you want and there’s so many possibilities. It was just fun to sort of play around in that space with language and ideas. One of the exercises was to write a prose poem in the style of Bluets by Maggie Nelson, about something that we were obsessed with. I just started looking after this horse a couple of days a week and I started writing about her because she’d been playing on my mind. It’s a very auto-fictional novel. I thought, why am I so obsessed with her? Like what’s going on? So I kind of needed an outlet because I hadn’t realized how much I needed to write about her. And once I got that form, it just flowed and I wrote three pages for the assignment. I had a lot of really positive feedback from my peers in the class, which I hadn’t had that level of engagement on other assignments I’d handed in, and suddenly it was like I’d hit it. I just kept going with it really and it was going to be a long lyric essay. Then a developmental editor I worked with and my sister both read it and said, “I think this could be a novel.” I write stories for kids, I love narrative, and narrative was kind of creeping in. So I leaned into that and it gave me the freedom to make up characters, move things around, be less autobiographical, and shape the story more. That’s how it took shape gradually over two or three years.
TM: I want to talk about the structure and the form of the novel, because in the States, typically, novels sort of follow this standard structure; follow these acts, these many chapters, and so on. When I first started reading it, I was like, okay, what’s happening here? So I scanned through and I’m like, wait, the whole book is like this. I really enjoyed it and poetry kept coming up in my mind though I knew that this is not poetry. So after a while, the structure and the form didn’t jar me and I kind of eased into it. That is also just because of what we’re typically used to reading, what it looks like, visually. Mare is visually beautiful and I think, for me, reading it, the structure lent to how I was feeling about the story. You are an illustrator. You have three children’s books under your belt; The King Who Banned the Dark, The Last Tree, and Protest: How People have Come Together to Change the World. Writing for children is quite different from writing for adults. Talk a bit about what that change was like for you. What was it like for you creatively when you spoke to the developmental editor and your sister and they were like, no, this could be something? Then you had to go there. What was that process like?
EHB: There was the nonfiction one I’d just come off of after doing two fiction, so that felt very much about kind of, up-checking, getting it right, sensitivity reading, and legal reading. It’s a history book, essentially, but with a lot of sensitive subject matter representing a lot of different groups and movements. And so, it felt very kind of big to hold, but also we were thinking a lot about the voice in which you write for children. I co-wrote it with my sister so we were literally typing into a Google doc at the same time, which was joyful and hilarious, but really interesting in terms of writing. We talked a lot about cliches and how children don’t know or understand cliches because they’re so fresh in the way they’re come into language. That is so refreshing as a writer. It was difficult, but challenging in the best way to write in the simplest possible way. I like to think that I was bringing some of that training into Mare, that poetic training because they’re quite similar in that way. Children’s books are also very tight on space, like poems. A lot of the material that I developed from there after that first Bluets assignment was also from other poetry classes, so there was a lot of poeming in that book, as you noticed, and then the line breaks were kind of taken out in the edit. So for children, you’re also writing quite tight, you maybe write longer, and then you edit and edit and edit. It’s like a puzzle and it has to fit these thirty-two pages or whatever the format is. And I guess, with Mare, I suddenly have a really, really massive canvas and I could write as long as I wanted, which was such a delight. So freeing to just write more. But also I found that to edit it, I had to see it. It was really difficult because I was used to working in these really short formats where I could see the whole book in my mind’s eye, as well as literally see it in terms of, I could lay out all the spreads on the floor of my room and see the whole book. Twelve spreads for a picture book and each spread would look visually different because I’d also be illustrating them and there’ll be a rhythm and a pacing across the book. It’s very controlled, and suddenly with a novel you’re like, whoa, it’s just loads of words in a Word document, and it’s insane. I kept saying to other writers, “How do you see it? How do you see the book?” And they were like, “I don’t know what you mean.” So I think that’s when I broke it into really small fragments so that I could visually grasp each one. Whereas, if I’ve got a really long box of text, I just get lost and that might be because of having a neurodivergent brain as well as an illustrator’s brain. I had to be able to split it up, chunk it, and see each section, and for them to visually look different with those slightly different layouts and things helped me. I guess the other main difference in terms of children’s books is the subject matter. My children’s books tend towards the darker end of the emotional or political spectrum, for kids anyway. And I like those kinds of books for kids and pushing that envelope but I always say there is a limit, and with adult books, you can talk about death, about climate change, about sex. People talk about the apocalypse, they talk about grief, you can just go there a bit more without worrying about upsetting your audience or not being appropriate. It’s great to have those two audiences to work with and be able to make different kinds of texts for them.
TM: Nice. Now, the book explores a couple of themes. What do you hope the reader will take away from the book about loss, about community, and about healing the self?
EHB: Healing yourself, yeah. It’s hard to know exactly. I think like all my best work is the work I make for myself to try and figure something out. And the worst work I make is when I’m trying to sort of spread a message or convince someone of something. I think it has done well so far because it’s sort of found a readership, because I wasn’t trying to convince anyone of anything. But at the same time, I do feel quite passionately about community being built in a different way, or the possibility of community that I think it’s in capitalism’s interest to hide from us; that community is only accessible via the patriarchy and family structures and the kinds of experiences that can be bought with money. What I find from living is that that’s not at all how community is built. Community can be made in so many ways and I’ve been so surprised by that. You don’t have to be related to someone to care about them, and they don’t have to be the same species as you for you to care about and care for them. I guess that’s mainly the most polemic aspect of the book. And in terms of loss, I just wanted a space to think about that and I hope that if anyone else has experienced a similar situation to me that the book also creates space for them to feel those things. And to feel some kind of community, kinship, and healing there. Likewise, perhaps someone might recognize themselves and think, yeah, it’s okay to heal myself with the things that I love, whatever they may be. If anyone takes a horse riding course because of this book, great. I’m so evangelical about it. My father says it’s my life’s mission to get everyone I know on the back of a horse. I don’t know if I’m consciously doing that, but I certainly invite everyone I know to come and ride my horses. I am quite passionate, secretly, about the healing power of horses, although I know logically that it’s not for everyone, but they’re so magical.
TM: The other piece of this that really tugged at me was not just the relationship with the horse, and what happened with the dog in the beginning, but the relationship with the two girls– Not-my-daughter and Also-Not-my-daughter. I loved that dynamic and the connection between the protagonist and the girls. I annotated, “The maternal connection to the 2 girls is palpable and beautiful. They carry the weight of being her own and still very much not hers.” The way you write that is so gorgeous that it triggers these emotions when you’re reading it. Just the language and naming them without giving them actual names; “Not-my-daughter got called in for dinner.” It’s okay to know them as such because it speaks to the relationship that the protagonist has with them, this disconnected connectedness, they don’t belong to me, but they’re mine all the same. That was spectacular.
EHB: Oh, thank you so much. That means a lot.
TM: You’re welcome. So we’re gonna pivot a little bit and talk about your writing practice. You’ve been in the game for a bit and you have three books. When I was researching, I didn’t see the nonfiction, Protest: How People Come Together to Change the World, come up.
EHB: Unfortunately, it’s out of print already because my publisher was bought out by one of the big five just after it came out and they immediately put it out of print, which is really sad. I think there are secondhand copies out there, and it’s been published in a few languages as well. It’s a shame because we’re really proud of it and we did a lot of work in schools with it for that short time when it was out. I still go and do work in schools about it, I just pretend it’s still out.
TM: Yeah, it is fitting for the current time. Okay, so you have your three books, you’ve been through the process; agents and publishing and marketing and all of that. As for your writing practice, what does that look like for you? And I mean that quite specifically. Are you a, I get up at five every morning and I go to the desk and I work for four or five hours? Or I get up at five and I make my coffee, then I go to the horses, and then I have lunch, and then I may write a little bit, and then I’ll go to the beach. What does your discipline, your routine look like?
EHB: Okay, well, I’ll tell you what it looked like when I was writing Mare, and then I’ll tell you what it looks like now because it’s very different. [Spoilers] So when I started writing Mare, the dog’s death that happens near the beginning of the book, that was based on my real life dog who had died just before I started writing the book. There was a three year window before we got another dog because my husband was too heartbroken but I was begging him to. I had these mornings that I hadn’t really had for ages where I just could write for an hour. I joined something called the Writers Hour that meets online at 8AM in four time zones, and I did that for a couple of years religiously. I’m neurodivergent so I love routine but I really struggle to keep it without adding in lots of dopamine. I need a lot of accountability on top of a routine and things that make it fun and a deadline. On top of the Writers Hour, I joined a lot of poetry classes. Every week I’d have my assignment and I bent all the assignments to be applicable to Mare. Every class I took, even if it was about something completely different, I’d use to make material for my book. Also, I was in a writer’s group, which I’m still in, which meets once a month. I put all these things in place and then I choose that hour-a-day to write as much as I could towards those goals. I joined a Gotham Writer’s Workshop class at one point and the goal of the class was just do as much word count as you could every week to generate your first draft. There was a word count orbiter on their website where you could put in how much you’ve done and that was quite motivating. I also work with a developmental editor whom I’ve been working with for years, who I’d meet with month to month. Towards the end of writing Mare, we’d meet once a week with a list of all the scenes I need to write, fill in the plot holes, discuss what next to write, and plan the next scene. So it was really like belt and braces. I need help to do this. We got another dog three years after losing the first one who was a rescue and wasn’t toilet trained. She was quite energetic and I had to get up and be out of the house by 8AM with her, which is exactly where the writer’s hour was. I’m terrible at getting up early so I couldn’t manage to get up and get her out before then. It was such a huge joy to have her but also, the writing schedule just fell apart. I now have several horses since I moved to the countryside two or three years ago. Basically, my life is getting up, going in, riding and looking after the horses, or walking my dog. I do a lot of teaching and coaching, so I just fit in writing whenever I have a free moment in the day or a canceled meeting. I write; go, go, go. It’s a constant struggle at the moment to try to get a routine going, but at the same time, I find when I’m not outside with the horses as much or if I pay someone else to look after them, I just don’t feel that well in myself. So I need to get that balance right with the physical activity and then being at the computer. It’s a tricky one, definitely, and I’m still very much working it out. I’ve always dreamed of being that person where I get up at five, I write for two hours and then I go to the gym and then I write for two hours and then do my correspondence in the afternoon, you know, like one of those Victorian male writers, but that’s just not me. It’s always a work in progress.
TM: And that’s beautiful because individually, how we come to the page is how we come to the page and what works for you may not work for someone else. But what works for them may not work for you. So however you get to where you get to, in order to get to the finished product, is absolutely fine. You’ve touched a little on something I wanted you to explore and that’s your writing community. I was curious about what that looked like for you and you seem to have a pretty strong one. Within your writing routine, you’ve done the 8AM one.
EHB: Yes, the London Writer’s Salon Writers’ Hour. And it’s free, anyone can join it and they also have a huge community around that with lots of workshops and things. That one hour a day is just golden. I think with that accountability of just, we can turn the camera off and that feeling of knowing that other people are there. This helps, doesn’t it?
TM: It does, it really does. Listening in, as a writer, in my opinion you have a strong community. You have a bunch of different lanes that you can reach out to when it comes to your practice and support and feedback on your work. I want to know what it’s like writing with your sister?
EHB: It’s the best. I mean, my sister’s such a brilliant writer in her own right. She’s won several short story prizes and she’s very modest about her own work. It’s a real treat to get to collaborate with her on something professionally because we’ve been collaborating since we were kids. It sounds too fancy a word for it but, making stuff together, basically like making fake radio shows and taping them in the 80s, you know? When we were in our 20s, we had this underwear business where we would sew the underwear, screen print slogans on it that we thought were hilarious, sell them, and then it was a sort of art project as well. We’ve always made birthday cards together and things like that. So to get to do a book was really amazing. She makes me a better writer and a better person and she’s so much more knowledgeable than I am about the world. She’s a really refined thinker and she pulls me up, I guess. And also, she’s hilarious. It was hard going from that into a solo writing project, actually, and part of me just kept thinking, but where’s Alice? I need Alice. I can’t write this on my own. And I think that’s one reason I really pulled in the troops to help. Alice is always such a kind reader of my own work as well. So she read Mare, must have read it about four or five times in full draft already, which is so generous. She’s the person I trust the most about my writing because she knows me the best and she’ll always tell me if something’s not me. Like, she’ll say, “You’re writing with good posture,” meaning you’re kind of sitting up a little bit too straight and maybe it’s not quite you. I’m just so lucky to have a sister like that who’s so kind, but also a writer.
TM: Right. Because she’s your sister, she loves you, is kind, and has a professional eye, so receiving feedback in that way feels a little different than even maybe your closest friend, right? My son is this way. He just has an eye for what’s underneath, the layers of the story. And even if he’s like, “Mom, this is horrible, what are you trying to do here?” It doesn’t feel personal, even though it’s my son, because I trust him. When you said that word it resonated because that’s key; trusting the person with your work. So because they’re connected to you in that way, it just makes it all the more better.
EHB: Oh, that’s amazing that your son can read your work like that too, what a dream. That’s incredible.
TM: Yeah, it was a little shocking to me because he went to school for art. But then he started writing and he would ask me, “Mom, can you look at this?” And I was like, “Yeah, well look at this too. Let me see how you see work that’s not yours.” And then I realized, oh, he knows what he’s doing. So it worked out for me. We’re both lucky. You have your Alice. I have my Josh.
EHB: That’s so nice. It reminds me of when I was a teenager writing poetry, that my father is a poet and though it’s not his profession, he’s always written poetry ever since I can remember. He’s always gotten up at 6 AM to write before work ever since he had kids and he’s been such a role model. We used to exchange poems and we’d critique each other’s work. He was so kind to me and he never commented on the subject matter, even if it was about boys or really awkward stuff. Fathers and daughters at that age can be a bit awkward, but it’s a wonderful way to connect with someone that you love.
TM: There are a couple of questions that I ask every author to wrap up our talk. Even though you’re a seasoned writer, this is a debut work of adult fiction for you. What are you most looking forward to once it’s out in the states?
EHB: It’s been out here in the UK since the twelfth of March and that’s been so wild. I’m a teacher, mainly of visual storytelling, but also graphic novel, children’s writing, memoir, and illustrating. I coach as well; authors on their writing projects, and a lot of these students I’ve been coaching or working with for years, I’ve become very close with them. And to have them read my work, to have that switch as well for something that’s not a children’s book but much more personal and intimate, it’s been really scary. To have that feeling of like, they’re going to see me the way that I’ve been seeing them. Am I ready for this? To have the tables turned feels really vulnerable, but actually has been the most heart opening experience, so vulnerable in the best way. And I’ve had such beautiful responses from lots of people I do know, but also from people I don’t know and people I taught a long time ago and we’ve gotten back in touch. Even people I didn’t know who’ve been through a similar experience with their bodies or with horses, just messaging me to say, “That happened to me” or, “I want to get back into horses too.”
It’s not even out in the States yet, so that will be a very different experience. We do have some family there, my in-laws, and we’re going soon for the launch in New York. It’ll be lovely to meet my publishers in real life. Part of me is just looking forward to getting on with the next book because that’s what writers want to do, isn’t it? You’re just thinking about the next thing already but part of me knows this is the moment, so revel in this, have that new experience and bask in this weird probability.
TM: When is your launch in New York?
EHB: It’s the 19th of May, so it’s the day that it comes out in the states. That’s the last day of our trip. We’re going to Georgia first to see family and then we’re flying to New York for a few days and then we’ll fly out the day after the launch. I’m going to be in conversation with Rivka Galchen at Books are Magic in Brooklyn. I read Rivka’s book, Little Labours, about a year before starting Mare and as I was starting it, I was like, I need to read that again. It was such an influential book for me so I’m just so excited to meet her.
TM: Oh, it’ll be great. I’ll see you there live and in person.
EHB: Oh my god, that’s so cool.
TM: What’s the last book that you read for fun and the last book that you read for craft?
EHB: Ooh. This is a very good question. I’ve literally just started Deborah Levy’s new book, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, and she is my favorite living author. I just gobble up everything that she writes, especially her memoirs. I’m trying to slow myself down reading that book because I can already feel how much I’m loving it and it’s feeding me. I feel like I have an IV in me that’s pumping me with these amazing literary nutrients and I don’t want to eat it all too fast, drink it in too fast, so I’m trying to ration myself. And then I just reread a few books for an article that I was writing about obsession and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata was one of those. It kind of blew me away, reading it again, but I knew I loved it the first time. An amazing leaning into an obsession in a totally monotropic way. It’s a real masterclass on that, I think.
TM: You’re now working on the next thing. What can you share about your next project?
EHB: My next project is about obsession and kind of how far is too far. Mare’s about obsession and this new book is sort of taking the same obsession we see in Mare further, and thinking about where that edge lies. And is that edge dictated by itself or by society? Who gets to decide how much you can love something, I suppose, is the question I’m interested in.
TM: And it’s adult fiction?
EHB: I’m not sure yet if it’s gonna be fiction or nonfiction, but it’s for adults, yeah.
TM: And how far along in it are you; I’ve just started or I have a chapter or I’m like halfway through?
EHB: At the moment, there’s kind of a memoir strand and a non-fiction strand and I’m sort of halfway through the memoir strand a bit, in draft. So in all, I’m sort of halfway through the first draft, not super far, but still figuring out the landscape of it. These things always take longer than you think they will, don’t you think?
TM: That’s true. You think you’re done, you think you get somewhere, and then either yourself or somebody in the business is like, no, do this, and you’re back to square one.
EHB: You say you’re a long way through, and then later you’re like, girl, you were like an eighteenth of the way through. What are you talking about? You were so optimistic. Can I ask you what you’re working on at the moment?
TM: I’ve just finished the first draft of a memoir and now I’m working on a novel. Early days still but thank you for asking.
EHB: I always want to know what people are working on and I think that’s why I like being a coach because I’m so nosy and I’m always like, tell me everything.
TM: Last question, what wisdom have you learned on your journey of writing and publishing, with a little more emphasis on the latter, that you can share with emerging writers?
EHB: Ooh, I would say to ask for help, and it doesn’t need to be professional help. Think mutual accountability partners, early readers, or people who want to be part of your writing journey, and that’s fun for them, and you can help them back. It’s the most important thing you can do as a writer: have a community. Then, when your book comes out, your community will read your book. It’s all an ecosystem. And then for publishing, I would say if you have the right editor, trust your editor. I think I was so overwhelmed because I had these incredible publishers on board. I was a little intimidated at the beginning of the process and I actually couldn’t open the edits document for quite a few weeks because I was so scared that they were going to be telling me to do stuff that I couldn’t do and that I wouldn’t be up to it. My dad had to sit down with me and open the email because I was so terrified. The process wasn’t them telling me to do stuff and then me having to jump through hoops that I didn’t know how to jump through. It was really gentle suggestions and collaborative in a conversational back-and-forth way. I think if I’d known it was going to be like that, I wouldn’t have been terrified. So maybe just putting that out there for anyone who feels that way coming into the process to know that your editor should love you, and they should be so excited to help you make your book good. They know that they’re not the writer, and they should want to support you to write your best book. It’s not the confrontational teacher/student relationship I thought it was going to be. It was much kinder and warmer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Emily Haworth-Booth is an author-illustrator and educator living in the UK. When not writing, drawing, or out with her dogs and horses, she teaches online course at the Royal Drawing School in London. The author of three acclaimed children’s books, her adult fiction debut, Mare, comes to the US in spring 2026.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Tsahai Makeda is a Jamaican-American writer who writes about the human experience and its impact on one’s sense of self in the world. When not writing, she is reading or knitting. She earned her BA in English, minor in Philosophy, from The State University of New York at New Paltz and her MFA in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She teaches workshops at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and has received support for her work from The Center for Black Fiction and The Kenyon Review. She received The Caribbean Writer’s 2023 Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for her short story, ‘For Generations’. Her work appears in Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Women Who Submit, Epiphany, Breadcrumbs, REWRITE London, The Caribbean Writer, & Prairie Schooner. She’s recently finished writing her memoir and is in conversations to get it out into the world. She lives at the foot of the Catskills where she writes and reads, and writes some more.