Conversation Series Sofa Issues Winter 2026
The Horse as an Invitation
“I think that we can learn so many lessons from horses about the ways that people have connected to the land and to other living beings throughout time. Because horses tell stories about slavery, about indigeneity, about work. And I think that my relationship to horses reminds me that collective struggle is always somehow related to the land.”
The world is on fire and horses are on my mind.
What can horses teach us about revolution? I say, as someone who loves and learns from horses, a lot.
Bitter Kalli is an equestrian, land steward, and author of the book Mounted: On Horses, Blackness, and Liberation. For Kalli, connecting horses to revolution is only just the beginning of understanding what horses can teach us. In Mounted they explore their relationship to horses as it intersects with other facets of their experience; from their Black identity, involvement in political movements, connecting to their ancestors, and relationship to queerness and neurodivergence. Kalli’s mycelial approach to the horse as a subject is shaped by how deeply horses have been formative to their lifelong learning. Where lessons happened both on and off of the horses they’ve ridden. From imagining alternative models for friendship inspired by the pony books they read as a child, to observing the use of police horses as tools of state violence during the protests which erupted in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd and Michael Brown’s which Kalli witnessed in their college years. For Kalli, the horse is an invitation to consider one’s place – in life, land, and time.
I had the opportunity to chat with Kalli about Mounted during a time of transition into the Year of the Fire Horse in the Lunar New Year astrological cycle. This timing felt particularly auspicious. The conversation we shared continues to remind me that the world is full of teachers. I look to these teachers for guidance in the coming shifts, changes, and revolution.
Bitter Kalli + Nina Vichayapai
Nina: So the Year of the Horse is just around the corner. I’m wondering if that holds any significance to you. Are you doing anything to celebrate?
Bitter: Yeah. I genuinely feel like the Lunar New Year is more of a beginning than the Gregorian New Year. I’m friends with a few astrologers who have been studying Chinese astrology. They’re Chinese and they’ve been teaching me about their own research into the fire horse. From what I understand from what Alice Sparkly Cat was telling me is that the Year of the Horse is all about belonging and finding your herd. And questions of who you’re taking care of and who’s taking care of you.
I’m still learning about it. But I definitely think about the horse as tied to labor. We were talking about the fire horse as this symbol of basically reaching the pinnacle of something, and now you’re kind taking stock of the energy you have. You might be exhausted. Where do you go next?
I think with Lunar New Year, Ramadan, and Saturn entering Aries, those are all happening around the same time. Looking at astrological cycles, it feels like a very ripe and potent time for collective work and for uprising also.
Nina: Totally. It feels really timely that the Year of the Fire Horse is happening when it feels like we’re hitting this point in this country of just not being able to take what’s happening anymore. That brings me to something that I’ve been thinking about and wanted to ask your opinion on, which you touch upon in Mounted. I really appreciate how in your writing you never let go of the political side of this intersection of horses and identity. So, how do you see horses as fitting into this moment of political reckoning that we are having?
Bitter: I think that regardless of whether horses are physically present in any particular moment of protest or organizing, horses are always tied with the history of the land and often with the history of the stolen indigenous land that we are on, in what we now know of as the United States. I think that we can learn so many lessons from horses about the ways that people have connected to the land and to other living beings throughout time.
Because horses tell stories about slavery, about indigeneity, about work. And I think that my relationship to horses reminds me that collective struggle is always somehow related to the land. Even what’s happening right now in Minneapolis, it’s so based on people’s relationships to where they live, people’s relationships to their neighbors. They’re fighting against what is literally an occupation of their land.
So I think of the horse as both a symbol and also as a flesh and blood living being that invites us into deeper relationships with histories of place, how we’ve related to landscapes, and how we’ve related to each other through the work that we do.
Nina: That’s so beautifully put. Well I’d love it if you give a bit of background and talk about where your love of horses came from. How did that turn into this desire to then write this book?
Bitter: I have been really fascinated by horses since I was young. I read a lot of children’s literature about animals and somehow pony books caught my attention. I write in Mounted about the specific themes around girlhood and independence and the ways that pony books offered specific models of how I might relate to and also think beyond the frameworks of girlhood that were offered to me. And how I might relate to my connection with animals, my connection with nature and the urban environment.
I started going to this local urban stable in Brooklyn that is located in an area where carriage horses used to be kept. It’s located in a very busy part of Brooklyn. The teachers would have to lead us across the street to Prospect Park in order to have our lessons.So it was very different from the idyllic landscape of pony media. But I did feel like I was living out that pony kid dream in my own way.
And then as I got older, of course that became more complicated as I gained more awareness about politics. I started understanding more about race and class and also started seeing the differences between myself and the white women and girls who surrounded me in the more suburban setting that I started going to in high school to ride horses. I was really seeing the ways that my parents were struggling financially and I also wasn’t always riding consistently. We were saving money to take the Long Island Rail Road out to lessons. It was very different from these other kids who would just drive from their house to the stable and interact with horses from a place of comfort.
Then in college there were a lot of protests against police brutality after the murders of Michael Brown and George Floyd. That was when I really internalized the ways that horses are used as tools of state violence. Seeing news and images of police on horseback and facing down these rows of Black protestors.That image was really impactful to me as someone who had seen and interacted with horses in this very positive light. In an athletic sense, but also in the sense of loving animals and wanting to be a vet. My association with horses was very far from the political organizing that I was involved in or my thoughts about state violence. I held those two things as separate but in that moment they came together for the first time. And I started feeling very conflicted about my own ongoing life in equestrian sports. It continued to be something that I was reaching for and also struggling to access. I was working on campus just to be able to offset the costs.
And again, there was a huge contrast between me and the other people on the team. And I was doing a lot of campus organizing. So again encountering this tension between the different worlds that I was moving between. I ended up leaving the team after my sophomore year. I was also starting to become interested in the alternative histories of how my people have related to horses. Like I know that it isn’t only like this WASPy activity.
I had a sense of like, even growing up, my mom would talk about her childhood in Jamaica and how people would go to the horse races on Sundays. It was a big social event. And when she went back to Jamaica in her early twenties she also rode a horse along the beach. It’s an activity that people do but it’s also part of the tourism industry. So I had these as examples of people outside of the US interacting with horses.
I knew a little bit about Black cowboys and then obviously experienced the urban stable in my neighborhood that I attended. So I started to really search for ways to connect with those histories. I started venturing further into the archives.
In a way I think I was trying to justify or explain to myself my own involvement with horses. I was trying to make sense of and create a narrative of what other stories might be available to me now that I had walked away from the team and didn’t have the day-to-day relationship with riding horses. So that’s what became the book eventually.
Nina: Thanks for such a comprehensive journey through that whole process. I really understand that desire to make something out of that feeling of isolation, as a way to understand yourself and find others out there who have also had these experiences.
I’m curious if either through the process of writing the book or now having it out in the world, have you found more kinship in the horse community with people who are thinking about horses in a similar way to you?
Bitter: Yeah, throughout the years I have built relationships through the process of writing the book. I moved to Philly to be closer to loved ones and also because I was very interested in connecting with Black land stewards here. I started volunteering at a Black-run farm in Philly. I also love the ways that Black cowboy histories are so interwoven with this city.
At the Fletcher Riding Club, where I volunteer, I love being able to just see Black kids on horseback in the park and also giving pony rides in the summer. So I’ve really connected with people and organizations before the book came out. I also have had experiences where people will come up to me at a party and be like, “can I tell you a story of like this horse I connected to at summer camp?” And it’s been really sweet just having these experiences where people see me as “the horse person,” you know?
The other day my friend texted me saying that her friend, who is Gullah Geechee, her grandmother was like this woman who rode horses and owned shotguns and was this really independent and cool person. I’m just getting all of these stories about people’s relationships to horses that I probably wouldn’t have gotten before. So that’s been really cool.
Nina: That’s amazing. It’s sweet how putting something out into the world attracts more people who are seeing something in themself through you.
I’m curious what your research process was like. I learned so much from your book and I can only imagine it was really in depth. How did you go about collecting all the information you shared in the book?
Bitter: It was kind of a slow accumulation of different rabbit holes. I attended this class in my senior year of college with the writer Anelise Chen called Writing the Athletic Body. I spent the whole semester just writing about horses. We were supposed to do different assignments but she let me do my own thing. Somehow I ended up writing about Black jockeys and my own history with horses. I started looking at the history of lawn jockeys in the South, which are these really caricatured images that people have in front of their homes. I started really diving deep into some of those histories.
Then I wrote a piece for Guernica Magazine about the weaver Dietrich Brackens and his weaving of a child on horseback. So at every opportunity I was finding horses and finding ways to weave them into my work.
My research process itself is very associative. I learned a lot about being neurodivergent and accepting the way that my brain works through the process of writing this book. Because it feels like a collage. I kind of just have an Are.na Channel with hundreds of links, images, and notes that I’ve written to myself. Often I’ll just follow threads of wondering if something happened, or wondering if people had a relationship in this place and being curious about how that might’ve been.
I think that my research process tends to be kind of messy but very focused on collecting a lot of fragments until they somehow cohere in some way or not.
Nina: I loved the structure of the book so much. It didn’t feel like you were following a formula. It felt very natural, the way you bounced around from covering things in history, to popular culture, to music, art, pony books, kink… it just felt like such a warm invite into all these things that you’re interested in.
Bitter: Obsession definitely plays a role in my research process too.
Nina: Yeah! Could you talk about that? I should probably share the journey of how I found out about your book. I first learned about it through encountering the essay you wrote, On Obsession as a Creative Practice. You wrote about how your lifelong obsession with horses drove you to write Mounted. I was reading that essay and saying to myself, “Wait, how did I not know about this book?!”
But I’m very curious about obsession and the role it plays in your writing?
Bitter: Yeah, I think I just have a very recursive mind and often end up mulling over the same thing from multiple angles for years. Like in some ways, I feel that I’ve been working on the same projects since I was born. And that some of this feels like a spiritual assignment. I feel these things deeply within myself and I have a need to carry them out in this lifetime. So I feel like there’s this internal compass that I have towards certain things that I know I will be engaging with for the rest of my life. I think that goes back also to what, in a Western psychological framework, we could talk about as like neurodivergence, or autism, or special interests.
But I don’t feel like those phrases capture the feeling of returning and spiraling back to something again and again. That feeling of holding something in your hands and turning it over for years and years. I should say my process is also very visual. I started out as an art writer. I still feel very anchored to the visual as a way to move through my writing and gather ideas. The way that I found an agent was through writing that essay about the weaving by Dietrich Bracken, which ended up becoming the work on the cover of the book. I feel like my relationships with Black artists made this book possible and are very woven through the fabric of this book.
Nina: I really loved your writing on that piece. I would love to read more art reviews and critiques by you. Are there other writers or artists who are exploring horses in the same way as you that you’ve learned about since making the book?
Bitter: Honestly, I feel like my understanding of what a text is is very expansive. I think I’ve learned so much from land workers and horse people who are sometimes writing on the page and also sometimes not. But I think that the work that they do is also creating possibility for my own writing.
I wanna shout out Avry Jxn, who is a photographer and a horse trainer. I spoke with them in 2019. We did an interview for Scalawag Magazine and they have definitely been a huge inspiration to me just watching them grow their practice. They remind me of the political stakes of this work. We spoke on the phone after my book announcement came out and they shared that they know Black people who are actively criminalized for having horses. Who have gotten felonies for having horses like in urban environments or places where the zoning laws don’t really allow for that. The legal framework becomes a way to alienate Black people from the land and from histories of caring for and riding horses.
Also a writer who recently passed, her name was DéLana R. A. Dameron. She had her own horse farm and was a rodeo rider. She also wrote books about Black people’s relationship to the landscape in the south.
After the book, I’ve connected with Chi-Ming Yang, a Chinese American writer who teaches at Penn State. She recently published a book called H is for Horse. And it’s about Octavia Butler’s relationship to horses. Apparently Octavia Butler was also obsessed with horses and some of her first writings as a child were about horses. The book charts the ways that Butler’s relationship with horses informed her writings on interspecies kinship. She also apparently produced so much visual art and writing as a young person about horses. So that was cool.
So those are some people I’m thinking of who write in different ways who engage with the text of the horse and the land.
Nina: I’ll have to look into those. I’m curious to know if there was anything surprising that came up during your research?
Bitter: Yeah, I was really fascinated by the ways that the horse comes up in Jamaican dancehall music. I had an inkling of that, but when I looked further I was like, wow, there are actually so many artists who took on cowboy names! This was actually a significant trend.
Connecting it back to my own Caribbean heritage and realizing how present the horse is, even in places that don’t have this legacy of Manifest Destiny or American cowboy culture and physically colonizing the land.
I definitely learned things about myself in writing the essays about kink and about African diasporic spirituality, and learning things about my own relationship to animality. I’ve been familiar with ideas of the limits of the framework of the human, but learning about how Black people have always kind of stood outside of this Western idea of the human, and how those violences are shaping me.
So I think those were some things that I uncovered through the process of writing.
Nina: Do you have any future books planned or writing that you’re working on? Any new obsessions you’re following?
Bitter: Yeah, I’ve been writing a lot about sugarcane. And the history of sugarcane as central to Black labor in the Caribbean specifically. I’ve been growing sugarcane here in Philly and learning how to adapt it to a northeastern climate. So I’m following the history of that plant and seeing what it shows me.
Nina: That’s amazing. Well, I hope that I can read your writing about that someday.
So my last question, which is a little silly but is related to a project I do around horses and people who love them, could you describe your dream horse? What kind of horse did you picture yourself riding or being in friendship with as a child?
Bitter: Yeah, I was always drawing horses. I remember the horse I wanted, it was so specific. I wanted a Dutch Warmblood horse, which is a great horse for jumping and very athletic.And I was fascinated with Greek mythology. So I would come up with all of these like Greek god and goddess names for my theoretical horse.
Nina: Amazing!
Bitter: My horse was reddish brown with a darker brown mane and tail and four white socks.
Nina: Cute. So good.
Bitter: Yeah. I also had a lot of model horses. So I think I also had a rotating collection in my brain of horses that I might have one day.
Nina: Of course. So cool. Well I’ve loved chatting with you so much. Let me know about any horsey things or sugarcane things coming up!
Bitter Kalli is a writer and landworker born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. They work across mediums including soil, seeds, and printed matter. They are the author of the essay collection Mounted: On Horses, Blackness, and Liberation. Bitter is a child of the Atlantic Ocean. They are based in Philadelphia.
Nina Vichayapai makes art that explores what it means to be at the intersections of margins and peripheries. Through exploring the edges of people, places, and psyche, she celebrates what can be found beyond convention. Her interdisciplinary practice includes anything from soft sculpture, public art, pie making, event organizing, dog petting, and eavesdropping. Her work has been exhibited internationally and locally in spaces such as the Tacoma Arts Museum, the Wing Luke Museum, and the Henry Art Gallery. She has been an artist-in-residence in places such as the Seattle Public Library, Deception Pass State Park, and Caldera Arts. Nina was born in Bangkok, Thailand. She currently lives between Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon.