robin somers leaning against a wooden block

About Robin

Author of Beet Fields, a murder mystery, Robin is a founding member of the Coastal Cruisers chapter of Sisters in Crime, and an Emerita Lecturer in Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Eleven Stolen Horses, a Wild Horses mystery was inspired by the time Robin lived in the rural Sierra Nevada foothill town of Sonora, California — where she kept her horse, worked as a crime reporter for the local newspaper, and was an editor for the United States Forest Service.

In 2002, Robin returned to her home near the beach in Santa Cruz, California, where she lives with her husband and their Havanese, Buster. She is a passionate advocate for wild horses.

BEGINNINGS

the colorado river flowing through rock canyons

I was 37 when I started to write my first novel. I’d returned to school at the University of California, Santa Cruz, majoring in Literature and taking as many creative writing courses as I could. My creative non-fiction writing teacher, Page Stegner, announced he was taking his class on a week-long rafting trip down the San Juan River on the border of the Navajo Nation. I came away from that river with a bad case of hyperthermia, a passion for Indigenous culture, and a lasting belief in the spirit of landscape, which formed the perspective from which I write.

This first attempt brought me to a village of stick huts and tamped earth floors on the eastern slope of the Sierra de San Pedro Martir in Baja, California, where the Kiliwa live. The chief, whose name was Cruz, only spoke Kiliwa, a disappearing language. He believed I was there for the gold; I explained I was writing a novel. I wrote that book on my electronic typewriter and packed it away in a briefcase.

Since then I’ve written four more novels, and the latest is my first traditionally published book.

Writing is an Evolutionary Process

— Jim Houston (Continental Divide)

robin reading Eleven Stolen Horses book from a stool in a horse pen, with two horses in the background

I’ve taken many forms as a writer since I began forty years ago. I’ve reported and written essays, columns, features, and lots of poetry and fiction, then narrowed the fiction to the mystery genre.

I wrote freelance for the alternative presses in Santa Cruz before landing a full-time job as a beat reporter for a daily newspaper in the Sierra Nevada foothills. I was briefly an editor for the Forest Service and taught high school English in that same town.

I moved back to Santa Cruz to attend San Jose State’s fledgling MFA program in Creative Writing where I finished my second novel Tornado, Kansas, which took a decade to write.

I began the Olive Post eco-mystery series, based on my son’s organic farm, Dirty Girl Produce. I self-published the second book in that series, Beet Fields, a murder mystery, in 2020, the year of Covid. Beet Fields will soon be re-released as an eBook by Sibylline Press.

My most recent book, Eleven Stolen Horses, a Wild Horse Mystery, launches September 16, 2024, by Sibylline Press, a women-owned company that specializes in the work of women over fifty.

All these parts of my evolution as an author at age 75 affirm: “Never give up.”

Q&A

Excerpt from an interview with George Cramer

My stories are born of reality until my imagination takes over, due to a trained journalistic mind that resists confinement to fact. I’m a pantser, which means I write the story as it comes to me, and sometimes the dang thing won’t come.
But I got to the end of Eleven Stolen Horses. The story is about two women, one who goes missing and the other her best friend, who will not give up the search to find her—dead or alive. The premise came from the tragic disappearance of my friend Patty Kelly Tolhurst, who disappeared in the Sierra Nevadas ten years ago and has not been found. Patty helped me pick out my first horse, which became a scene in the novel.
My fiction is my way of processing experience. Eleven Stolen Horses is a prayer for my missing friend.
Eleven Stolen Horses took me to a working horse and cattle ranch in Northeastern, Utah, in the nape of the Jarbidge Wilderness, where ranchers bring their truths to the page and the geological hoodoo formations lend their spirit.
The story also drew me to the Modoc Forest in Northern California, home of the Devils Garden Wild Horse herd, where I observed the helicopter roundup of these beautiful thriving horses, one of many roundups in one of many government wild horse management areas throughout the western states. The mustangs not adopted into homes far too often live out their lives in holding facilities or worse, are sold to kill buyers for slaughter.
Today, I volunteer at a local wild horse rescue farm and serve as an ambassador for American Wild Horse Conservation.
Real until they must don a disguise. That said, the very real spirit of landscape has remained the lens from which I tell a story ever since that San Juan River trip with my first creative writing teacher, where I was lucky enough to experience the transformational power of landscape and live through it. That spirit entered me; I hope it will always reside in my work and, with any luck, touch my reader.
- Louise Erdrich. Favorite book: Love Medicine. I’ve read all of her Ojibwe series and taught Round House to my university students.
- Everything by Peter Heller! He canoes, flyfishes, knows rivers, loves wolves, and writes killer mysteries with an environmental twist.
- I wallow in Jane Harper’s dry land mysteries and Molly Gloss’ historical fiction about women and horses.
When I’m stuck, I read these and other masters until their words open a door and I can write again.
I'm adding favorites all the time as I read my Sibylline Press colleagues' new books.