AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT
JOHN EGENES
John Egenes
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John Egenes lives in New Zealand these days, but he grew up in Southern California and came of age in the 1960s, the era of JFK's assassination, the hippie culture, and the Moon landings, and was affected deeply by these events. His father left when he was seven, forcing his mother to enter the workforce as an unskilled, inexperienced worker, where she did her best to raise four kids on her own. John was left pretty much to his own devices to figure out how his own life was supposed to work. He spent much of his teenage years hitch-hiking and riding freight trains around America, and living mostly by his wits, even before the formative journey chronicled in "Man and Horse".
John has lived his adult life in two separate worlds, of music and horses. In the music world, John is a multi-instrumentalist, sharing the stage and playing with such artists as Pete Seeger, Bonnie Raitt, Lyle Lovett, Jerry Jeff Walker, Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Eliza Gilkyson, Townes van Zandt, and Kevin Welch. He produces albums for other artists and plays various instruments on dozens of tracks for recording projects every year. The internet allows him to collaborate with others all over the world.
John's music may be found on BandCamp at https://johnegenes.bandcamp.com and on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/user/johnegenes/videos. John also produces a weekly radio show called The Jukebox Highway at www.oar.org.nz .
In another world, John’s love of horses steered him toward saddlemaking. He owned a saddle shop for 18 years in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he and raised his two daughters. Saddlemaking eventually led him into fashion design, and he created accessories for designers like Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Isaac Mizrahi, and many others. His leatherwork was featured in stores and catalogues such as Neiman-Marcus, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Barney's, Sharper Image, Spiegel, and Bloomingdales, and he produced custom work for a long list of celebrities, including John Wayne, Kevin Costner, Sam Shepard, Ronald Reagan, Bruce Springsteen, George Jones, and others. John and his leatherwork are featured in this TEDx talk: https://youtu.be/GGhtCTfzbs8
Now a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Otago, John lives in Port Chalmers, New Zealand with his wife Kathryn and three cats. When not teaching or making music John enjoys fly fishing and stargazing. You can usually find him at a small local café with a cup of coffee in his hand and his head stuck in a book.
Buy Man & Horse: The Long Ride Across America: Read 274 Kindle Store Reviews - Amazon.com"
by John Egenes
In 1974 a disenfranchised young man from a broken home set out to do the impossible. With a hundred dollars in his pocket, a beat up cavalry saddle, and a faraway look in his eye, John Egenes saddled his horse Gizmo and started down the trail on an adventure across the North American continent. Their seven month journey took them across 11 states from California to Virginia, ocean to ocean. . As they left the pressing confinement of the city behind them, the pair experienced the isolation and loneliness of the southwestern deserts, the vastness of the prairie, and the great landscapes that make up America. Across hundreds of miles of empty land they slept with coyotes and wild horses under the stars, and in urban areas they camped alone in graveyards and abandoned shacks. Along the way John and Gizmo were transformed from inexperienced horse and rider to veterans of the trail. With his young horse as his spiritual guide John slowly began to comprehend his own place in the world and to find peace within himself. Full of heart and humor, Egenes serves up a tale that's as big as the America he witnessed, an America that no longer exists. It was a journey that could only have been experienced step by step, mile by mile, from the view between a horse's ears.
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