Off Track: or How I Dropped Out of College and Came to be a Horse Trainer in the 1970s While All My Friends Were Still Doing Drugs

by Jim McGarrah

"What does a Vietnam Vet do for an encore to one of the most soul-wrenching combat memoirs I've read? He's back in the saddle, writing about his road back to sanity, using the race track as a halfway house. Off Track is part race-track folk history, part heart-wrenching view into the mind of a man broken by war, and part heart-warming story of a man willing to go on the adventure of a lifetime--to find himself." --Jerry Waxler, author, Memoir Revolution

162 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 15, 2015

About the author

Jim McGarrah's poems, essays, and stories have appeared in many literary magazines over the past decade and the author of ten books. His play, Split Second Timing, received a Kennedy Center ACTF Award in 2001. He is the author of five books of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down (2003), When the Stars Go Dark (2009), Breakfast at Denny's (2013), The Truth About Mangoes (2016), and A Balancing Act: New and Selected Poems 1998-2018, a critically acclaimed memoir of the Vietnam War entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace that won the 2010 Legacy Nonfiction Award from the Eric Hoffer Foundation and the sequel entitled The End of an Era. His nonfiction account of life as a horse trainer, Off Track, was published in 2015 and Misdemeanor Outlaw followed in 2017. Jim is also co-editor of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana and a founding editor of RopeWalk Press, as well as the former managing editor of Southern Indiana Review.