BRATTLEBORO — On Friday, July 9, at 5 p.m., the Brattleboro Literary Fest continues its 20th anniversary year with a home-on-the-range trip to Elko, Nevada via KT Sparks' new book, Four Dead Horses.
Sparks will participate in a free online conversation with local writer Stephanie Greene.
On May 1, 1982, 18-year-old Martin Oliphant watches a horse drown off the shore of Lake Michigan - the first of (almost) four equine corpses marking the trail that will lead Martin out of the small-minded small town of Pierre, Mich., onto the open ranges of Elko and into the open arms, or at least open mics, of the cowboy poets who gather there to perform.
Along the way, he nurtures a dying mother, who insists the only thing wrong with her is tennis elbow; he corrals a demented father, who believes he's Father Christmas; he assists the dissolute local newspaper editor; and he serves stints as horse rustler and pet mortician.
For 30 years, Martin searches for an escape route to the West, to poetry, and to his first love, the cowgirl Ginger.
The book is described in its publicity as “laugh-out-loud funny, darkly sardonic, overflowing with heart.”
Four Dead Horses “is an exquisitely crafted romp through one man's life in the Upper Midwest and the dreams of versifying cowboys that carry him through,” its publisher, Regal House Publishing, says.
Sparks is a writer and farmer whose work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Pank, and elsewhere. She received an A.B. in politics, economics, rhetoric, and law from the University of Chicago; an M.A. in politics, philosophy, and economics from Oxford University, Brasenose College; and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina - an educational grounding that “matches her lifelong interest in everything and mastery of nothing,” she says.
She spent 25 years in Washington, D.C., most of it in the U.S. Senate, as a policy analyst and speechwriter and continues to be involved in progressive politics, most recently with President Biden's 2020 campaign. She lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband, dog, a fluctuating population of barn cats, and no horses, dead or alive.
Four Dead Horses is her first novel.
Host Stephanie Greene's short fiction has been published in Nostoc Magazine, Green Mountains Review, Sky Island Journal, The New Guard, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her work has been long-listed for the Lascaux Prize for Short Fiction, and it has been nominated for inclusion in the “Best of the Net” Anthology and for a Pushcart Prize.
A contributor to Vermont Public Radio for nine years, she is revising her second novel (“the first being safely locked in a drawer,” she says). She lives on the family farm with her husband, writer and artist Marshall Brooks.