Join us for an evening of conversation with KT Sparks and CJ Hauser discussing Sparks’ debut novel Four Dead Horses!
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
On May 1, 1982, eighteen-year-old Martin Oliphant watches a horse drown off the shore of Lake Michigan—the first of four equine corpses marking the trail that will lead Martin out of the small-minded small town of Pierre, Michigan, onto the open ranges of Elko, Nevada, 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; corrals a demented father, who believes he’s Father Christmas; assists the dissolute local newspaper editor; and serves stints as horse rustler and pet mortician. For thirty years, Martin searches for an escape route to the West, to poetry, and to his first love, the cowgirl Ginger, but never manages to get much farther than the city limits of his Midwestern hometown—that is, until a world famous cow horse dies while touring through Pierre, and Martin is tapped to transport its remains to the funeral at the 32nd Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence.
About the author:
KT Sparks is a farmer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and a staff writer at The Southern Review of Books. She has short memoir upcoming in the Kenyon Review, and her short and flash fiction has appeared in Prime Number Magazine, Pank, Word Riot, Citron Review, Jersey Devil Press, WhiskeyPaper, and Jellyfish Review, was anthologized in The Lobsters Run Free: Bath Flash Fiction Volume Two and Tulip Tree Press’s Stories that Need to be Told 2019, and was recognized in the New Millennium Writing Awards and The Moth short story competition. KT received her MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, where she served as an assistant fiction editor of Qu (a literary magazine). Four Dead Horses is her first book.
About the moderator:
CJ Hauser teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University. Her novel, Family of Origin, was published by Doubleday in 2019, and her novel, The From-Aways, was published by William Morrow in 2014. Her first full length work of nonfiction, The Crane Wife & Other Essays is forthcoming from Doubleday in the US and Viking UK in Spring 2022. Her work has also appeared in Tin House, Narrative Magazine, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, Esquire, Third Coast, The Kenyon Review, The Guardian, and The New York Times. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and a PhD from Florida State University.
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