He's been bringing a bit of poetry to OKC Thunder sportswriting. Now he's debuting his first novel

Growing up in Fort Gibson, an outpost in northeast Oklahoma’s Green Country, Tyler Parker knew there were stories to be told about the wondrous and weird state he called home.

“I always felt like there was plenty of entertaining and interesting things happening all around,” Parker said, “and it just never quite made sense to me that there weren’t more.”

More television shows, more books and movies influenced by this enigmatic place.

“This is an area of the country that deserves highlighting,” Parker told himself.

In his debut novel, "A Little Blood and Dancing," Parker does just that.

“It’s a tale as old as time: doomed romance, bloody revenge, fast food and the voice of God,” the book jacket reads. “Welcome to Tyler Parker’s Oklahoma.”

The story focuses on Sylvia Table, his tumultuous relationship with Lady Sixkiller and how Table’s past haunts his future.

The 389-page book, published earlier this year, doesn’t fit neatly into one genre. It’s a comic tragedy with a Western feel. Hilarious yet devastating — written in Parker’s inimitable style, as Chris Ryan, editorial director at The Ringer, put it.

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“You can't make Tyler sound like anyone else,” Ryan said. “He sounds only like Tyler no matter what he's writing about. You could ask him to review a restaurant or a movie or write about a basketball player or write a piece of fiction, and it's just gonna be that voice.

“That's the thing that's so beautiful about him as a writer and as a person, is that he kind of speaks to the value of creative writing in the first place because it really is communicating some sort of internal vocabulary, internal cadence that no one else has.”

'A fondness for the people' in Oklahoma

The Oklahoma towns and places in "A Little Blood and Dancing" are fictionalized, but unless you’re from here, you probably wouldn’t realize it.

Parts of the book are absurd, but that makes it all the more believable.

“Oklahoma is sort of wild enough on its own that a lot of the references to real things can exist next to some of these wilder things and people don't really question it,” Parker said.

There are all sorts of Easter eggs in the book that Oklahomans especially would enjoy.

The couple in the book met at Sonic. One chapter is titled “Stacey Dales/LaNeishea Caufield,” named after Sooner hoopers of yore. There’s mention of Joe Washington and Eduardo Najera, Clara Luper and Garth Brooks. And even Mathis Brothers Furniture.

“I was very conscious of the fact there will be large swaths of people reading this that don't get these references or will have to go look them up, and I did not give a s--- about that,” Parker said.

“I have had to read so many books about New York or Los Angeles or Chicago or Dallas or Big City X, and I don't know the restaurants there, I don't know the stores there, I don't know the little one-off nicknames for certain parts of town, but the writer writes it with authority, and it's a known place to some people, and so they get a pass for it. I wanted to operate that same way here.”

Parker was born in Muskogee, but he was raised in neighboring Fort Gibson.

He now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Blythe, and their daughters, June and Adelaide — the three to whom Parker dedicates his book. After graduating from Oklahoma Baptist University in 2010, Parker lived in Chicago, where he studied comedy, and New York, where he earned a master’s degree in fine arts from Columbia.

But still he holds an affection for Oklahoma.

“I have a fondness for the people there,” Parker said, “the way they talk and how big the sky is.”

A 'frankly poetic' type of writing for OKC Thunder

Parker finished his book while working full time as a writer at The Ringer, a sports and pop culture website founded by Bill Simmons.

Parker writes about basketball, but not in a net-rating, effective-field-goal-percentage sort of way.

He romanticizes the sport the way baseball and boxing have been. Not hiding his Thunder fandom in his writing, Parker once wrote a nine-paragraph opening that compared the pain of a Thunder win during a tanking season to being covered in maggots from an exploded ostrich carcass. Really, you should read it.

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“It would be unique in any era, but it's especially unique in this era when I think a lot of basketball writing has gotten very technical and very analytical,” Ryan said. “Tyler's is frankly poetic.”

Parker honed his craft on basketball blogs, including Daily Thunder, the site founded by Royce Young, a former ESPN reporter who now works for the team. Parker thanked Young for giving him a platform to share his work.

"That was The New York Times best seller list as far as I was concerned,” Parker said of being featured on the site.

Unlike most basketball writers, Parker was quite the player.

Todd Dickerson, Fort Gibson’s boys basketball head coach who was an assistant during Parker’s days, still remembers a play Parker made almost 20 years ago.

“We were playing in the Inola tournament, he blocked a shot from a kid going to the basket and then made the save going out of bounds,” Dickerson said.

In Inola’s gym, as Dickerson told it, the corner of the court where Parker saved the ball leads right into the gym’s lobby.

“And he was going so hard to go get it and save it that he went into the lobby,” Dickerson said. “And I thought, we've got a player ... That's Tyler in a nutshell.”

Parker then played four years at OBU, ending his college career in 2010 as a member of the Bison’s NAIA national championship team.

“I think he ended up getting every last ounce out of his ability,” said Doug Tolin, OBU’s hall of fame coach. “He worked, and worked, and worked, and he really made himself a role on a very good team. They ended up winning the national championship, and we would not have won it without Tyler.”

The former 6-foot-5 forward has a go-to comp for his game.

“In high school I played like Nick Collison at Kansas,” Parker said, “and in college I played like Nick Collison on the Thunder.”

'I love Oklahoma'

Parker is already working on another book, which also will be set in another fictionalized Oklahoma town.

Being born in Muskogee, growing up in Fort Gibson and going to college in Shawnee influenced "A Little Blood and Dancing" in ways Parker said he probably doesn’t realize.

The places you live are special in that way.

“I was never an ‘I gotta get out of here’ kinda kid,” Parker said. “I love Oklahoma. I just … career and life took me elsewhere.”

"A Little Blood and Dancing" brought him back.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Fort Gibson's Tyler Parker talks about debut novel, set in Oklahoma