Dancing at the Crossroads

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

Open any volume by Joan Finnigan and prepare for powerful entertainment
as you are transported to the mythological Lost Nation, home of her
clan, up the Quebec side of the Ottawa Valley. Half folktales, half
conventional fiction, occasionally wandering and overly tribal, these
stories enter a country as vivid as Lake Wobegon or Mariposa, but far
darker. Meant as much to be told ’round the fire, they roll on with
the wry Irish blarney of her ancestors, drawing the reader into
tragicomedy where characters both epic and ordinary strut out their
dramas: “Christmas Eve in the cold, incredible stars hung over all the
puffing houses of Canonville, hung over the Big House blazing in the
snows ... hung over the mansion stables where MacTavish summoned his
stableman to saddle up the donkey.”

Painfully honest, her themes embrace the joys and sorrows of humankind:
alcoholism, adultery, incest, and deliberate cruelty. But the characters
challenge their fates without a whimper of self-pity. An old man enters
a nursing home; a sister abused for 40 years watches with satisfaction
as her brother dies; couples battle in love and hate; and a city girl
returns to attend a funeral, wondering if she can go home again. Larger
than life and canonized by memory, these stories leave the reader asking
for more, entranced by this wonderful and fearsome community, the human
condition writ large and well: “I want to die on the River and when I
feel my death upon me I’ll go down to the dock and set out in the
Ghost. ... And I’ll blend with the river I loved.”