Three Songs by Hank Williams

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

The 13 stories in this collection by West Coast writer Calvin Wharton
are precisely crafted, economically written, intriguingly insightful,
and populated by memorable, deftly drawn characters.

The stories, most of which are set in Western Canada, deal with a
series of universal themes: rootlessness, disappointment, betrayal,
alienation, and the search for meaning in the commonplace, to name just
a few. In “Something to Say,” a young father, determined to pour out
his feelings about things left unsaid and apologies never made, eerily
pursues the ghost of his dead father that he sees in a truck at a
traffic light. Evidence that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”
is presented in the story “A Thing of Beauty,” in which a
middle-class businessman who craves attention from his wife and his
friends negotiates the purchase of a gun from a couple of bikers in a
bar. In “Paper Covers Rock,” two teenagers who have stolen a car and
are selling drugs learn who the winners are when they are robbed by two
greasers.

One of the most developed and longest of the stories, “Chicken
Man,” interweaves the lives of an elderly couple who refuse to accept
the loss of their adult daughter as a suicide with the lives of their
down-on-their-luck tenants. A friend of the tenants struggles in the
aftermath of an unexpected divorce from a wife who “just shook her
head and looked at her untouched cup of coffee as if it, too, were a
disappointment.”

The denizens of Wharton’s world may be hitchhikers, down-and-outers,
has-beens, wannabes, drifters, or grifters, but they all have a
recognizable human face. These are stories for novice writers to model
and experienced readers to appreciate.