Country Music Country

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

The characters in these stories are blue-collar types who bruise their
knuckles for a living, work and play hard, fall in with bad companions,
and serve time. One of the author’s strengths is his depiction of
childhood, of grubby little boys building forts on the edge of town,
forging manly bonds that make the reader smile. He captures well the
rhythms of conversation, the details of their hours cruising through the
billiard hall, sitting in an old Ford sedan that is falling to pieces in
a meadow, or burying a pail of spit in a ritual.

In one story, a vagrant saves the narrator from freezing to death in a
blizzard; at their kitchen table, the narrator’s mother trims
“rollies” with a razor and plies the tramp with soup and sandwiches.
In another story, we watch a teenager put on work clothes like his
father’s and start his first job on the long road to apprenticeship.
For those who would plumb the hearts of man and boy, Country Music
Country is as true a vehicle as any.