After It Rains by Bill
Haugland (Vehicule Press, $18)
For years, Bill Haugland honed his skills as a writer and
storyteller, mainly as a reporter for CFCF’s suppertime newscast “Pulse”, and
later as its anchorman. However, while he became a master news storyteller,
Haugland was also trying to develop his skills as a storyteller of a different
nature, mainly fictional stories.
When he retired from telling new stories several years ago,
Haugland decided that instead of going the traditional route of writing a
trenchcoat memoir of his life as a TV newsman, he used his TV news background
as a premise for a novel. In fact, he turned it into two novels about the
goings on of a mythical TV news operation in Montreal during the late 60s and
early 70s, Mobile 9 and The Bidding.
For his third foray into fiction writing, Haugland decided
to dig through a dusty old box that was stored in his Vermont home that was
filled with story ideas and short stories that were started but remained
unfinished. So with a lot of discipline and his knack for telling a story,
Haugland went back to many of those stories and completed them. The end result
is his first short story collection After
it Rains.
The book is a collection of 14 short stories of varying
themes and narratives that don’t solely rely on his past experiences in TV
news. In fact, it deals with several examples of the human experience, whether
it be realistic, fantastic or humoristic. Haugland’s purpose in telling these
stories is to show the reader what these experiences are like from the point of
view of the people who are taking part in it or being affected by it.
For example, there is the experience of a quirky family
planning a carrying out a bank robbery (“Family Finances”); confessing to a
murder while on death row (“A Confession”); how a simple object can release a
tale of survival during the Holocaust (“The Photograph”); the wild, hustle and
bustle world of the TV news stringer during the late 60s (“Stringer”, in which the
mythical station CKCF from Haugland’s previous two books figures prominently in
this story); and how an inherited 1943 U.S. penny turns into something more for
the lonely grandson whom it’s handed down to (“The Wishing Jar”).
Haugland shows that he does have the knack for crafting and
developing a quite readable fictional short story. In fact, he even knows how
to develop a good plot twist that will throw quite a curve to the reader. Case
in point, “41 Ward B”, a story of two elderly patients who reside in the
Alzheimer’s ward of a rehab center. Although their rantings and states of mind
could be attributed to their deteriorating mental condition, the ending is
quite surprising (for the better) and leaves the reader with a “wow!” reaction.
After it Rains is an enjoyable collection of diverse short
stories from someone who spent his career telling the public true stories on a
daily basis for over 40 years. And after so many years of telling the news,
it’s refreshing to see that Bill Haugland can effectively craft a series of
15-20 page works of fiction. Basically, he just cemented his new career as a
writer of good fiction. Hopefully, the trenchcoat memoir won’t be so far
behind, too.
