Courageously creative – two works by Michael Blouin

Wore Down Trust – a blues in three lives

★★★★

This poetry/prose work is presented with three narrators; country and western icon Johnny Cash, Canadian poet Alden Nowlan and the author.

Though Cash and Nowlan have distinct sections dedicated to them, the reader has no idea what thoughts should be attributed to the author. The Cash and Nowlan sections are hardly different with both being equally bleak burdened as they both are with impoverished childhoods that beset them with demons, their pessimistic take on the present despite both having achieved significant success, and their hopeless view of the future and overall cynical look at life. This, of course, is as presented by Blouin, who one might assume somehow relates to the rural poverty and the lack of opportunity of these two distinguished artists though one would wonder how since he’s about 30 years their junior and the era he grew up in is dramatically different.

Blouin’s “blue collar” ordinary guy writing style, similar to Nowlan’s prose and poetry and Cash’s lyrics has moments of power and clarity but eventually becomes pretentious. The redeeming elements of this work are its originality in both style and presentation..

I Don’t Know How to Behave – A Fiction

★★★★

I Don’t Know How to Behave is called “a fiction”, as opposed to a work of fiction to avoid it being taken as a traditional style story with an arc, characters etc. This work by Michael Blouin definitely doesn’t have those storytelling fundamentals. It is told by characters who are real people; a film director, a poet and a daredevil, though their narratives are imagined by the author and never converge.

Once the appeal of the experimental style and presentation wears off (quite quickly, actually), trying to decipher this work becomes challenging and tedious. But for its courageous creativity, it gets four stars.