A Ticket to the Grand Show: Journeys Across Cultural Boundariesby Neil McKinnonPublished by Your Nickel’s Worth PublishingReview by Toby A. Welch  $29.95 ISBN 9781778690235 Wow! What a fascinating book! I didn’t even need to dig into chapter one to get hooked; the introduction itself sucked me right in and I couldn’t put A Ticket to the Grand Show down.  McKinnon is insistent that this is not a travel book, more like a story collection of cultural experiences in his life. But I loved reading about the places he visited and the encounters he had in them. The book is more about the culture in the places he traveled to than a list of things to do. “Culture” is a multi-layered concept that cannot be adequately explored in a brief five hundred words. It means different things to different people. Culture is often a deeply buried belief that someone may not even consciously be aware of having. A Ticket to the Grand Show is broken into five parts, each one detailing a geographic location: China, Japan, Mexico, Hawaii, and Canada. Some of McKinnon’s experiences took place decades ago but under his skillful hand, they feel like they happened yesterday.  While I enjoyed reading all five parts, my favourite was…

Tuckahoe Slidebottle by Neil McKinnon Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $18.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-07-02 “The town itself is homeless. It lies on the prairie like a drunk on a sidewalk.” The town is Tuckahoe, a fictional SK community invented by gifted writer Neil McKinnon, and on the strength of these first two sentences, I knew I was going to enjoy his short fiction collection Tuckahoe Slidebottle. McKinnon renders a cast of characters simultaneously outrageous and credible; if Tuckahoe were on a map, readers would be flocking there. I can’t help thinking that the writer wore a smile while penning most of these twenty stories. First, let’s look at the town itself. Tuckahoe’s a place where “Dried potholes slam your teeth as you drive.” There’s the inevitable coffee row, called “The Jury” (“five or six tobacco chewers and sunflower-seed-spitters who met every day to pass judgement on the private lives of others”). And there are wild characters like one-eyed Old Alex, who took off his black eye patch Saturdays and “used a silver dollar to cover the hole where his left eye was supposed to be,” because he believed in dressing up on Saturday nights. Reverend Davies is…