By Rosalie Morris
Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand
by Tim Bowling
Freehand Books (2025)
Established poet and novelist Tim Bowling’s newest book is a collection of short stories titled Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand. The title is evocative of the collection’s themes of both the drudgery and whimsy of everyday life. Bowling’s years of experience as a writer show in his deft ability to capture deep emotions roiling under the surface of seemingly mundane events, from a little league baseball game to a trip to the bookstore. Each of the stories in this collection offer up a bite-sized look into the lives of characters who seem to be nothing special – they are librarians, sessional lecturers, fishermen, college students, and baristas–but who contain deep wells of trauma, grief, despair, hope, and joy. Recurring themes in the collection include grief, secrecy, the reopening of old wounds, and the impact of traumatic events on individuals and those close to them.
In “This is a Test of the Emergency Book-Buying System,” we are introduced to a narrator doing what seems like a perfunctory task: checking local bookstores for a particular book he wants to buy. We follow the narrator navigate multiple bookstores (and multiple unhelpful booksellers) and a bitter cold prairie winter day, and slowly learn about a recent tragedy and how finding a particular book is wound up with his grief. Bowling keeps the emotional turmoil subtly below the surface in this story, eventually bubbling over in an image that is both comedic and exultant, when a young bookseller named Skyler rides an elevator away from the narrator, who describes the image as “almost glorious, like a Renaissance painting. The Ascension of Skyler into Children’s Books and Merchandise.” (108). This story is an excellent example of Bowling’s tendency to take a small, seemingly unimportant moment and imbue it with emotional weight.
As often as Bowling delivers stirring emotional moments, he also imbues the collection with humour and playfulness. One example of this is in the story “Bartleby, the Sessional,” where a sessional lecturer, Jerris Johns, who has long been struggling to get ahead in the world of academia, simply gives up and takes up attitude of preferring not to do things in an homage to Herman Melville’s classic story “Bartleby, the Sessional.” It begins with a snowstorm causing Jerris to cancel one class, resulting in a snowball effect of cancelling class after class. Jerris justifies it by stating “the inevitable future of lecturing would be virtual anyway, so why not get a head start and even go one step further by not lecturing, period?” (56). Eventually, Jerris is called into a meeting with the chair of the department and, expecting to be fired, is instead given accolades for his pedagogical excellence.
Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand is a compelling exploration of the mundanity of life in all its complexities, seen through a lens of diverse characters with varied emotional scars, biases, and desires.
Rosalie Morris is a writer and editor based in British Columbia. Her work can be found in The Malahat Review, Room Magazine, The Fiddlehead, PRISM, Indie Is Not A Genre, and various dark corners of the internet.