- Publisher : All En Crafts LLC Press
- Language : English
- Print length : 333 pages
- Available in
Paper Cover
Hard Cover
Coolers, Cousins & Country Roads
A part of the Barrooms, Beers & Backyard Barbecues related collection—a group of companion titles connected by back-porch humor, small-town storytelling, and the kind of everyday wisdom that tends to show up around coolers, campfires, barstools, and backyard tables. Each book stands on its own, but together they offer a fuller picture of the characters, memories, humor, and hard-earned observations that shape this corner of James Allen’s Sawdust Sage work.
a collection of short reflections, poems, and stories about the people you know, the places you’ve been, and the moments you didn’t realize you were keeping.
These pieces live in the everyday spaces where life actually happens: around coolers at tailgates, across kitchen tables, on folding chairs pulled a little too close together. They’re about cousins by blood and cousins by circumstance—the friends, regulars, neighbors, and characters who show up often enough to become part of your story whether you planned on it or not.
With humor, honesty, and a sharp eye for detail, James Allen, writing as The Sawdust Sage™, captures small truths about work, aging, memory, loyalty, love, and the quiet absurdities of modern life. Some pieces happened more or less as written. Others absolutely did not. Most live somewhere in between, shaped by memory, exaggeration, and the human instinct to tell a better story than the facts alone might allow.
There’s laughter here, a little grit, and the kind of recognition that makes you pause mid-page and think, Yeah… I know that guy. Or, I’ve been there. Or maybe, That used to be me.
This isn’t a book meant to be rushed. Read it straight through if you want, or pick it up for a few minutes at a time. Read it out of order. Come back later. These are the kinds of stories that wait patiently.
Pull up a chair. Stay as long as you like.
The Origin of Coolers, Cousins & Country Roads
This one grew less from a single idea than from accumulation.
More prose, poems, and stray observations kept showing up that reminded me of growing up, family gatherings, old friends, small-town habits, and the kinds of stories that seem to collect around barrooms, beers, backyard barbecues, dented aluminum coolers, cousins, and keeping it country.
Some pieces came from memory. Others started with a phrase, a character, or a moment that felt familiar enough to belong beside the rest. Eventually it became clear they were all circling the same territory: the people, places, humor, and half-remembered truths that help define where you came from.
So, much like the stories themselves, the collection simply kept growing until it had enough company to become a book.