The small town is a haven in an unruly world. There is much reassurance in the familiar. Shirley at the post office knows everybody's name. Bingo is every Wednesday night at the Legion. The community pulls together unquestioningly for funerals, fires and parades. A small town sets the parameters for personal successes and takes the blame for failures. Hot Town and Other Stories is a book about people who exchange their high expectations for belonging. Small town people are loyal and resilient, with histories steeped in both tradition and subversion. They tolerate disappointment well, while a betrayal is never forgotten. Memory is the foundation of the small town, accurate or not. And memory runs deep, deeper than the abandoned gravel pit north of the tracks. AUTHOR: Janet Trull is a freelance writer with a regular column in the Haliburton County Echo. Her personal essays, professional writing in the education field, and short stories have appeared in The Globe and Mail, Canadian Living Magazine, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly and subTerrain Magazine, among others. She won the CBC Canada Writes challenge, Close Encounters with Science, in 2013 and was nominated for a Western Magazine Award in the short fiction category in 2014. Trull resides in Ancaster, Ontario were she continues to observe the seemingly small town trivialities. Hot Town and other stories is her debut short story collection.