I am working on a collection of my stories about Winnipeg 
and this is the description of the text: the stories of Winnipeg are as varied as the city is itself. Caught in the middle of the continent by the amber that is its past glory and its current penury, Winnipeg occupies a rare and beautiful place in the Canadian landscape. It is a city of ridiculous wealth paraded past desperate poverty on its way to the concert hall for the ballet, even as bodies are pulled from the Red River on the banks where the human rights museum tells its stories. Winnipeg is defined by its main road, which only circles the city, and its tottering buildings sitting on pylons driven deep into the mud of the old lake bed. People in the city carry on their lives as heedless as ants in the hill, although with much less concern about maintaining the city. Even as the hundred feet of water tremulously asserts its Lake Agassiz presence 
over our heads, we pretend the lake will not return, and that here on the mud we are as safe as though the city were built on rock.
Many Winnipeg stories feature the city as a distant black hole which the suburbs orbit slowly, gaining speed so as not to get pulled into the event horizon that is the downtown where light does not escape. This collection would probe that black hole itself, would wander the frigid streets and stand over the odoriferous steaming grills, in order to see how the modern city dweller commutes in the core, lives in apartment buildings built on mud, and works in the far flung reaches of strange industrial parks where a grey moonscape competes with the grey sky for the viewer’s reluctant attention.
Interspersed in the collection, just as the unsettled commuters are on the buses that ply the unploughed streets, are the Mutes and Norms newsletters, which detail either the deterioration of a person’s mind or some vast city-wide conspiracy. There are also tales of live-in maids in mansions in Tuxedo, wheelers and dealers in the real-estate trade, people who may or may not exist or understand something special about the city, love stories with strange Winnipeg twists, and a few stories in which Winnipeg people escape.
We cannot just drive away, but we can be absorbed into a horizon, lose ourselves in an ad, or disappear into the forest and shelter-belts on the outskirts. Some features of the city are recognizable. The sizable immigrant population, the thousands of dead end jobs and half empty buses with their redolent reminders of those who have ridden them, and the sense—which we are even reluctant to admit even to ourselves—that something strange is happening in this city, some vortex that draws us in, some lode stone against which we feel ungovernable attraction and a wary repulsion.
This collection is about that tension, the taut pull and push that is the city in Manitoba, its nodes of the two universities, the religious fanatics who write Jesus angrily in the snow and on dirty windows, the many crushed faces of its poor, the backroom dealings that give rise to shoddy infrastructure and corrupt city council. A city of extremes, Winnipeg is only slowly coming into words, and those words are abrupt and sprawling, glittering and soiled, ecstatic and forlorn.
