A
Storied Winnipeg: Fables and Local Legends
The stories
of Winnipeg are as varied as the city itself. Caught in the middle
of the continent by the amber of its past glory and its current
penury, Winnipeg occupies a rare and beautiful place in the Canadian
landscape. It is a city that parades its ridiculous wealth past
desperate poverty on their way to the concert hall for the ballet
even as bodies are pulled from the Red River next to where the
human rights museum tells its stories. Winnipeg is defined by
its main road, which merely circles the city, and its tottering
buildings sitting on pylons driven deep into the mud of the ancient
lakebed. The principal streets crook across the flat prairie following
the ancient whims of cattle and the people maintain their lives
as heedless as ants in the grain without the worry of anthill
maintenance. 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 slowly orbited
by the suburbs which gain speed so they are not pulled into the
event horizon that is the downtown where light does not escape.
This collection would probe that black hole, 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, like unsettled commuters 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 Tuxedo mansions, wheelers and dealers in the real-estate trade,
ghostly presences who understand something special about the city,
love stories with strange Winnipeg twists, and tales of escape
only to return.
We cannot
just drive away, but we can be absorbed into a horizon, lose ourselves
in an ad, or disappear into the forest and shelterbelts on the
outskirts. Some features of the city are recognizable. The sizeable
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 to ourselves-that
something strange is happening in this city. There is a vortex
that draws us, some lodestone against which we feel ungovernable
attraction and a wary repulsion.
This collection
is about that tension, the taut grasp and thrust that is the largest
city in Manitoba, its nodes of the two universities, its religious
fanatics who write angry Jesus 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.
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