ArticlesIssue 73, Fall/Winter 2018/19

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  Fiction

  A complex pairing delves into genetics and identity

  Vancouver-based Keith Maillard has published more than a dozen novels in his long career. His latest, Twin Studies, concerns a brother and sister who claim to be identical twins. What follows is a story about identity, loss, and gender. And twins.

  By Quentin Mills-Fenn     Issue 73, Fall/Winter 2018/19

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  Non-Fiction

  Suffragette’s memoir expands with modern analysis

  Ethel Marie Sentance wrote a memoir for her husband in 1952 and gave it to him as a present for their 40th wedding anniversary that year. But her personal story is reaching far beyond her family.

  By Paula E. Kirman     Issue 73, Fall/Winter 2018/19

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  Motivation for playwrights, comedy for readers

  A debate about pies, an argument about alien abductions, adolescent chess players, and a zombie asking to be remembered: all of these can be found in The Long & Short of It: A selection of short plays written by the Prairie Theatre Exchange Playwrights Unit, a new collection of “Short Shots” written by the Prairie Theatre Exchange Playwrights Unit and edited by Brian Drader, the executive director of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights.

  By Kyla Neufeld     Issue 73, Fall/Winter 2018/19

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  Poetry

  Giving voice to Russia’s last tsarina

  Winnipeg poet Lori Cayer’s latest book focuses on an unlikely subject: the last tsarina of Russia, Alexandra. Mrs Romanov reads like a memoir in verse, from Alix’s marriage to the future tsar, Nicholas, to the birth of her children and her relationship with Rasputin, to the time her world came crashing down.

  By Quentin Mills-Fenn     Issue 73, Fall/Winter 2018/19

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  Young Adult/Children

  Meeting challenges to unity with respect

  Karen Spafford-Fitz has loved books and reading all of her life and she has been writing since she was five years old. Unity Club, her fifth book, is written for middle-grade readers who are 10 to 14 years old.

  By Shirley Byers     Issue 73, Fall/Winter 2018/19

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  Fiction

  Building a novel through “unguarded conversation”

  Eavesdropping. Polite society frowns upon it. Parents raise their kids to not listen in on other people’s conversations. What if a researcher challenged these accepted norms and used the power of eavesdropping in a project to collect these bits of other people’s lives to generate new data on public opinion?

  By Ian Goodwillie     Issue 73, Fall/Winter 2018/19

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  Fiction

  Death and rebirth on the shores of Lake Winnipeg

  An ex-cop with a troubled past. A close-knit lakeside community with close-guarded secrets. The suspicious death of a young woman. These are all the makings of a good noir story, but in W. D. Valgardson’s hands, they combine to become a mythic blend of Icelandic history in Canada and a story of death and rebirth.

  By David Jón Fuller     Issue 73, Fall/Winter 2018/19

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  Fiction

  Triumph and turmoil in a small-town family tale

  “Even as a child, I was attracted to books with characters in turmoil,” author Fran Kimmel says. Now her own fiction involves protagonists with tumultuous lives.

  By Bev Sandell Greenberg     Issue 73, Fall/Winter 2018/19

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  Features

  Visions of accountability, healing through poetry

  In March 2016, Jian Ghomeshi was acquitted of choking and sexual assault charges. Throughout the trial, Halifax-based poet Sue Goyette had been posting on Facebook, expressing her outrage, trying to support her friends.

  By Ariel Gordon     Issue 73, Fall/Winter 2018/19

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  Features

  Rooster Town emerges from the shadows

  With the publication of Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901–1961, authors Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, and Adrian Werner have produced the most comprehensive account to date of the marginal Métis community that occupied the bush terrain of southwest Winnipeg from 1901 to 1961. 

  By Margaret Anne Fehr     Issue 73, Fall/Winter 2018/19