Melissa Martin

This was what Olena Kayinska’s life looked like, in the time before: art, and more art, and more. It was her days in her Lviv studio, painting glimpses of haunting and fantastical worlds. It was nights at galleries, where she soaked in the vibrancy of Ukraine’s thriving contemporary art scene. It seems like another life already. It wasn’t that long ago.

It was supposed to be the most attractive music festival imaginable, but then it didn’t happen. It was supposed to have a pop-up restaurant on the main stage, and six-foot chromed mirror balls dangling over luxurious lounge couches. It was supposed to be, in the words of its own Instagram post, “the…

This was what Olena Kayinska’s life looked like, in the time before: art, and more art, and more. It was her days in her Lviv studio, painting glimpses of haunting and fantastical worlds. It was nights at galleries, where she soaked in the vibrancy of Ukraine’s thriving contemporary art scene. It se…

A few minutes down the road northeast of Ukraine’s capital, along the big highway that leads, if you follow it long enough, to Belarus, from where the first wave of Russian troops came, the busy streets and soaring apartment blocks fall away. What grows in their place is a grassy sort of quie…

These last days of the week are the breath caught, the pause, the interregnum of an exquisitely choreographed public grief.

Within his first week as Twitter’s new owner, billionaire Elon Musk declared that the social media platform was “freed,” shared a link to a baseless conspiracy theory about the man who is accused of attacking Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer and announced that, in the near future, Twitter would…

There’s a phrase that comes up often when the talk turns to veterans of past and passing generations. The father who never really opened up to the daughter; the grandfather who tucked his memories, along with his uniform, away in an attic. Those who came before, honoured in occasional ceremonies but always partly opaque, even to those they loved most.

When the lights went out on Sunday night, I was halfway through a book I’d started that morning, not intending to finish it in one sitting but having been seduced, without my realizing, deep into the story. The book was Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. It’s a special book, a beautiful piece of writing. I…

We don’t always see the outcomes of our stories, but when we do it makes real the connection that otherwise is so hard to wrap our minds around, so hard to imagine beyond the theoretical.

The year opened with beauty, with the gifts of the winter. It opened in sparkling snowdrifts and barren tree branches coated with silver. A wonderland, in which the light of the growing days can play: right now, Manitoba looks like the hopes we hold for each new year. A brightness, a promise, a blank page.