Melissa Martin

Opinion: Seeing hometown anew both sobering and rousing

In the waning days of Ukraine’s tense summer, a soldier named Yaroslav stepped off a train in Odesa, the historic jewel of Ukraine’s southern coast on the shores of the Black Sea. He’d been granted a...

There was a time, late in the storm of my adolescence, when the dark clouds inside my head and home swirled so thick I struggled just to breathe. By Grade 12, as my mental health collapsed, every day...

In the spring of 2017, when I first learned the Free Press had tapped me to interview former United States president Jimmy Carter, the first thing I did was call my father. Carter was my American dad’...

There is something immensely satisfying in the prospect of beating Toronto. It’s not necessarily just about sport. It’s also about celebrating Winnipeg’s own story.

CHERNEVE, Ukraine — To this day, Darlene Clark remembers what her father, William “Gus” Wasiuta, always said when he was feeding birds in the yard, or shooing a fly out of the house. He’d always shoo,...

In Chornobyl, memories of the 1986 nuclear disaster are intertwined with the present dangers of war. The area is a poignant reminder of resilience amid destruction, a precarious existence shaped by past and present calamities.

Brent DePape, a retired federal government economist, has made multiple trips to war-torn Ukraine to help wherever he

KHARKIV, Ukraine — Luka huddled in the foxhole as the growl of Russian tanks crept closer, their steel tracks chewing at the grassy fields of eastern Ukraine. For over two hours, the 33-year-old Croat...

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Katerina Seledtsova has a six-year-old son, whom she adores, but she also dreams of someday having a daughter. So in 2018, when she opened a bakery and coffee shop on a pretty, t...

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.

In the opening decades of the 20th century, optimism for the bustling Portage strip, and the blocks lined up neatly around it, was overflowing. The City of Winnipeg was growing, booming with new European settlers and new business, signs of the wealth being extracted from the land in a young colonial country, and the promises of more wealth to come.

It’s hard for Pat Ningewance to guess how many times it’s happened, that she’ll be working on a translation and find herself stuck. It’s never easy to translate between tongues, especially two as different as English and Ojibwe; so even Ningewance, a renowned University of Manitoba professor and translator, sometimes comes across a term that leaves her stumped.

On a bitterly cold night in early November, as darkness fell over Winnipeg’s streets, a long line of people shuffled down an Exchange District sidewalk, huddled against whips of thick snow. As they inched forward their voices caught the wind to reveal a notable distinction: for every one person speaking English, about three were speaking Ukrainian.

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…

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.

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…

Vivian Santos is headed back to city hall for her second term as the councillor for Point Douglas. The incumbent comfortably held off challenges from businessman Moe El Tassi and former real estate br...

KYIV — In early April, just three days after Russian troops retreated from the Kyiv region, Yurii Savchuk, general director of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, rounded up a photographer and drove north, into the wreckage of communities that fan out from the capital, still littered then with mines and parts of dead people.

LONDON — Twenty-five days before the death of Queen Elizabeth, I walked to Buckingham Palace on a long layover in London, halfway through a trek between Winnipeg and Ukraine.