Melissa Martin

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.

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...

HORENKA, Ukraine — When the war came to Horenka, a quiet village on the outskirts of Kyiv, Nataliya Sheynich fled her home, but she didn’t go far. For 20 days, she lived in a basement in a neighbourin...

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.

The news that dominated this week was about Indigenous women’s bodies, languishing in places where bodies shouldn’t be. A landfill. A bus shelter. At least three of their lives were stolen through violence, though whatever pushed the fourth to find refuge under a pile of blankets on a -22 C night could be called violence of a different kind.

Of all the many ways I’m a bad Winnipegger, being a latecomer to KUB bread is one. It’s not my fault; I didn’t grow up with rye. My parents were WASPy immigrants from the American Midwest who never quite picked up on the city’s more insular culinary traditions; when I was a kid, all the loaves in our house were white.