Latest news with #ArielGordon
Winnipeg Free Press
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
What's up: Red River Ex, Wild & Wonderful Words, Ukrainian festival, VVonder, Grad Walk 2025
NIC ADAM / FREE PRESS files Of course you want to go faster. The Red River Ex opens Friday and runs for 10 days.. NIC ADAM / FREE PRESS files Of course you want to go faster. The Red River Ex opens Friday and runs for 10 days.. Tickets $10-18; ride-all-day wristbands $60 at Hold on to your hats, it's that time of year again! The annual June fair is back with carnival rides and games galore, as well as a plethora of food trucks slinging all manner of fairground faves. Fill your tum with Philly cheese steaks, ice-cream tacos, fried pop tarts, Flamin' Hot Cheeto pickle pizzas, caramel apple nachos, barbecued meats, pickle fries and grape jelly-glazed crispy chicken served in a waffle cone. Kickoff is at 5 p.m. Friday with activities taking place at Kiddie-Land, Kids' Stage and the free Family Fun Zone. If you're there for the music, the first band on the Central Park Stage, Motley Crue tribute act Looks That Kill, start at 5:30 p.m. while Red Barn Stage's music starts 15 minutes later as You and What Army play a 45-minute set. A full day of begins on Saturday when gates open at noon. Head straight for the rides, but remember to snag a spot before the Caribbean Day parade starts at 3 p.m. near Central Park Stage. And mark your calendars if you're looking for savings — there is free gate admission for one hour only from noon to 1 p.m on Sunday. Festivities continue throughout the week with different themes running each day until the fair wraps up on June 22. Check for more information and updates. — AV Kitching Local authors will convene at Sookram's Brewing Co. (479-B Warsaw Ave.) on Wednesday as part of the fourth Wild & Wonderful Words reading event. Mike Deal / Free Press files Have a drink and listen to Ariel Gordon read Wednesday at Sookram's. Mike Deal / Free Press files Have a drink and listen to Ariel Gordon read Wednesday at Sookram's. Hosted again by creator and local author Sheldon Birnie (Where the Pavement Turns to Sand), the event will feature a pair of established writers and a couple of up-and-coming authors. In the former category is Winnipeg's Ariel Gordon — author of essay collections Fungal and Treed as well as volumes of poetry (Stowaways, Siteseeing) — and Mitchell Toews, author of the short-story collection Pinching Zwieback. The pair will be joined by writer/musician Antonio Marrazas Luna and Zoë Mills. After Wednesday's event, the series takes the summer off before returning in the fall. The event is free and all ages; in addition to serving up all kinds of beer, Sookram's also offers non-alcoholic options. — Ben Sigurdson Eva Wasney / Winnipeg Free Press files Pick up some perogies at the Ukrainian Village Festival this weekend. Eva Wasney / Winnipeg Free Press files Pick up some perogies at the Ukrainian Village Festival this weekend. Budmo! Winnipeg's inaugural Ukrainian Village Festival is bringing the spirit of Ukraine to The Forks this weekend with three days of community, connection and culture. Enjoy family-friendly activities, live music, dance performances and interactive workshops at CN Field. And definitely go hungry: baba-approved homemade borscht, perogies, deruny (potato pancakes) and cabbage rolls will be on offer, as well as a variety of traditional Ukrainian drinks such as medovukha, a honey-based alcoholic beverage, uzvar, a non-alcoholic compote-style winter punch, and kvas, a sweet-sour ale. — Jen Zoratti Supplied VVonder releases its new album Friday at Blue Note Park. Supplied VVonder releases its new album Friday at Blue Note Park. Give VVonder three minutes of listening time, and the Winnipeg quartet is bound to fill it with perfectly crafted catchiness. Led by the acrobatic vocals of Micah Braun, with groove-ready harmonies by Steve Martens, Joey Penner and Nate Sheridan, VVonder — prefixed by two Vs but pronounced with a single W — has spent the last three years finishing its followup to 2022's Now and Again, a squeaky clean jangle-pop time capsule about the messiness of living. Free Press reviewer John Kendle called the band's sound a perfect distillation of upbeat indie rock and melodic psychedelia, name-dropping both the Beatles and ELO. Those comparisons aren't overblown, but VVonder has still flown under the national radar. Could that change with Stumble On, a sophomore record whose name gives a directive for unexpected discovery? Based on the strength of lead tracks Don't Turn Around, Dr. Says, Shanana, My Choice and Invisible Man, it's safe to assume VVonder has added a dozen timeless tunes to its catalogue, and one can hope a much-deserved breakthrough is around the corner. See what all the fuss is about Friday at the Blue Note, where VVonder will be supported by openers Juvel and the Full Benefits. — Ben Waldman What started as a pandemic work-around has become a North End tradition. Students, family, friends and civic-minded Winnipeggers are invited to get together today for the North End Grad Walk, a neighbourhood celebration of local high school grads. Kicking off at St. John's High School and wrapping up at R.B. Russell, where a community barbecue and party await, walkers will stop along the way at the Bell Tower and Children of the Earth. 'One year the mayor, Scott Gillingham, came out and served hot dogs to the students and community,' writes organizer Michael Champagne on his blog. 'But most important of all the guests, were the smiling parents, the neighbours and, of course, the graduates themselves.' The loud, proud celebration includes an award portion, with $500 memorial bursaries going to two students, one from R.B. Russell and one from St. John's. — Conrad Sweatman
Winnipeg Free Press
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Spore to love at Free Press book club with virtual meeting, forest walk
The Free Press Book Club and McNally Robinson Booksellers are pleased to welcome back Winnipeg author (and Free Press copy editor) Ariel Gordon for the next virtual meeting on Tuesday, May 27 at 7 p.m. to read from and discuss her essay collection Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest. Gordon is a poet and author whose latest collection of essays, published in 2024 by Wolsak and Wynn, follows 2019's Treed: Walking in Canada's Urban Forests. Her most recent poetry collection is 2023's Siteseeing, a collaborative work with Saskatchewan's Brenda Schmidt. For those with a curiosity about which mushrooms can be found in Manitoba and where, Fungal will lead you down the right path, as it were. But Gordon also explores broader, more complex ideas of ecosystems in nature and life, and how mushrooms can act as metaphors for — and be catalysts to — building community and testing boundaries, among other things. MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS FILES Ariel Gordon MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS FILES Ariel Gordon Gordon also offers readers a personal glimpse into her life as a woman and mom of one teen (now adult) daughter; in Fungal mushrooms act as a through line, seamlessly tying the stories together like clusters of fungi that pop up on boulevards and trees throughout the city (mushrooms are an omnipresent being tying all the stories together seamlessly). From the sloppy back roads of a rain-slogged rural Manitoba and the familiar territory of Assiniboine Forest, to working at a mushroom farm and 'mudlarking' along the banks of the Red River, Fungal is an example of what treasures can be found if you just take the time to look for them. In his review of Fungal for the Free Press, Jarett Myskiw called the book 'a satisfying, invigorating read,' adding 'This is a work thoroughly located in both time and place… Gordon's enthusiasm is infectious.' Gordon will join Free Press Arts & Life editor Jill Wilson, McNally Robinson Booksellers event coordinator John Toews and Free Press audience engagement manager Erin Lebar to read from Fungal, discuss the book and field questions from viewers and readers. Fungal Fungal Copies of Fungal are available to purchase at McNally Robinson Booksellers; there's no cost to join the book club or virtual discussion. Video of the meeting will be available for replay on the Free Press YouTube channel following the event. In addition to the virtual meeting, this month the Free Press Book Club is offering a free in-person event for members on Thursday, May 29. Gordon will lead an urban forest walk with some forest bathing components, talk about foraging for mushrooms and provide information on best practices. The event is currently full; those interested in joining a waiting list or receiving more information can sign up for free at bookclub.
Winnipeg Free Press
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Stanzas for SPRING
This year's National Poetry Month marks the 10th anniversary of Writes of Spring, an annual gathering of poems edited by Ariel Gordon and, this year, Charlene Diehl, director of Plume Winnipeg. Of the 500-plus poems submitted, Gordon and Diehl selected 13 from established and emerging Winnipeg poets, including Rosanna Deerchild, the only returning writer of the group, Marjorie Poor, Spenser Smith and others, which can be found in the 49.8 section of today's Free Press. (Pages F2 through F4 in the print edition.) A reading to launch and celebrate these poems will take place at McNally Robinson Booksellers' Grant Park location at 2 p.m. on Sunday. Re:Wild Her ● ● ● Rewilding, an intervention into the natural world to restore ecosystems, is the structuring conceit in Shannon Webb-Campbell's latest collection, Re:Wild Her (Book*Hug, 112 pages, $23). These poems follow the speaker from Iceland to France to California through art, tarot and deep time, gathering tenderness and claiming pleasure and expansiveness. The collection is propelled by a subtle, incantatory rhythm that evokes the ebb and flow of the tide: 'Water rushes over cracked earth/ you retrace tides through clay/ grounding mud with reversing rhythms/ (… .)// what flows in/ must flow out.' In How Do I Reach for the Wild/ (Three Graces), Webb-Campbell uses the life cycle of a girl, woman, crone to trace a process of reclaiming a self that's been worn away. The poem moves from a position of alienation from the world and the self — 'how do I reach for the wild?/ circle the womb/ how can I grasp the wind?/ motherlines ring a cosmic spin' — toward reconnection: 'become a fish-woman/ emerge from the water's offering/ after a trinity of swims all in one day/ baptism by sea.' Buy on Myth ● ● ● Terese Mason Pierre's much-anticipated debut, Myth (House of Anansi, 120 pages, $23), is a startling, transformative collection. Using a series of speculative logics and images, Pierre transcends the boundaries between earth, ocean and cosmos and past and future. In Momentum, the speaker considers the conditions of belongingness: 'My family takes a second helping of love —/ my father, from the church parking lot.' From this opening, Pierre weaves images that create friction between the speaker's family and true belonging before she invokes a myth to change the story: 'I draft// a new mythology, of sand and shells/ and touching every other creature// that has breathed an air of full faith/ beyond a warped chain —// a taught beld, the scuttling of crabs/ underfoot, the rising tithes.' Here, Pierre's intricate use of line and language shine. She ties this new mythology of water and interconnection to the opening image of the church parking lot with 'the rising tithes,' which at the same time calls back the strictures of religious rules — and, with its phrasing and near-rhyme, evokes the ocean. These poems enact a myriad of small and monumental shifts away from disconnection and injustice into a web of belonging and justice. In Aliens Visit the Islands, Pierre envisions a possible future that centres and celebrates Black people, as well as an ideal model of cultural exchange: 'they give us teleportation (the key is to ignore/ philosophy when you push the button) and we/ give them white sand, yellow roti, a container/ of sorrel.' While the background of this poem is the meeting of two cultures, the poem ends with a several-lines-long meditation on grief and longing, which is rooted in the Aliens' physical difficulty inhabiting the world: 'When they leave, they promise/ to tell their people Earth was warm, was Black,/ and cradles its pain in the sea.' Unmet Buy on ● ● ● In Unmet (Biblioasis, 124 pages, $22), stephanie roberts uses surrealism and ekphrastic poems to explore the way one's imagination shapes one's experience of the world. The poems in this collection demonstrate a vivid use of image and a versatile use of line and technique. In the first of four poems titled Unmet, roberts conjures Marilyn Monroe as a child, who 'during services (…) sat/ on her hands, bit her lip, & for a minute,/ forced a smaller self against the world.' Here, the past and the spiritual world are made concrete with a visceral bodily sensation, of an addressee for whom 'silence stiffens your neck,' of a girl whose adult self will become iconic forcing 'a smaller self against the world.' In Einige Kreise (Several Circles), an ekphrastic poem responding to Wassily Kandinsky's painting of the same title, roberts explores the relation between viewing a painting and painting it. The poem opens and closes with the same image pattern. In the opening, the speaker imagines cold, and in the closing stanza, after the speaker has moved backward and forward in time, 'the imagination's ouroboros' returns to cold and 'Love waits at the end of line;/ mind seizes line, draws it/ end to end, kisses it to canvas.' Elegy for Opportunity Buy on ● ● ● Natalie Lim's debut, Elegy for Opportunity (Wolsak & Wynn, 96 pages, $20), opens with an argument against writing to feed the voyeuristic hunger for trauma: 'what if I'm done with diasporic trauma. done imagining what people want to read,' she writes. What follows is a dynamic collection, lively and moving with curiosity. During Elections Get campaign news, insight, analysis and commentary delivered to your inbox during Canada's 2025 election. In On Biology, the speaker considers the way the pandemic altered their relation to the world and their bodily experience. Notably, the speaker does not look away from the ways in which they are made helpless in the face of overwhelming conditions: 'gotten bored/ and felt guilty about it, because what a privilege it is/ to be bored instead of desperate or sick. I try to do/ the small things I can, for myself and the world —/ go on walks, sign petitions, take baths, donate./ all of it feels like failure.' The collection is anchored by five elegies for the NASA Opportunity Rover. In the last of these, which closes the collection, 'things are bad right now./ really bad.// the world feels unrepairable.' Here, the short, end-stopped lines weigh the poem down — for good reason, because, as in On Biology, the problems Lim faces aren't solvable with individual action, whatever good intentions fuel them: 'unchecked greed and exploitation./ heat domes and cold snaps./ bombs, disease, starvation, genocide —/ 40,000 dead in Gaza.// 40,000.' The strength of these poems lies in their clear-sightedness and their bravery. Time and again, Lim faces devastation in the same way she continues to address the dead rover, the same way she continues to imagine a future, persistently, curiously, lovingly: 'I would love that kid so much,/ like no one has ever loved a kid before,' she says of the question of motherhood, 'and it wouldn't be enough/ but I would try, I would try so hard.' Buy on Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.
