Jill Wilson

Martha Wainwright has one of the most expressive, distinctive voices in the pop music pantheon. In it you can hear echoes of her famous parents, the performers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, and hints of her brother, Rufus, the crooner, but its beauty has an unpolished aspect all its own, one that can surprise with its raw…

It starts the way so many gatherings do these days: with a spinning wheel on a computer screen. Eventually the Wi‑Fi connection picks up again, the video stream resumes, and the comments section starts to fill with greetings from almost a hundred regular live viewers, checking in from Winnipeg and rural Manitoba, and as far away as…

In 1993, when I was twenty-one, several of my friends and I appeared on the front page of the arts and life section of the Winnipeg Free Press. Wearing our army boots and band T‑shirts, we were illustrating a story on Generation X, the cohort born between roughly 1965 and 1980. The lighthearted…

There’s a bas-relief portrait of Joe Zuken on a plaque outside the exercise studio in the Wellness Institute, a rehabilitation-­fitness centre attached to the Seven Oaks General Hospital in the north Winnipeg neighbourhood of Garden City. The bespectacled face of the lawyer, long-time school trustee, and city councillor — the longest-­serving Communist Party politician in North America — is a reminder of his commitment to strengthening his community by empowering all its…