Once and Forever Winnipegger
by Ariel Gordon
For years, the joke was that there were more Winnipeggers in Calgary and Toronto and Vancouver than in Winnipeg.
For years, if you were smart and ambitious – oh wait, if you had MONEY and were smart and ambitious – you left. But I always thought that was bupkis.*
I grew up in an English suburb on the banks of the Red River that had once been a district of French market gardens feeding the city. I attended a French immersion high school with Anglos and third-generation Franco-Manitobans. I wore a Métis ceinture fléchée and leg wrestled during Festival du Voyageur and listened to my French teachers talk about the betrayals of English Canada.
I grew up with people asking if I was Mennonite and my sisters if they were Métis. Because those are the Winnipeg phenotypes, besides Indigenous, besides Jewish, Ukrainian and Filipino. My parents bought big bags of frozen perogies and fresh loaves of “Winnipeg rye” bread and my favourite way to spend my allowance was 7-Eleven Slurpees.
I loved Winnipeg but I left too, even though I didn’t get it quite right. I went to an even smaller place, Halifax, for journalism, oatcakes and cheap supermarket mussels. (When I told people I was “going out east” for school, they said, “Oh, Toronto? Montreal?” I think I wanted to fall off the edge of my friends’/family’s understanding of the world.) Then I went to South Korea, a megalopolis of fourteen million people, to teach ESL. I lived on the outskirts, in a neighbourhood that acted like a village, and took the subway to the U.S. army base–adjacent foreigners’ district when I needed wildness and/or Indian buffet.
I came home for my father’s second marriage and my plan was to go teach English, to put together a manuscript of poetry while teaching, somewhere else in Asia. But then, like a cliché, I met someone at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. It turned out, I already knew all of his friends. It turned out, we’d attended the same preschool daycare – he jokes I was that one girl who pulled his pants down, but that’s a malicious lie – and both worked in the student press while at uni.
At the folk fest, he walked around with a bag of ice on his Tilley hat and went and got me cherries when I saw someone walking around with cherries and COVETED their cherries.
Six months later, we moved in together. And we’re still together, twenty-five years later, still walking under the trees, looking for mushrooms.
In that time, I became a writer – not only that, I became a Winnipeg / Treaty 1 territory writer. I’ve had six books of poetry and Canadian nonfiction published, countless broadsides, chapbooks and weirdo projects like Writes of Spring, where I somehow persuaded the Free Press to run poems in the newspaper every year.
In that time, I learned that the writing and publishing community here, in French and in English, is as deep and wide as our rivers. I love being in community, in this community, and I’m committed to making it stronger and more diverse any chance I get.
And now? Winnipeg’s textures – its limestone buildings, its humid summers and killing winters, its 1919 General Strike, its fading canopy of elm trees with cankerworms hanging from them, its Portage and Main round dances, its arts communities, its Canada geese, nesting in garden boxes/parking lots and READY to fight you, its independent bookstores – are the only ones that make sense to me.
Now, I love seeing strong Métis women wearing ceintures fléchées and I’m proud to say that I’m from the homeland of the Métis nation. I love seeing the books and art, music and theatre coming out from my Cree and Anishinaabe colleagues. I’m proud that the Free Press has one of the last remaining books sections. I love that gynecologist Jennifer Gunter’s response to criticism from the wellness community was “Bitch, I’m from Winnipeg,” like that was supposed to mean something. I love our history of angsty Mennonite lit and the support of the Mennonite community for those writers. I love that Louis Riel, not Alfred Boyd, is considered the first premier of Manitoba. I love that anyone who lives here for more than three weeks is forever more considered a Winnipegger.
But people still think it’s okay to walk up to me, while I’m somewhere else touring a book, to say, “Anything to get out of Winnipeg, eh?”
I always have to tamp down the desire to bite them. But then I smile, because I know those people will never move to Winnipeg. I will never see them on walks in Assiniboine Forest or on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, at standing-room-only readings at McNally’s or on the steps of the Ledge, all of us up to our knees on this floodplain, all of us troublemakers and quibblers. They will never really get in my way.
*The day this was posted, my writer-friend Anna Leventhal reached out to let me know that I was using bupkis wrong. She pointed out that it translates to "nothing/peanuts," whereas she thought I meant mishigas, which means "craziness/nonsense" or even bobe-meyse which is "nonsense/an old wives' tale." So I stand corrected, but I wanted to share Anna's example sentence, which for me was the best part of the exchange: "I like being a writer, but the pay is bupkis."
Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 Territory–based writer, editor and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Her previous work of nonfiction, Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests, was shortlisted for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award. Gordon’s essay “Red River Mudlark” was second-place winner of the 2022 Kloppenburg Hybrid Grain Contest in Grain magazine and other work appeared recently in FreeFall, Columba Poetry, Canthius and Canadian Notes & Queries. Gordon’s fourth collection of poetry, Siteseeing: Writing nature & climate across the prairies, was written in collaboration with Saskatchewan poet Brenda Schmidt and appeared in fall 2023.
