This week’s newsletter is a day late, and disjointed, and I’m sorry. Something changed in the life of someone I care about recently, and it’s temporarily distracted my mental energy. Please don’t worry: I’m happy, I’m safe and, as the saying goes in Ukraine, vse bude dobre, everything will be okay. There will be a time to write this part of the story someday, but that time isn’t now.
Point is, while I adjusted to this change this week, I just didn’t have a coherent piece in me. All I wanted to do was write poetry and process what I was feeling. So instead, I give you a little confetti of odds and ends for this edition; I’ll try to make it up to you with something better in the coming weeks.
When I came back to Ukraine in January, I brought some gifts from home for friends. I wanted something with a distinctly Manitoba flavour, and for my friend Olena, who is both a brilliant artist and one of the most exuberantly fashionable people I know, I found the perfect present: a pair of dangling fuchsia and black earrings from Women Helping Women Beadwork.
That project, as my Free Press colleague Eva Wasney wrote about in December, is a special endeavour. It was founded as a labour of love by Sandra Burling, who gathers beaded jewellery made by Indigenous women incarcerated in Manitoba prisons and sells them online, shipping them across the world and hand-delivering in Winnipeg.
The pieces, as you can see on the Instagram page, are beautiful. All the profits from sales go to the women who made them, which gives them a rare opportunity to earn money for treats from the prison commissary, or to help support their families, or to acquire some savings for when they get out of prison and begin the difficult work of rebuilding their lives. There’s also a key healing component: beading is a meditative act. It is peaceful. And it connects the women who do it to their ancestors and their culture, building a bridge across what was broken by the colonial rupture.
Now, a disruption. Last week, Manitoba Justice suspended access to Women Helping Women Beadwork for the women incarcerated in Headingley Correctional Centre. I learned about it thanks to this TikTok, by a young activist on our Treaty One land.
As I write this, the reasons for the suspensions seem murky. Justice minister Kelvin Goertzen told CBC there were reports that participants were being bullied by other inmates in order to bring in more money. I’m in no position to verify those concerns, though journalists have spoken to women in the program who are heartbroken at its suspension and wish for it to continue; surely, if there were problems, those could be addressed without stealing the opportunity from everyone. Goertzen said there will be a new beading program in the institution, though it’s unclear if that one will still give the artisans access to buyers from all over the world.
Whatever happens with this specific program, the incident highlights something that goes beyond beading. To me, it’s another sign that we need to make profound changes in how we include incarcerated people in the life of the broader community.
As I highlighted in my last big piece for the Free Press before my sabbatical, most people who are incarcerated in Manitoba are survivors of staggering trauma. This isn’t breaking news by any means, but there still seems to be a public reluctance to fully accept what responding to that trauma must require, in order to pave the way towards healthier and safer communities for everyone in them.
Let me put this another way.
Manitobans care about those among us who suffer, especially the children. When Phoenix Sinclair was murdered, there was immense public grief and horror at the abuse that little girl had endured, and how the systems tasked with protection had failed her. Many people wept for Phoenix. There were many compassionate words written and spoken about the life that child deserved to have lived.
Yet most children subject to these abuses don’t die. They don’t enter the headlines as someone we grieve for. They survive, they grow up, and with each passing year their trauma is compounded. A little girl, abused and surrounded only by suffering adults with addictions, becomes a teen who is sexually exploited, and then one who numbs her own pain with addiction. The cycle usually continues, unless massive communal care and resources are mustered to break it.
But at some point in the life of a person born into that cycle, how the public perceives them changes. If their traumas become visible, they’re met mostly with disgust. And if in the course of that struggle, they get tangled with the justice system? Get them outta here, lock them up, we don’t want them.
To me, it’s always seemed fairly simple: if we would weep for a child who had known nothing but pain, a child that had grown up surrounded by violence and poverty and addiction, then we must extend the same compassion to the adults some of them will become. And that describes most people in Manitoba prisons.
Of course we’re scared of crime. It’s harmful. But the vast majority of people in prison are not bad people; they are incredibly wounded people, who have survived things that most of us cannot imagine. If you want people to heal and not enact these traumas on others, then you need to make sure that they are not so discarded.
So: people who are incarcerated need and deserve healthy points of connection to the city and province. They need opportunities to be engaged with the world, to find and express their gifts, and to do meaningful work for fair pay. They need to be welcomed and included in our broader community. Women Helping Women Beadwork gives one avenue for that connection; we need many more, and while problems may arise in the building, that shouldn’t result in them being yanked away.
On that note: Writer’s Block Winnipeg is looking for 75 people to be pen pals for incarcerated people in Manitoba. There’s a sign-up form here. If I weren’t on the other side of the planet, I’d definitely be doing it.
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Today feels heavy. My community here is in mourning. A moment of your time.
Not long ago, my friend Tom texted to invite me out for a drink with a journalist I’d never met: Arman Soldin, the head of video journalism in Ukraine for France’s AFP. After remembering that friends had mentioned Arman with high praise, I wanted to meet him; but I’d just finished a long day of errands, so I decided to stay home.
I regret that decision now.
On Monday, Arman was killed in a rocket attack while reporting in Chasiv Yar, a town in Eastern Ukraine, close to the hellfire combat in Bakhmut.
Most of my friends here knew Arman well, and adored him. They had gone with him to the most dangerous parts of Ukraine, they’d decompressed with him after they got out, they’d shared constant logistical and emotional and moral support. They’d smiled when he saved a wounded hedgehog and nursed it back to health; everyone who knew Arman said he was a kind person, with an ebullient spirit. I wish I had met him.
Every day, good people are killed in Ukraine. Good people, smart people, people who have much to offer the world. If I may say something delicate, I do not think, in these grim calculations, that foreign reporters ought be a primary concern: those who work near the front are there by choice. They know and accept the risk, and always have an option to leave. Many lives destroyed in this war did not have that privilege.
Still, Arman died because he believed in something. He believed in the work, and that documenting the stories of war was worth endangering his own life. And it’s hard for journalists to lose one of our peers in the field, whether we knew them or not, but all we can do is let their loss affirm the value of what we do.
If you will, please hold a thought today. Not even specifically for Arman, but for what he believed: for journalism. For those who make themselves a conduit through which all can bear witness, even if that means going to places few of us would choose to be.
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When I was a little girl, I often asked my father why he moved to Canada from where he was born and began his academic career, in the United States. He had a number of reasons, but often came back to one vivid memory.
One night in the late 1960s, when he was a new professor — I forget if it was his first job in Chicago, or his second one in Iowa — he was at a dinner party with the faculty of his psychology department. After dinner, as they were chatting, the talk turned to guns: buying them, firing them, the relative merits of one gun over another.
My father, uncomfortable, piped up with a question: “Who all here owns a gun?” As he recalled, his was the only hand that didn’t shoot up.
He realized then, he told me, that there was a pervasive sickness in American culture, forged by fear and violence and a stubborn insistence that the only way to respond to the first, is to wield a greater threat of the latter. It frightened him, he would tell me, and also gave him a sense of dread about where that tendency was leading. He didn’t want to raise his children in that environment, so when he was soon offered a job in Canada, he took it.
This week, in the aftermath of yet another grotesque mass shooting — this one in Texas, where a neo-Nazi armed with eight legally-purchased firearms slaughtered eight people at a mall — an FBI public service announcement video about how to increase your chances of surviving such an attack surfaced on Twitter. It’s unclear when it was produced, but its production values are high; it’s gripping and hard to watch. It’s also not the only one of its kind: students in the U.S. are shown similar instructional videos.
When I watched the video, all I could think was how it is the natural product of a deeply sick culture. I mean sure, it’s good to tell folks to take notice of emergency exits and put pressure on gushing bullet wounds. But this sort of thing is the only response to mass shootings in America now, and that’s what’s disturbing. This, or making it mandatory to teach children how to apply tourniquets, I guess.
To quote a Tweet I saw but failed to save: this is what surrender looks like.
My dad was a very wise man. It’s what made him such a good therapist: he could see where things weren’t healthy. I don’t know what it will take for the United States to cure the sickness that accepts slaughtered children as a fair price for comparatively unhindered civilian access to wildly destructive weapons, but my dad knew it would never come in his lifetime. I don’t hold much hope it will in mine either.
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I wrote this after the missile attack in Uman last week that demolished an apartment building and killed 23 people, including six children. I wrote it, while thinking about how I’d somehow slept through the noise of several recent aerial attacks on Kyiv. (Air defence in the capital has been outstanding lately; almost everything was shot down.)
It’s been sad to observe how these regular attacks on civilians in Ukraine have slipped from international headlines, though it’s not surprising. There’s more suffering in the world than there is space to give all of it enough attention. So it goes.
What I’m Reading
The Road Expansion Lobby Doesn’t Want You To Read This. A scathing blog post breaking down the proposed Route 90 expansion; Winnipeggers should read it.
This compassionate, diligent and carefully crafted piece from AP hit me like a punch to the gut. Reporters spent months uncovering the identities of men found dead in a boat in the Caribbean, a journey that took them to the other side of the ocean and also gave hurting families long-awaited closure.
In the Globe and Mail, Mark Kingwell delivers very clear-eyed reflections on a life of heavy drinking, and what it has cost him.
The Mother Who Changed: A Story of Dementia. An impeccably reported and thought-provoking piece that tackles a very nuanced question: if someone goes through cognitive decline, how do we decide which version of their wishes for their life should take precedence?
Okay, that’s enough heavy stuff, so here’s something fun: for decades, Jeopardy aficionados searched for five early episodes that had been fully purged from the show’s history, after a mysterious scandal about the winner. Now, the lost tapes have been found, and that winner has, for the first time, told her story.
One Photo, One Story
My friend Kris got back to Kyiv last week, after several weeks out doing journalism in the east and south of Ukraine. We went for a long walk through the city on a radiantly warm day, wandering the parks perched high above the Dnipro riverbank, periodically pausing to savour the best views.
I was missing someone that day, and today, and will miss them for many days in the future. It’s okay to miss someone, though it’s very hard, especially when there is no way to know how long the missing will go on, no way to say “see you next week” or “see you next month.” All you can do is accept that the missing is now a part of the geography of your heart. It’s okay, but it takes some adjustment.
We were talking about that, Kris and I. Not about the missing as such, but about the person I miss, and why. We had stopped for a long while in the shade thrown by the trees, close to a gazebo where couples were surreptitiously kissing. I squatted down on my heels to rest my legs, and stared at the stone path at my feet.
There, a shimmer of crimson caught my attention: a red confetti heart, scattered by the wind after someone else’s gift or celebration. It looked so pretty, just a splash of colour in a comforting shape, all alone on the ground.
I don’t literally believe that the universe alters the physical world to send a message. We put our own meaning in things. We notice mostly what’s relevant to how we are feeling. But as I took a photo of the heart, it sure felt like a reminder that every bit of care we give to each other goes on. It can be lost and carried off on the wind to land somewhere very far, but it’s still out there, shining and waiting to be found.
So in the spirit of this photo, I have a mission for you, if you choose to accept it: go for a walk this week, with a clear mind, and see what little things find you. See what they have to say — or rather, what they inspire you to say to yourself.