Wisened wit

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/09/2022 (1441 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Ben Sures lived in the city in the 1990s, he was a student at the University of Mitch Podolak.

Classes were in session at the West End Cultural Centre, which Podolak helped found in 1987 with with his wife, Ava Kobrinsky. Summer school meant volunteering at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, another Podolak creation.

Sures became a frequent opening act at the West End for touring performers early in his career and launched his debut album, No Absolutes, at the repurposed church at the corner of Ellice Avenue and Sherbrook Street in 1994.

“You either saw me playing there or you saw me cleaning up there,” Sures says. “I’ve vacuumed the floor thousands of times.”

Sures, who now lives in Edmonton, will have no janitorial duties tonight. Instead, he’s the headliner as he returns to his old stomping grounds for a concert that will showcase songs from his latest album, The Story That Lived Here, which is dedicated to Podolak (who died in 2019), among others.

“Mitch didn’t like junk mail and one time, he phoned, maybe it was a pizza place or something, and he threatened, ‘If you don’t come get your garbage, I’m gonna bring my garbage to you,’ and I’m pretty sure he did.” Sures remembers.

“Because of his convictions, he’s one of the most significant contributors of the culture of Winnipeg and Canada. He’s the guy that designed big folk festivals in Canada. He made the template.”

During his time performing in Winnipeg, Sures gained a following for his witty lyrics and stories. The Story That Lived Here, which came out in January, continues in that vein — “In case this is the end of the world, I’m gonna have a cinnamon bun,” he sings in the album opener, End of the World — although he says his wry outlook has mellowed over the years.

“I was very black and white, super funny or super grim, and nothing in between,” Sures, 55, says of his early musical days.

“I’ve always loved those kind of songs that are meaningful, but you’re not taking yourself too seriously, but also you still have some dignity… I’ve been trying all my life to merge all that stuff.”

That approach shows many times in The Story that Lived Here, especially on two songs on the record, Father’s Shoes and the title track, which are about his father, ceramic artist Jack Sures, who was 83 when he died in 2018.

The elder Sures was born in Brandon and had a studio in Winnipeg but eventually settled in Regina, where he established the ceramics department at the University of Regina and later became its artist-in-residence. He received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art shortly before his death.

In Father’s Shoes — “he left neon green and blue shoes no one could fill,” — Ben Sures paints a picture of what his father was like: a lover of Chinese food who was careful with his words but who was there to lend a hand to his family and to students when it was needed.

“There are certain people in the world that never sit still,” Sures says. “Until his last six weeks he did everything he wanted to do. He was golfing and curling and cooking and working.”

Sures recorded the album on Vancouver Island during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the isolation it caused led to End of the World. While the song’s title has an apocalyptic tone, Sures punctures it with his own view.

“I’d just want some creature comforts or some human connection. There’s a whole verse about not being able to touch so I have a crash-test dummy to practise dancing with.”

Life and death are themes that revolve around many of the songs on Sures’s record, none more so than No One Will Remember You. It’s definitely not a song for those who focus on building a legacy that will live on after they’re gone.

“Sometimes we get caught up on the stuff we haven’t done, and we forget the stuff we have done. All the stuff we do in our life is what feeds us, it makes us who we are,” he says.

“It doesn’t matter if anybody remembers you. No one’s ever going to know the work you put in, but the work is for you.”

His love of libraries, especially one in Regina when he was a youngster, led to the song Library Ladies, which has a lyric, “The keepers of secrets, the job of giving them away,” that reveals Sures’s high regard for librarians.

“There’s no bitter agenda when you’re a librarian, other than to feed and nurture and inform,” he says.

Sures added his own book to libraries’ treasures, especially ones in Manitoba First Nations schools. The Boy Who Walked Backwards is a children’s book published by the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre in 2018 that’s about a young Ojibwe boy, Leo, who returns home for Christmas after spending a few months at a residential school, where teachers took away his culture and customs, including cutting his long hair.

When nuns come to take him back to the residential school, Leo walks backwards into a bush and they leave without him after they see the tracks and figure someone left the bush instead of hiding in it.

Sures says his friend Dave Mowat, from Alderville First Nation in Ontario, told him that it was a family story, and later Sures adapted it into a song for his 2011 album Gone to Bolivia.

“Any kid, whatever background, can be inspired (by Leo’s story),” he says.

He wrote a story as well, but kept it aside for years. He eventually showed it to Indigenous friends, and feared a bad reaction — Sures is not Indigenous — but he says they liked the story and encouraged him to try publish it.

“The family, they’re my friends. I have their blessing and that’s what matters,” Sures says, adding he’s received some criticism for being a settler telling an Indigenous family’s story.

“I’m just a storyteller, carrying it along.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall