Vermette lands on non-fiction editing short list

Manitoba COVID-19 cases rise to 17; confirmed cases are travel-related

Manitoba is conducting more tests for the novel coronavirus — including a new drive-thru site that opened in Selkirk — while suspending breast cancer screening.

As of Wednesday morning, chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin said the province had thus far conducted 2,900 tests for COVID-19.

Hours later, two more presumptive positive cases were reported, bring the total of confirmed and presumptive cases to 17, with no reports of anyone requiring hospitalization. All but one still being tracked Wednesday are travel-related, Roussin said at a news conference.

While nine COVID-19 screening sites have opened in Manitoba in the last 10 days, breast cancer screening is on hold for two weeks, said Lanette Siragusa, Shared Health chief nursing officer.

They say a man's home is his castle; grand old Queen Anne house takes the adage literally

To call the house at 494 College Ave. anything other than a castle would seem wrong, so we’ll call it the Castle. It’s three storeys tall but seems taller, 115 years old but seems older, and it is right smack in the middle of a neighbourhood, right in the middle of a city, where its turreted existence inspires confusion, bewilderment and a touch of awe. It’s a place both out of time and out of place, but somehow, it feels like it’s exactly where it belongs.

“It definitely stands out around here,” says Ryan Lavallee, a 33-year-old man who lives two doors down, on the second floor of a house without turrets of its own. “Kids are always stopping to look at it. Even adults do. I have.”

In 2015, Vanh Thiep Hoang looked at it, and couldn’t stop. Hoang had come to Winnipeg with his family from Vietnam, where he worked as a surgeon. He marvelled at the Queen Anne-style castle — its gabled roof, its orange bricks, its ten-foot ceilings, and its playful disregard of convention and defiance of expectation. It cast a bit of a spell.

“It reminded me of palaces I’d seen where I was from,” and of buildings in Ukraine, where he studied, says the 63-year-old Hoang, who emerges from the castle’s front door wearing board shorts and metal-rimmed glasses, his thick head of hair as attention-grabbing as the castle he calls home.

Ready to launch: Inside the massive undertaking to revitalize the beloved Nonsuch replica

For 44 years, the Nonsuch has been enchanting visitors to the Manitoba Museum, bringing a whiff of adventure and the romance of the sea to our landlocked city.The jewel in the crown of the Hudson’s Bay Company Museum Collection, the replica of the 17th-century fur-trading ship takes those who board her back in time.

Decades’ worth of schoolchildren have clutched the rails at the side of the rickety gangway that leads you onboard and descended the narrow stairs — backwards, please, for safety! — into the fo’c’sle, where they could marvel at the tiny bunks — how short men were back then — and peer out the round portholes, imagining them being lashed by salt spray as you crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a grand adventure to find a new trade route for England.

Few of us on long-ago field trips ever stopped to think about why this Prairie city was honouring a British ship that never actually visited Manitoba — let alone why we had built an entire museum wing around a replica that, while it sailed more than 14,000 kilometres in European, Canadian and American waters, was hauled into Winnipeg in pieces.

As the first phase of its $17.5-million Bringing Our Stories Forward capital campaign, the museum has spent about three years planning its refurbishment of the Nonsuch exhibit, which has remained largely untouched since it was installed in 1974, in part to better tell that story.

Canada names Beijing flag-bearers, won’t boycott opening ceremony

The two-time Olympic gold medallist in women’s hockey and three-time Olympic short-track speedskating champ are each fine choices in what can be a fraught business for the COC.

Vermette lands on non-fiction editing short list

Winnipeg-based novelist, poet and editor katherena vermette has made the three-person short list for a new $25,000 prize given awarded to the editor of a work of non-fiction.

The inaugural Nancy Flight Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Editing finalists are vermette for Louis Busch’s Carry Your Heart: Indigenous Helping Wisdom & the Science of Psychological Flexibility, George Galt for ​My Year in Fairyland: Grief, MAID and a Lifetime of Books, written by ​Sarah Ellis​, and Rachel Rose for ​Humanitarienne: A Doctor’s Stories from the Conflict Zone, written​ by ​Kirsten Johnson​.

In addition to her writerly output, vermette has served as a senior editor at Simon & Schuster Canada since 2024. The winner of the Nancy Flight Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Editing prize will be announced at the Writers’ Trust Awards on Nov. 10.

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