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Crafted: Show + Sale

Friday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

WAG-Qaumajuq

Tickets: $10 at wag.ca or at the door; Indigenous peoples and youth under 12 are free

More than 100 artists from 38 communities across Manitoba, Nunavut, Northwest Territories, Nunavik and Nunatsiavut will be featured in the ninth edition of Crafted: Show + Sale, WAG-Qaumajuq’s annual juried craft show.

Shoppers can take home one-of-a-kind textiles, glass, wood, metal and clay works and support artists at the same time. As well, net proceeds from Masagana Flower Farm & Studio’s DIY Floral Bundle Dye Kit will go towards Sunshine House, a community drop-in and resource centre.

“What began as an experiment in 2015 has become a holiday must-do for local craft aficionados,” said Tammy Sutherland, director of the Manitoba Craft Council, in a media release.

“Crafted is a wonderful opportunity to gather at WAG-Qaumajuq, and, along with our amazing northern partners, celebrate the skill, labour, time and resourcefulness that has characterized craft making throughout the human story.”

For a full list of featured artists, visit wag.ca. Admission to Crafted also includes access to the galleries.

— Jen Zoratti

Raine Hamilton helps Canzona launch new season

Sunday, Nov. 5, 7:30 p.m.

Exchange Event Centre, 291 Bannatyne Ave.

Tickets: $17.50-$25 at canzona.ca

The Canzona baroque choral group aims to be as dependable as the mail on Sunday night at the Exchange Event Centre.

That’s when it launches its 2023-24 season with Raine or Schein, a punny title for a concert that combines songs from Raine Hamilton’s album Brave Land with vocal works of 17th-century German composer Johann Hermann Schein, such as Studentschmaus (Student Drinking Songs) and Diletti Pastorali (Pastoral Delights).

The show also serves as the debut for Canzona’s new artistic director, Elroy Friesen, who is also director of choral studies at Desautels Faculty of Music at the University of Manitoba.

Canzona turns 35 this season and will celebrate the anniversary April 21, 2024 at the Knox United Church with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and Henry Engbrecht, its founding artistic director.

— Alan Small

Stellar, Taylor Jackson and Katie MacDonald at the Daughter

Saturday, Nov. 4, 8 p.m.

The Handsome Daughter, 61 Sherbrook St.

Tickets: $13.40 at reallovewpg.com

“I’m starting to get quiet again, floating below the line, and I hate my house cause it traps me in, but I never wanna sound like I’m whining.” The opening lyrics to Stellar’s contemplative single Spring (77) sound a lot like winter. That track, along with the 2022 debut album Stages, by Winnipeg’s “galactic group” — Sophie George, Hailey Hunter, Sage Stoyanowski and Ellie Ratel — seems to hit just right as the temperature dips below zero.

This Saturday, the quartet hits the stage at the Daughter, joined by a pair of local songwriters who specialize in gentle melodies buoyed by honest lyrics and bolstered by stripped-back instrumentation. At this past summer’s Real Love Summer Fest, Taylor Jackson earned raves for her Saturday afternoon set, lulling the crowd with her softness and craft. Katie MacDonald’s voice — human, clear, precise — is one worth hearing.

Together, the three artists should cushion the blow of winter’s first winds and provide a reminder that warmer days always lay ahead.

— Ben Waldman

David Rabinovitch book launches

Friday, 5 p.m. Pembina Hills Arts Council (352 Stephen St, Morden)

Sunday, 3 p.m., Whodunit? Mystery Bookstore (Winnipeg, 163 Lilac St.); seats can be reserved at wfp.to/6Kv

Free admission

Morden-born, California-based filmmaker and writer David Rabinovitch returns to Manitoba with a new book in tow — one that delves into a family member’s role in one of the biggest money-laundering schemes in history.

Jukebox Empire: The Mob and the Dark Side of the American Dream was published by Rowman & Littlefield earlier this month. In it, the award-winning author chronicles how his uncle Wolfe Rabin (born William Rabinovitch, and whom the author never met) moved from small-town Manitoba to Chicago after spending his teenage years smuggling booze over the border during Prohibition.

In Chicago, Rabin started a jukebox business that pivoted to weapons manufacturing during the Second World War. When the war ended and the jukebox making started up again, a group of Rabin’s silent partners began skimming money from the enterprise, shorting artists and record labels out of royalties. It would eventually all come crashing down.

— Ben Sigurdson

Remembering Indigenous veterans

Friday, 7 p.m., Manitoba Teachers’ Society Classrooms, Level 1, CMHR, 85 Israel Asper Way

Free admission

To honour the contributions of thousands of Indigenous people who voluntarily enlisted during the Second World War, the CMHR is screening Forgotten Warriors, a documentary chronicling the historical injustice to Indigenous veterans who returned home after the war to find the government had seized parts of their own reserve land to compensate non-Indigenous veterans.

Following the screening there will be a discussion with Indigenous Veteran advocates Randi Gage and Bill Shead, both of whom were instrumental in the founding of Canada’s National Indigenous Veterans Day (Nov. 8).

Gage, a Vietnam-era veteran, will talk about the racism and misogyny she experienced as an Ojibwe woman in the military, while Shead, a member of Peguis First Nation and a 36-year veteran of the Royal Canadian Navy, will discuss how he advocated to create National Indigenous Veterans Day.

— AV Kitching

Manitoba authors launch new poetry, fiction

Wednesday, Nov. 8, 7 p.m.

McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park location

It’s two local authors for the price (free) of one when Ariel Gordon and Mitchell Toews join up for hybrid launch of their new books from At Bay Press, Siteseeing and Pinching Zwieback: Made-up Stories from the Darp.

Siteseeing is a poetry collection co-written by Gordon — the producer of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project that appears in the Free Press, where she also works as a copy editor — and former Saskatchewan poet laureate Brenda Schmidt in a call-and-response format. Over the course of a year, Gordon and Schmidt collaborated on work that tackles climate change, the natural world, struggle and survival with perception and wit.

Toews’ Pinching Zwieback follows related characters in a small Mennonite town; the loosely linked short stories are based heavily on the author’s own upbringing in his parents’ bakery in Steinbach.

The launch will be hosted live in the atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream. It will feature readings from both authors and a conversation with Sue Sorensen, director of CMU press and editor of West of Eden: Essays on Canadian Prairie Literature.

— Jill Wilson

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