Putting our city on the map

Jennifer Still wants you to help write the story of our city — what is, what was and what could be.

Winnipeg’s poet laureate for 2025/26 has just launched The Story of Winnipeg, a citywide poetry project in collaboration with the Winnipeg Arts Council and the Winnipeg Public Library.

Each library branch will provide participants with folded, fill-in-the-blank books that Still crafted out of City of Winnipeg maps and archival materials. People can keep their books as keepsakes, or they can send their poems back to Still via the paper mailbox stationed at each library branch in the city.

The collected poems will be shared as part of a public installation in 2026.

“I think I just felt as poet laureate I had this task of engaging Winnipeggers in writing poetry. No small task, but it’s sort of what my big vision was,” says Still, 52, a lifelong Winnipegger whose poetry practice explores the intersections of language and physical form.

“I wanted to create something that was gentle and meaningful and inviting and easy and all those things — but, like, sneakily a poem.”

No one will be confronted by the terror of the blank page or a blinking cursor here. The book is filled with prompts that come from a single-page introduction to a book called Winnipeg: The Gateway to the Golden West, published circa 1911.

Winnipeg is the central point of (BLANK). The city contains (BLANK). The most marvelous (BLANK) radiate from it.

“It’s these dense few paragraphs just trying to basically sell our city as the city of growth and commerce and rapid development and infrastructure,” Still says, adding that it measured our city in miles of sidewalks and graded streets.

“The first thing I thought of: how would we finish those sentences differently now? I just did an erasure of this description of Winnipeg, and I plopped it in the six pages of this book. And there are 12 blanks, and they’re very open to whatever anyone would like to say. So basically, a mad lib.”

There is also a physical, tactile element to The Story of Winnipeg that requires participants to actually put pen (or pencil, or crayon) to paper. That’s by design.

“Someone writing with their hand and pen on the page, to me, is the closest you can get to the spoken voice. It’s a signature, it’s unique, it’s intimate and it feels very direct. You can’t get that with a QR code,” Still says.

The book folds out into an 8 1/2-by-11 page emblazoned with a 1917 streetcar map of the city, the imagery of which also informed the spirit of the project.

“It’s beautiful to look at, like how the city used to be connected with public streetcars. All the routes are red, so it very much speaks metaphorically to arteries and connection,” she says.

Three thousand books have been circulated and Still has received 50 books back since the project was soft-launched at Plume Winnipeg’s Thin Air Poetry Bash and John Samson Fellows’ concerts in September.

“And the libraries, within a day, said we need more, way more. I don’t know if we’ll be able to print more, but if we can, we will,” Still says.

The responses she has received so far have been personal, generous, humorous and concerned with the future, Still says.

“The other thing I’ve noticed is these very strange images we all share that we might not normally think about. So, sneakers dangling from power lines, or miles of lost mittens.

“It actually makes my heart feel big and huge. The story of Winnipeg is a million stories, but those are the overlaps, those are the intersections, those are the streetcars coming together.”

The Story of Winnipeg will run until Dec. 1.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca