Sagkeeng First Nation member named WAG curator of Indigenous and contemporary art

Family history, solo sojourns paved path for celebrated author’s latest novel

It’s 1967 and Lee Clarke has just been kicked out of UCLA when he receives his draft letter in the mail. Rather than report for basic training, he hops in a car and sets off across America on an amphetamine-fuelled road trip to bid farewell to his fractured, dysfunctional family before crossing the border into Canada.

Such is the premise for B.C.-born, Portland-based Patrick deWitt’s sixth novel Dodge City, published in September by House of Anansi. He’s in Winnipeg tonight at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location to launch the book.

The 51-year-old deWitt came to prominence with his sophomore novel, 2011’s The Sisters Brothers. The book was a critical and commercial success, winning the author the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and was adapted for the big screen in a film starring John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix.

His 2018 novel French Exit was also adapted for cinema, and his 2023 novel The Librarianist won deWitt the Leacock Medal for the second time. Dodge City is deWitt’s fourth novel to make the Giller Prize long list.

Gillingham says Portage and Main underground should stay open

Scott Gillingham said he hopes to keep the circular concourse beneath Portage Avenue and Main Street open, if he’s re-elected mayor next week.

“I would like to find a way for it to stay,” said Gillingham during the mayoral debate hosted by CJOB Wednesday.

The downtown intersection reopened to pedestrians at street level in June 2025.

When he first supported that hotly debated reopening in 2024, Gillingham called for the underground mall to be closed. At the time, the city estimated it would take $73 million and up to five years of traffic-snarling construction to repair the leaking membrane under the street that protects the properties below.

Rocky Horror star prepared for a rude reception in all the best ways

While it enjoys the longest theatrical release of any movie in history, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was all but ignored by critics when its revolutionary brand of camp first hit silver screens in 1975.

And before it whipped up a cult following, Rocky was a fringe theatre hit in London whose first run’s final night — which had attracted such luminaries as Mick and Bianca Jagger — was derailed by an unlikely culprit: glitter. According to the late Tim Curry (who died at 80 in August), the shiny stuff ended up where the sun don’t shine.

“Well, Rocky got some glitter down his trunks and it set up an irritation. When we arrived at the theatre, he was standing in the shower and the show couldn’t go on,” he told the press in 1974, after crossing the Atlantic to lead the show’s American theatre debut.

Glitter is one of the things audiences may not throw at the stage at The Rocky Horror Picture Show screening tonight at the Centennial Concert Hall. Unlike in the anarchic midnight screenings at the New York’s Waverly Theater beginning in 1976, where audiences chucked everything but the kitchen sink, a prop bag will be courteously supplied at the door.

Exchange welcomes new gallery

Co-owned by Laura Porath and Mike Page, Lucent Gallery + Design Studio celebrates its grand opening, Thursday.

Is Osborne a street or a road? ‘Stroad’ status fails everyone

Last month, the City of Winnipeg said it would soon begin to study ways to improve pedestrian and cyclist safety along Osborne Street, which runs between two of the city’s densest neighbourhoods, where residents walk and bike for many of their daily activities.