Tangled in darkness

Past and present collide in Carter’s taut, enthralling new novel

Suddenly dropping into a world existing 20 years in the past, and reliving the horror and aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, are among the many personal crises facing Ash in Lauren Carter’s thrilling new novel, The Longest Night.

The Longest Night is Manitoba author Carter’s third novel. Her previous novel, This Has Nothing To Do With You, won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer at the 2020 Manitoba Book Awards. Her work includes a short-story collection and two poetry collections. Carter founded Wild Ground Writing Retreats and has facilitated and led creative writing workshops online and in person.

The Longest Night opens in 2021, with a harrowing scene in which 18-year-old Ashley (Ash) Hayes, having fled her parents’ incessant fighting, is locked out of her family home in rural Minnesota in the middle of a 40-below late December night. Not properly dressed for the extreme cold, when Ash realizes she can’t get back into her house, she knows she must find shelter quickly before hypothermia sets in. Led by what might be an imaginary red fox, Ash runs to a neighbour’s house, ringing the doorbell and then losing consciousness.

When she awakens, she finds herself in bed, naked, with her right hand bandaged. She doesn’t recognize the messy room she’s in or the white cat watching her. Exploring the house, she meets Lucille, who persuades Ash to drink a cup of tea which Ash finds unusually delicious. Having left her cellphone at home, Ash uses the flip phone that Lucille gives her to call her parents but just gets a recording. She talks about going home, but Lucille stops her, saying the doctor who saved Ash’s life wants to meet her.

Kreviazuk, in her own voice

Chantal Kreviazuk is in the midst of a very busy year.

In May, the Winnipeg-born singer-songwriter released her 11th studio album, In My Own Voice — a project that reclaims and reimagines a selection of hit songs she’s written for some of the world’s biggest artists.

The 12-track album features Kreviazuk performing ethereal covers of Pitbull’s Feel This Moment, Drake’s Over My Dead Body and Gwen Stefani’s Rich Girl, among others.

But she didn’t stop there.

Crop storage headaches loom on horizon

A sense of calm descends over Prairie fields this time of year — at least on the surface.

Activities become more limited in the weeks leading up to harvest. There’s not much farmers can do now to support this year’s crop, other than monitor and protect it from diseases such as sclerotinia in canola and leaf stripe and fusarium head blight in wheat and barley.

July is when you might see farmers wading into a thick stand of canola, conducting a so-called “wet pants test” to get a low-tech read on how much disease-inducing moisture is lurking in the canopy.

Disease pressure is high in a humid, hot summer like this one and it’s kept aerial applicators busy applying fungicides. Sclerotinia spores live on plant residues in the soil and blossom into a mould that destroys the canola stem, starving the maturing pods.

Prepare to be … blutterbunged?

Are you not blutterbunged?

If Russell Crowe’s second-century gladiator character had uttered a 19th century equivalent of “Are you not entertained?” that fit the mood of today’s 21st century, that would be it.

Definitions first. Blutterbunged is an obscure regional dialect word from England that means everything from astonished to confounded to bemused or shocked into speechlessness. Its composition suggests something both more and less, namely blustering bloviation (that’s the more part) and empty words (that’s the empty part). These days we would more naturally punctuate our reaction to an event or statement with a profanity. But you get the drift.

Unearthed by lexicologist Susie Dent, it speaks volumes about our times that it fits now. That we need to reach back hundreds of years to find the right word to adequately capture a contemporary civic reaction to what the hell is going on in politics and the world today.

Rollins becomes fifth councillor to bow out of fall election

Sherri Rollins says she’s withdrawing her bid to keep her city hall seat after eight years, citing her concerns about the “gradual erosion of the role played by council” and the struggle to work co-operatively with the mayor’s office.