The road less travelled

East Kildonan

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/10/2023 (767 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s harvest time in rural Manitoba, and one local author has reaped a bounty.

On Thursday, Oct. 12, Bill Redekop, local author and retired Winnipeg Free Press reporter, will launch Don’t Fence Me In: True Stories about Rural Manitoba at McNally Robinson in Grant Park Shopping Centre (1120 Grant Ave.). The collection of non-fiction stories about life in rural Manitoba is Redekop’s sixth book.

“It really was kind of a labour of love for me,” said Redekop, who retired from the Free Press in 2019 after covering the rural beat for his last 14 years at the paper. “It was something I wanted to do. I had a lot of story ideas still from my days at the Free Press. Story ideas to reporters are things you have to do almost, you feel so compelled to do if you feel it might be a good story. To just leave it is almost like reading a book and the last few pages are missing. You want to find out about it.”

Redekop got started on Don’t Fence Me In shortly into his retirement, but the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into his reporting.

“These were the kinds of stories you had to go out and see people and go into their homes, get them to trust you, but that was out the door (owing to COVID-19 restrictions),” recalled Redekop, a longtime East Kildonan resident. “ So I went through these stops and starts.”

Still, Redekop persevered, eventually collecting 24 new stories of life beyond the perimeter.

“A lot of it was, even when I was doing it for the paper, it was going down this winding road that I had never been on before,” Redekop said. “My job gave me licence to go down those trails. So it was similar to that, just exploring all these little pockets of rural Manitoba.”

While all the reporting in the new book is fresh, Redekop said he first came across some of the ideas during his time at the Free Press, but was unable to follow up for one reason or another — until now. One such tale involved would-be coureurs du bois who ended up in Hollow Water First Nation on the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg.

“These six hippies in the ’70s decided they were going to canoe across Canada,” Redekop said. “They started at Rocky Mountain House, Alta., and took the Saskatchewan River, which empties into Lake Winnipeg, where they eventually washed up on Hollow Water First Nation. Two of them never left. They married Indigenous women, had children, adopted the culture, became trappers. Fifty years later they’re still there!”

While Don’t Fence Me In came together, in fits and starts, Redelop was also writing freelance, including a number of projects he’d never attempted before, including corporate biography. Along with Don’t Fence Me In, The Life and Legacy of Commodore D.A. Ritchie is also due out this fall, and The Princess Auto Story is set for release in March 2024.

“I really loved all these projects that I worked on,” he said. “I’ve never done something like this before, never had time. It’s kept me really busy. I started freelancing and one thing led to another.”

The launch of Redekop’s Don’t Fence Me In: True Stories about Rural Manitoba, where he will be interviewed by former Free Press books editor Morley Walker, is set for Thursday, Oct. 12 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson.