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Province Providing Additional Support to Help English as an Additional Language Students
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Urban legends
Dear Peggy is a collection of contemporary Winnipeg folklore from storyteller hannah_g
By: Marlo Campbell
"Everyone likes being told stories about themselves," says local multi-disciplinary artist-turned storyteller hannah_g.
She’s right, of course — but her statement may ring especially true for those who call this particular city home. In Winnipeg, an isolated Prairie town where everyone knows everyone else’s business and gossip spreads faster than you can say Burton Cummings, self-mythologizing comes as natural as frostbite (see: Guy Maddin’s dreamy pseudo-documentary My Winnipeg, which had at least a few American film critics scratching their heads over implausible legends of frozen horses and Nazi invasions, some true, some less so).
On Thursday, Feb. 23, at Dalnavert Museum, hannah_g will be sharing some Winnipeg mythology of her own with the launch of Dear Peggy, a contemporary folklore project she’s been working on for the past three years.
Originally from England, hannah_g, who’s now in her mid-30s, moved to Winnipeg in 2008 after scoring her dream job as the program co-ordinator at aceartinc., a non-profit artist-run centre on McDermot Avenue. Though she had previously spent six months working in Toronto, she didn’t know a single person here; in fact, she had never even heard of Winnipeg prior to accepting the job.
Like all newcomers, hannah_g soon discovered the uncanny interconnection shared by Winnipeggers — call it one degree of separation instead of six — and the mutable variations of civic history passed down from one generation to another as a result.
"(Folklore) is usually transmitted orally between people, and that’s a lot of what I was introduced to in Winnipeg when I first arrived here," hannah_g says.
"Those multiple connections that people have with each other mean that everyone’s got a story about that one person’s story."
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