Darren Bernhardt Online Book Launch
Tuesday Dec 01 2020 7:00 pm - Online Book Launch, Virtual
Join us as we celebrate the online launch of The Lesser Known: A History of Oddities from the Heart of the Continent (Great Plains Publications) featuring author Darren Bernhardt in conversation with Trevor Dineen.
Registration is required to directly participate in the Zoom webinar. It will be simultaneously streamed on YouTube and available for viewing thereafter.
Manitoba’s history is one of being carved. Ice sculpted the land before nomadic first people pressed trails across it. Southern First Nations dug into the earth to grow corn and potatoes while those in the north mined it for quartz used in arrowheads. Fur traders arrived, expanding on Indigenous trading networks and shaping new ones. Then came settlers who chiselled the terrain with villages, towns and cities.
But there is failure and suffering etched into the history.
In Winnipeg, slums emerged as the city’s population boomed. There were more workers than jobs and the pay was paltry. Immigrants and First Nations were treated as second-class, shunted to the fringes. Rebellions and strikes, political scandals and natural disasters occurred as the people molded Manitoba.
In The Lesser Known, Darren Bernhardt shares odd tales lost in time paired with archival images, such as The Tin Can Cathedral, the first independent Ukrainian church in North America; the jail cell hidden beneath a Winnipeg theatre; the bear pit of Confusion Corner; gardening competitions between fur trading forts and more. Once deemed important enough to be documented, these stories are now buried. It’s time to carve away at them once again.
Born-and-raised in Winnipeg, Darren Bernhardt has been writing as long as he can remember. He spent the first dozen years of his career working for newspapers in Saskatchewan before moving back to Winnipeg where he now lives with his wife, two kids and a dog in a 108-year-old house. He has been writing online for CBC Manitoba since 2009, specializing in offbeat and local history stories. He is the co-author of the 2005 JackPine Press chapbook, To Kerouac and Back and co-author of the play, Alison’s Leather Couch.
Each week on CBC Radio One's Now or Never, host Trevor Dineen and his co-host Ify Chiwetelu meet people on personal missions to make real change, big or small. Now or Never is heard nationally on CBC Radio One Saturdays. Trevor also makes rush hour fun as the traffic reporter on Information Radio 89.3FM/990AM, CBC Manitoba's flagship #1 morning show. And when he’s not guiding drivers through stalls and collisions, he's bringing the laughs on Twitter and settling into a fun chapter in life as a new dad.
Jenny Heijun Wills is the author of 
Sean Perrun is a Winnipeg-based videographer and award winning filmmaker. His short film Writer’s Block won the 2018 Anti-Racism Arts Festival’s 48-hour film challenge. Sean was co-director and co-cinematographer for a BellMTS docu-series called No Roadblocks, Just Detours, released 2020. He was also credited for his work as an editor on the CBC executive produced short film Ring Warriors, produced by Scott Carnegie. Sean was a camera operator for the MTS Stories From Home feature film Staging the Band, produced by Chris Gaudry.
Host Neil Besner taught Canadian literature for thirty years at the University of Winnipeg. From its founding in 2004 until this year, he edited the Laurier Poetry Series (LPS) with Wilfrid Laurier University Press, currently at thirty volumes, including one on 
