On the rails to Toronto
Writer/director of Trains of Winnipeg leaves for the Big Smoke
Quentin Mills-Fenn

For almost half a decade, filmmaker and writer Clive Holden has been working on something he calls Trains of Winnipeg. It’s a multimedia package that includes a book, an audio CD, a feature-length film and a website (the last called, not surprisingly, trainsofwinnipeg.com).

Trains is a love poem, a fable with music, a documentary movie, a film cycle, a collection of things found and created, and an ode to a city in the middle of Canada. For the last year or so, Holden has been travelling around the world, running the film and talking about it. It’s played at film festivals in Paris, Dusseldorf, Rome, Beirut, Rotterdam and Manchester, and it’ll be an official entry at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival in November. Holden will be doing screenings and lectures for another year, spending more time away than at home, he reckons.

Five years is a long time to devote to one project, the artist admits, and maintaining enthusiasm for the long term is part of choosing what to work on.

“It’s important to pick a project that... can sustain your interest,” he says. “You have to choose something you’re interested in or else you run out of steam.”

For this city, the next few days will be something of a summation for Trains of Winnipeg. The film that the National Post called “the Ben-Hur of experimental cinema” runs at Cinematheque, for example, on Sept. 22 and 23, and Holden will be in attendance for the screenings.

Then, Holden will read from the book as part of the Winnipeg International Writers Festival mainstage Poetry Bash on Sept. 24, in the company of Lorna Crozier, Brenda Leifso, Karen Solie, David Seymour and Sherwin Tjia.

“I’m on my own this time,” Holden says, “but it’s still a multimedia performance.

“It’s really a challenge going solo, but it’s what I was asked to do. It’s in keeping with what I’m doing right now.”

On Sept. 29, Holden will continue running his train with a lecture at aceartinc. This will mark the official launch for the CD.

“I try to make the lecture interactive once people get over their fears of asking question,” he says. “That’s my ideal. I can do a straight lecture, but most often I can get people going. And that’s better for me because I can learn things, too.”

In a sense, the manifestations of Trains of Winnipeg in the coming days are a valedictory for Holden’s time in the city. Not long after the aceartinc. lecture, the author/director and his wife, novelist Alyssa Yorke, are leaving Winnipeg and moving to Toronto, and he admits they’ll miss this place.

“This week will be a symbolic culmination — no, more of a denouement than a culmination,” he says.

“I’ve been here for eight years, and coming here was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. Alyssa and I know we’ll be coming back here a lot. There’ll be summers at the lake.

“Winnipeg is full of artists and eccentrics — and that’s one of the best things I can say about a city.”