The Slow Decay of a Rural Town

Kyler Zeleny is a photographer who grew up in Mundare, Alberta, a sleepy, 900-person farming community 45 minutes east of Edmonton. He spent most of his childhood on his parents’ farm, playing in hay bales with his cousins, desperate to grow up and move to the big city.

At 18, he took off to Edmonton, then studied in England and Toronto, before turning his gaze back to his roots on the Prairies. In the years since he’d left, Mundare had lost so many residents that it was on the cusp of decay. He decided to document his hometown before it disappeared completely.

Zeleny spent nine years taking pictures of Mundare, lovingly documenting out-of-service grain elevators, social halls, octogenarians growing vegetables, his own elderly relatives and the customs of the area’s Polish and Ukrainian community members. The resulting book, titled Bury Me in the Back 40, is a sensitive account of Mundare’s past and present. In the September issue, Maclean’s published a collection of Zeleny’s photographs, along with intimate descriptions of the world each one represents.

—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief

In 2014, Shams Erfan learned the Taliban was after him. He knew he had to flee Afghanistan immediately and spent the next few years in limbo before arriving in Canada in February of 2022. Since then, he’s brought his siblings over to join him. He hadn’t seen his brother since they were both teenagers. Now, they’ve been reunited after a decade.

Henrietta Southam vividly recalls the Edwardian-style fanfare that signalled summers at her family cottage on Ontario’s Big Rideau Lake in the ’70s. Her father was Hamilton Southam of the Southam newspaper empire, and every day at the lake was a party worthy of Downton Abbey. The cottage burned down in 1979, but in 2013, she bought an island oasis of her own on the lake—and she’s spent every summer there since.

FROM THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE

Everyone knows that owning a home in one of Canada’s marquee cities is now largely the purview of millionaires. In Toronto, a typical home goes for nearly $1.1 million, while the price of admission in Greater Vancouver is even higher at $1.2 million (and a house in West Vancouver has the vertigo-inducing sticker shock of $2.6 million). The good news is that we managed to find 10 cities on the rise where you can still buy a house for under $700,000. Read our September issue cover story now.

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