A mining town with a deeply musical past, Flin Flon has been a haven for artists since the northern Manitoba city was founded nearly 100 years ago, local creators say.In 2025, artists working in all media continue to call the community home — some with lineage to an older generation of workers who moved to Flin Flon for jobs at the Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Co. (later known as Hudbay) and became key figures in the city’s early arts scene. According to local legend, the mining company prioritized hiring talented singers, artists and hockey players in an effort to build a vibrant community around the remote mine. Jennifer Hanson’s father, Bill Hanson, was one of them. Hanson, who is well-known across the province for singing the national anthem at Winnipeg Jets games in the 1990s, says her father was a tenor who was drawn to Flin Flon in the late 1940s because he heard through word of mouth that singers could get a job at the mine “with very few questions asked.”Jennifer Hanson grew up in a musical family in Flin Flon. She says her father came to the community for work in the late 1940s, drawn by mining opportunities and the thriving local music scene. (Submitted by Jennifer Hanson )”I don’t know that he really cared what kind of job he had,” said Hanson, who is based in Winnipeg but spends her summers in a cabin near Flin Flon. “He went to Flin Flon because he heard that if you could sing, you could get a job at the mine. And he could sing.”Hanson says her father spent his whole career at Hudbay, all the while singing and playing music as an original member of the Flin Flon Glee Club. Tom Goodman’s father, Jimmy Goodman, was a metallurgist who worked his way up to becoming general manager at the mine. At the same time, he was a singer and conductor who served as an executive member of the glee club. Goodman, who was also a metallurgist with Hudbay, says his father was reluctant to confirm whether he prioritized singers when making hiring decisions.But “I’m sure he did,” said Goodman.Tom Goodman’s father, Jim Goodman, conducts the Flin Flon Men’s Choir on July 1, 1977. (Submitted by the Flin Flon Heritage Project)”The legend is they’d hire if someone was a good tenor … or a good hockey player. There’s no doubt that there’s some truth to that,” he said. The city was founded around the mine in 1927 and quickly became a “Shangri-La” for artists, Goodman says, as the mining company worked to build a community that people would want to live in long-term. “People were retained for generations, really along those lines. And a lot of the people that are hanging in there to this day might be second-, third-, fourth-generation Flin Flonners with an inclination towards artistic things, musical things.”LISTEN | Flin Flon artist finds inspiration in wildfire wreckage:Information Radio – MB9:00Finding Beauty in the Ashes: Art and Resilience After the Flin Flon FiresArtist Jan Modler, who lost her Denare Beach home in the summer fires, speaks with host Marcy Markusa about turning the remains of her home into art, joined by Crystal Kolt, Director of Culture and Community Initiatives for the City of Flin Flon, on how the local arts scene continues to thrive.Tim Spencer’s father, Jimmy Spencer, was a member of the original glee club. Today, Spencer is a leading member of the Flin Flon Community Choir and the Borealis chamber group. “There was always a lot of music happening in Flin Flon when I was growing up here. My parents were involved in it, and lots of their friends were, too,” Spencer said. But the vibrant arts community faded and went dormant for a time, Spencer recalls, until the 1990s, when the Kolt family came to town. “Since then things have really ballooned. We’ve got lots of arts stuff happening all the time here. It’s made it an exciting and interesting place to live,” he said. Musicians Crystal Kolt and her husband Mark Kolt moved to Flin Flon three decades ago from Winnipeg. Crystal Kolt is the director of culture and community initiatives with the City of Flin Flon. (Lauren Scott/CBC)”We really thought when we moved up here that we were leaving arts and culture forever for the betterment of our children,” said Crystal Kolt, who is now the City of Flin Flon’s director of culture and community initiatives. But she says she was immediately shocked by the level of talent that was “just sitting dormant” in their new home. Since then, the couple has worked to revive the community’s choir group, while organizing musical, theatre and visual arts events and lobbying for support and funding. The mining city might have a future as a northern arts hub.Kolt has been working for 17 years to create the North Central Canada Centre of Arts and Environment (NCCCAE). She imagines the centre as something akin to Fogo Island, N.L., or the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta. They completed a feasibility study in 2017, with the cost of the NCCCAE estimated at $34 million. Kolt says the centre is now seriously moving toward investment and development. Flin Flon’s arts renaissance has birthed Johnny’s Social Club, a local music venue that sits right next to the Northern Visual Arts Centre (NorVA), an artist-run, non-profit art gallery. Danita Stallard, whose parents were born and raised in Flin Flon, said she was inspired by the mining city during visits to her grandparents’ cabin as a child. Local artist and illustrator Danita Stallard wrote a series of graphic novels inspired by the story of Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin — the main character in the science-fiction book The Sunless City, from which Flin Flon gets its name. (Lauren Scott/CBC)As an adult, the NorVA member artist and illustrator has written a “love story to the area” in her series of hand-illustrated graphic novels. FLANN! continues the story of Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin, the protagonist of the 1917 science-fiction novel The Sunless City and Flin Flon’s namesake. She said Flin Flon is “a little jewel” tucked away from the faster pace of Manitoba’s big cities, where artists have the time and space to allow creativity to flow. “It’s just really cool to have such a large group of artsy folks,” she said. CC Trubiak, an alternative country singer/songwriter, says he never expected to be part of that group.Singer-songwriter CC Trubiak says he has been warmly embraced by the local arts community in Flin Flon — something he would have never thought possible growing up there in the 1980s and 1990s. (Lauren Scott/CBC)He left Flin Flon as a teenager in the late 1990s, planning to never return to a place where he had grown up feeling stigmatized as a 2SLGBTQ+ youth. He moved to Winnipeg and then Ottawa, where he began his music career. He reluctantly returned to Flin Flon in 2012 for work, thinking he would only stay for a year. “It’s just flourished a lot more since I moved back to Flin Flon, and I’ve been able to build my performing experience, my songwriting experience,” Trubiak said, adding Mark Kolt reached out to him about performing shortly after he returned.He said it felt like a “full circle” moment to be fully embraced by the local arts community. “Much to my surprise, I am really a proud Flin Flon artist. I love being here. I think being back home has provided me an opportunity not just to heal, but an opportunity to thrive as an artist,” he said.
Flin Flon has been ‘a little jewel’ for northern Manitoba creators for nearly a century, artists say
