We're excited to announce that the winner of our 2023 Creative Nonfiction Contest and $2000 prize is Nancy Huggett! Her essay "I am a good mother. I am a bad mother. I am no mother at all" is featured in the upcoming autumn issue of The Fiddlehead (no.301).
As an avid reader, and because reading is such a personal thing, it’s difficult for me to recommend one book to people I’ve never met. But in keeping with the theme of my story, Children of the Gentle People, which centres around food and friendship during times of unease, I’d like to suggest one beloved book: Lolo Houbein’s One Magic Square.
Words in search of a body: Matthew Walsh’s sophomore turn in Terrarium.
Terrarium, Matthew Walsh. Goose Lane Editions, 2024.
When I first came across Camilla Gibb’s memoir, This Is Happy, I had been struggling for nearly a year to finish any book I picked up, and my mental health had deteriorated to the point where I was forced to drop out of school and quit writing entirely. Despite everything going on in my life, I managed to read This Is Happy to the very end. It was the reason I showed up to work on less than two hours of sleep the next day, which ultimately resulted in me spilling very hot coffee all over myself.
I realize that, if the purpose of this column is to surface works its readers haven’t immediately heard of, picking the most recent Booker Prize winner misses the mark. That said, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song is just that good. More critically, it’s an important artifact pointing up the exhaustion of the threadbare neoliberal consensus that dominates much of “developed” democracy.
