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Editorial Assistant Miriam Richer Interviews Petra Chambers whose three poems appear in Issue 301 (Autumn 2024)

Miriam Richer: All three of your poems, in one sense or another, are about the speaker’s relationship to the past—revisiting a childhood home, reminiscing about adolescence, identifying with a rescue animal’s inscrutable history. How does the passage of time figure into your poetry? 

Petra Chambers: I love thinking about time. 

Thirty years ago, I read A.S Byatt’s Possession, the Booker Award winner of 1990, and was possessed by the novel. After her death, in November, 2023, I decided to revisit it, and (sorry for verbal overplay), was repossessed.  

Editorial Assistant Laura Broadbent Interviews Nancy Huggett whose story "I am a good mother. I am a bad mother. I am no mother at all." won our 2024 Creative Nonfiction Contest and was published in Issue 301 (Autumn 2024)

Laura Broadbent: On the liberating constraint of genre: What constraints does creative nonfiction afford you to speak in ways you otherwise couldn’t?  

The Fiddlehead is excited to announce the finalists of our 2024 Fiction Contest, judged by Zilla Jones! The winner of the $2000 contest prize will be announced in January and the winning essay will appear in the Winter 2025 issue (302). Thank you to all who entered and congratulations to the following fifteen finalists!

A Few Notes on Metamorphoses 3.158 

Ovid describes the cave dwelling of the hunter-goddess Diana as: arte laboratum nulla: simulauerat artem. Made by no art: mimicking art. 

I was reminded of Niina Pollari’s stunning book of poetry Path of Totality when the solar eclipse occurred earlier this year. This ominous phrase–which describes the area of Earth where the eclipse could be seen–haunted the news cycle for days. I had COVID at the time, and was only able to view the phenomenon on YouTube from my couch in a stupor.

Editorial Assistant Miriam Richer Interviews Margaret Watson whose story "The Returning Wife" appeared in Issue 301 (Autumn 2024)

Miriam Richer: “The Returning Wife” is such a psychologically complex story. I can’t imagine the narrative without a character like Rosemary at its centre, and yet the plot is—at least according to your taxi driver—all too common. Which came to you first: the protagonist, or the scenario?

Only An Octave Apart, Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond 

While researching opera for my next novel, I was introduced to the marvelously uncanny voice of Anthony Roth Costanzo, a countertenor who made a splash starring in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Philip Glass’s Akhenaten. Browsing Costanzo’s recordings, I came across his collaboration with cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond

I tend to read voraciously, though perhaps too quickly, since I often retain only an impression of a book and its atmosphere rather than its plot. A recent read that made a strong impression is Fearnoch, by Jim McEwen (Breakwater Books 2022). The details blur (and can’t readily be checked since my library copy has been returned) but I have a distinct sense of Fearnoch, both the small Ontario town that McEwen evokes with language both lyrical and grounded, and the people he populates it with.

A cardinal sin (if not what some might consider the cardinal sin) of reading is to judge the contents of a book based on the appearance of the cover. The notion that one is not supposed to make a value judgment after a quick glance is so widespread that the phrase has escaped the literary sphere and breached into life advice.