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I am a good mother.

Reckoning and Reclaiming

Your Body Was Made For This, Debbie Bateman, Ronsdale Press, 2023.

Vancouver Island writer Debbie Bateman’s first collection of short stories, Your Body Was Made for This, follows in the tradition of Margaret Laurence’s unforgettable Hagar Shipley and Sharon Butala’s older women protagonists. Midlife presents an opportunity for the characters to reckon with and reclaim their lives, and Bateman’s collection of linked short stories explores older women’s experiences of their own bodies and their relationships.

A poet glimpses his soul and mortality: ‘Please return my life of tender purpose to its memory’

In The Capital City of Autumn, Tim Bowling. Wolsak and Wynn, 2024.

Janielle Browne is a writer, poet, educator, and editor who grew up in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Her latest publication is in Mother She Wrote (Kola Magazine Spring Edition, 2022), which won the H. Nigel Thomas Prose Prize 2021. Janielle has also had her short stories published in online magazines Intersect Anu (2019), and ACalabash (2022). She currently lives in Toronto and is pursuing her MA in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.

When my friends recommend books, I borrow them from the library—my apartment remains infested with paperbacks despite my efforts to downsize, and books are an expensive vice—but I lasted a whole fifteen minutes into the audiobook of Julia Armfield’s novel Our Wives Under the Sea before I caved and ducked into a bookstore to buy it while out on a walk. It was just that good. 

Ashanthi Francis is a fiction writer from Pickering, Ontario. Her work has appeared in Lake Effect, MUSE Magazine, Hart House Review and The Temz Review, among other publications. She is currently studying law at the University of Toronto.

The Fiddlehead is excited to announce the finalists of our 2024 Creative Nonfiction Contest, judged by Lorri Neilsen Glenn! The winner of the $2000 contest prize will be announced in October and the winning essay will appear in the Autumn 2024 issue (301). Thank you to all who entered and congratulations to the following fifteen finalists!

It is a joy for a non-scientist like me to lose myself in descriptions of the exquisitely designed life cycles of pecan trees, maple trees, wild strawberries, witch hazel, black ash, and cattails. 

This is my year of reading short story collections, and this book exploded my understanding of what you could do with the “novel in short stories” form. The dust jacket describes it as a novel, and it follows a single protagonist, named Nina. But many of the stories that comprise it were published separately and several made it into collections like The Journey Prize anthology, and that’s because they make such powerful use of the condensed tension of the short story.