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Our 2024 Fiction Contest, judged by Zilla Jones, closes on Tuesday, September 3. Don't miss your chance to submit! Check out our guidelines here.

When I arrived at my designated campsite on my first camping trip, I encountered a black bear. It was bent over a picnic table two camp sites over, its snout riffling through crumbs and crusts on abandoned paper plates. My childhood friend, a bear expert who was working at Algonquin Park that summer, was shocked. She said she hadn’t seen bears roaming this close to the campsites all summer. She assured me that the likelihood of it coming back was slim, but I wasn’t convinced.

Salima Tourkmani-MacDonald is from Riverview, New Brunswick. She received her BA in English with a Concentration in Creative Writing from St. Thomas University, and her MA in English in the Field of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. She now works as the Program Coordinator for Poetry in Voice/ Les voix de la poésie. Her work has been published in The Dalhousie Review, Echolocation Magazine, and her poem "Obituary for a Love Affair With a Girl" was shortlisted in Eavesdrop Magazine's Queer Joy poetry contest.

Nucleus, a poetry collection by Svetlana Ischenko, published by Ronsdale Press. 

Nucleus takes readers through a journey that traverses space (Ukraine to Canada) and language (Ukrainian to English) to arrive at an arresting and beautiful synthesis.

I've had Jeremie Albino's record Tears You Hide playing in fairly steady rotation at our place since seeing him at the StanFest musical festival in Canso, Nova Scotia in 2023. Albino wowed me with his strong, disarming voice and confident stage presence, and he's even better in the studio. I find the jaunty second track on this album, "Angeline," perfect for shaking off the day's stresses while I'm cooking supper in the evening. "Across the Hall" is easily the best pandemic-themed tune I've come across.

A Coffin full of Books 

Bohumil Hrabal’s ninety-eight page novel Too Loud a Solitude opens with the following two sentences: “For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story. For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting wastepaper and books…” 

A paper baler is a closet-sized machine with a hydraulic plate that compresses the material into a block that is strapped with wires, ejected onto a pallet, and trucked to a processor where the fibre is extracted to make more paper. 

Welcome to issue 300 — those double zeros are so satisfying to write. And they represent an enormous collective effort. I think back to all the people who have furthered the life of The Fiddlehead over the years, and I’m grateful to everyone who has pitched in time, money, words, ideas, skills, care. I’m especially grateful to the host of volunteers who have sustained the journal. In particular I thank Sabine Campbell, who volunteered for many years as our reviews editor after retiring as managing editor and who has contributed greatly to The Fiddlehead in both these roles.

To kiss the hybrid future à travers un voile

Entre Rive and Shore, Dominique Bernier-Cormier. icehouse poetry, 2023.

Tout d’abord: wow. These were the first words that came to mind en mijotant sur how and where to begin a review of Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s multigenre, multi-temporal and dimensional, highly allusive, bilingual+ Entre Rive and Shore...

Simple Power: Representation and Resilience in Denison Avenue

Denison Avenue, Christina Wong and Daniel Innes. ECW Press, 2023.

“Lay mang mang, ah See Heeei,” Mrs. Wong’s voice rang out. (Take your time.)

Love and Demons thom vernon's review of Pervatory by RM Vaughan. Coach House Books, 2023.

In Pervatory, the posthumously published last novel by the spectacularly talented RM Vaughan (Richard Murray Vaughan), the iconic queer multi-hyphenate (think novelist, poet, filmmaker, critic, essayist, playwright, and visual artist — squirrel saloons made of pizza...