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Please join The Fiddlehead, in partnership with FROSTival, Fredericton's Annual Winter Festival, as we celebrate the launch of our 2024 Winter issue! With readings from contributors: Jody Chan, Melissa DaCosta Brown (Winner of our 2023 Fiction Contest), and Shane Neilson. There will also be a special in-person reading from UNB's 2023-24 Writer-in-Residence, Jaspreet Singh. 

We're excited to announce that Melissa DaCosta Brown is the winner of our 2023 Fiction Contest and $2000 prize! Her story "Husbands" will be featured in the upcoming Winter issue of The Fiddlehead (FH298).

Excerpt
"Husbands" by Melissa DaCosta Brown
Winner of the 2023 Fiction Prize

The Raw Light of Morning, Shelly Kawaja’s debut novel and winner of the $12,500 BMO Winterset Award in 2022 for outstanding literary work by a Newfoundlander or Labradorian, is at the same time a compelling story of domestic violence, poverty, and trauma, and a 1990s western Newfoundland coming-of-age character study of a young woman of remarkable resilience. This is Laurel’s story, and she is 14 in the opening scene, and forced to intervene to protect her mother from life-threatening violence.

Who can resist the title of this debut short fiction collection? Like cyclists in the eponymous event — a protest against fossil fuel consumption, among other things — Lisa Fishman’s 40 pieces, a collage of micro, flash fiction and narratives of greater length, flout convention. Vanity of vanities, the Pushcart Prize-nominated poet seems to say of the standard short story and its clothing/trappings.

I could think of no better way to begin this review than by diving immediately into the free-flowing, elusive, and mystical current that is Alycia Pirmohamed’s mind in her debut book, Another Way to Split Water.

The epigraph to Lisa Alward’s new story collection, Cocktail, is an epiphanic moment from Virginia Woolf ‘s To the Lighthouse, in which the artist Lily Briscoe strives to resurrect and memorialize her dead friend through painting her portrait. Moved to uncharacteristic emotion by a sudden realization of the brevity of life, Lily laments, “Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world?

As winter approaches, we should start to consider what music will accompany the gloom. Like central heating, stews, and mulled wine, Toronto musician Luka Kuplowsky’s, Capturing the Evening Song, is an essential comfort to get us through the cold. Released in the guts of winter 2022, Capturing the Evening Song is a meditation collection reminiscent of work by Beverly-Glenn Copeland and Hiroshi Yoshimura. It is a dreamy, synthy contemplation on simple, daily scenes.

I taught a class called Cotton at my New England university. In the course, we discussed the history of the crop, of the land, and the America commercial traditions of management, capital, and mortgaging, all of which came into being with plantation slavery. We wrote formal poems in response to contemporary news stories in which black men and women were being violently erased. At the end of the semester, my students pieced together a quilt. Each contributed a piece of cotton—a t-shirt, mask, or memento for the quilt’s border.

The Fiddlehead is pleased to announce the finalists of our 2023 Fiction Contest, judged by Jack Wang!