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I recently discovered a unique album called “I am in Need of Music: Songs on Poems by Elizabeth Bishop.” The Silken Water Suite with music composed by Alasdair MacLean and featuring soprano Suzie LeBlanc is arresting and beautiful. The four parts are: I. The silken water is weaving and weaving; II. Dear, my compass; III. Close, close all night; IV. Breakfast song. 

To understand more about my Native heritage, I’ve been immersing in books about Aboriginal healing. I’ve found three sources, two non-fiction and one fiction, that are giving me a very full perspective. 

A recent read-turned-favourite is There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job, written by Kikuko Tsumura and translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton. The narrator, burned out from her previous job, tries out a series of temp jobs with the caveat that they must be as undemanding as possible: “ideally, something along the lines of sitting all day in a chair”. Contrasted with our society’s focus on finding meaningful work, this premise is compelling from the start.

The natural disaster has been a trope in fiction (and movies) for decades. Usually what happens is that a group of strangers becomes isolated by an unexpected and massively destructive event. The ensuing drama chronicles the efforts of the unlucky individuals to cope with the challenges, dangers and deprivations they suddenly find themselves facing.

By happenstance, I picked Anne Marie Todkill’s “Storm Damage” as this year’s winner shortly after a citywide July storm cracked the trunk of a much-loved dozy Manitoba Maple out back. However, it matters little whether one has recently encountered and grieved a fallen tree, when it comes to this axiomatic and spellbinding piece. Todkill’s eulogy for a basswood undone by a Gilgameshing derecho’s “unmethodical and ghoulish mangling” will beguile anyone lucky enough to read it.

Winner of the 2023 Creative Nonfiction Prize

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice
as well as its feature.
 — Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree

Here shall he see / No enemy / But winter and rough weather.
 — William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Amongst those who know me, I’m not known as someone who can supply music fit for every mood. If anything, I select a song list entirely against the tenor of the evening, the moving vehicle, or the dish pit. Slow sad burners when the night is ablaze and the inverse. Not to be contrarian, but more so oblivious.  

We're excited to announce that Anne Marie Todkill is the winner of our 2023 Creative Nonfiction Contest and $2000 prize! Her essay "Storm Damage" is featured in the upcoming autumn issue of The Fiddlehead (no.297).

Anne Marie Todkill’s story “The Makeweight Piece” won The Fiddlehead’s 2021 fiction contest and appeared in issue no. 291. Her book of poetry, Orion Sweeping (Brick Books), was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. “Storm Damage” is from a collection of essays in progress.

A book I was thoroughly taken with this year was Dominique Bernier-Cormier's poetry collection Entre Rive and Shore. As in his excellent first book, Correspondent, Bernier-Cormier draws together the micro-politics of his family and the macro-politics of world history to great emotional effect. Here, the Acadian Expulsion mirror's the author's personal search for a home between languages and cultures.

When I read Lisa Jarnot, it makes me want to write. So, given my frequent creative slumps, I keep Lisa’s collections close to my writing desk. I love all of them, but Ring of Fire is perhaps my favourite. It’s the kind of book you can either open up anywhere and plunge into for two minutes, or let yourself become engrossed, and reread the whole thing. In Lisa’s poetry, the banal and sacred seem to inhabit the same space, one sculpted out of language that is sometimes playful and childlike, sometimes serious and biblical, or even cosmic.