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by Megan Kuklis

A review of Melissa Barbeau's The Luminous Sea (Breakwater Books, 2018)

Please join us in celebrating The Fiddlehead's upcoming 75th anniversary by participating in a life writing workshop with writer and educator Anthazia Kadir at Pier 21 in Halifax!
This workshop is free and includes a catered lunch. It is designed for newcomers to Canada but is open to all. Participants are asked to bring a meaningful object that will inspire their writing. See poster for location details.
Space is limited. To register, please email thefiddlehead@gmail.com 

Marcia Walker recommends reading American novelist, playwright, and activist James Baldwin. Read Marcia's story "Mating Imperatives" in The Fiddlehead's upcoming Summer Fiction 2019 issue (No. 280)!

Jill M. Talbot recommends reading works by New Zealand writer Janet Frame. Jill M. Talbot's essay "Checkmate" appeared in The Fiddlehead No. 277 (Autumn 2018), our all creative nonfiction issue. 

Megan Denton Ray's poem "As In Blackjack" appears in issue No. 279 (Spring 2019). Click "Read More" to access her music recommendation!

By Nancy Bauer

One recent June evening I attended a mesmerizing concert at the home of artist Stephen May, the first “house concert” I’d ever attended. Six other guests came, so with the host and four musicians, we were a gathering of twelve. The intimate group was surrounded by seven glorious May paintings and one pitiful palm tree. The musicians were plainly dressed: no theatrical tricks or garish makeup. . . .

By Ross Leckie

The sacred, the profane, and the glorious mundane shimmer through Kazim Ali’s poetry. The poems are visionary in the best sense of the word. They see both the translucence and the immanence of the world, a seeing that commingles vision, remembrance, and remembering, as he puts it in “Cover Me.” “Remembrance” is the odd word out here. Unlike vision and remembering, remembrance refers to something specific, a moment of history now commemorated. For Ali vision and remembering seem to step into a ceremony of memory that is elegiac, which can be as personal as a keepsake and as social as human slaughter: the museum, the monument, and the monumental. The visionary is given a body in these poems, through sex, embrace, travel, migration, and even something as simple as walking. . . .

By Sue Sinclair

I have just looked at the mock-up of the cover for the spring issue, and its millenial pink is making me consider the possibility that the shoulder-high snowbanks lining the driveway might not last forever. Thank you, Ian, designer extraordinaire. 

There is, of course, plenty beside the colour pink that makes this issue exciting. Kazim Ali, for starters. . . .

My Name is Bridge (an excerpt)

Mother told me my grandmother has lost her mind. She stood in the moonshine for too long and wandered up into the ocean of stars so deep it was hard for her to find her way back. She was swallowed whole by the myths of the past one night, and never could be retrieved. “Kharafet,” my mother said, “she lives in the land of fables now.” 

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Paper Birch